Blog - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™ | Innovation Keynote Speaker & Consultant

July 9, 2010

The view from inside the fire pit

So here’s the thing: sometimes everything feels like it’s going swimmingly. Life is pretty balanced (even if precariously), and you’re sailing along pretty much in alignment with who you really are. You feel hopeful! Anything is possible! Life is good!

Other times, not so much.

You know those times: when the computer is not functioning. When Mail won’t receive any emails. When client deadlines (or whatever) are shaking you by the shoulders and Your Important Work lies languishing in the corner. When the migraine gods decide it’s time to have a little fun at your expense.

Nothing feels like it’s working. You feel like a failure. Your goals feel impossible to reach, and you wonder why you even bother trying.

You’re sitting right inside the fire pit, getting singed, rather than enjoying the flames and singing songs with everyone else out in the campfire circle.

If you’ve ridden this spinning ball of clay enough circuits around the sun, you’ll hopefully understand that these other days — when it feels like nothing’s going right, never has and never will — are part of the journey, and will pass.

You’ll get back to life is good again. Really, you will.

What others see is not always what you see

My mom is reading a book right now about how to achieve and maintain work/life balance. Today, surprisingly enough, she told me she thinks I do a really good job of it, that whole work/life balance thing.

Huh. It’s one of those “not so much” times over here, so it’s funny to hear someone say that I’m a model for them of good work/life balance.

The house is a mess.

One of the kitties has peed somewhere and I can’t for the life of me figure out where, despite my efforts with the special black light I bought for the purpose some years ago.

I’m three days behind in my very tight deadline schedule, because my computer was out of commission.

I haven’t made art, or music, or written a blog post, in days.

I’m so busy fighting fires it’s all I can do to mark time. Forget forward progress!

But Mom reminds me that everybody has periods of imbalance. Yeah, sure, you’re stressed out and working like a fiend right now to catch up, but overall?

Patience, patience, patience

I interviewed singer/songwriter Cosy Sheridan today for the Thriving Artists Project. Cosy dropped out of college to be a singer/songwriter, much to the distress of her parents, who thought a college degree might be a pragmatic thing to get, even if she wanted to be a musician afterwards.

At the time, three more years of college seemed unendurable, but today over the phone Cosy mused that maybe she should have just finished. “It was only three years, after all.”

Only three years! In a 25-year career, it really isn’t that much if you think about it. And my few months of frustration every summer, when I crazily take off for a couple of weeks of music camp during my busiest season of the year, feels pretty minor in comparison.

Maybe Mom’s right.

I’ve been feeling so badly that my blog posts have dropped from almost daily to 3x/week if I’m lucky. (My other blog, The Dating Queen, has dropped from twice a week to zero.) The voices say “you’re a failure,” and “real bloggers write every day, no matter what,” and all sorts of other things to make me feel sucky. But the fact is, there just isn’t enough bandwidth, unless I cease sleeping and eating, or clone myself. And even then probably not.

Then I remind myself that my original commitment was to post twice a week.

Oh.

Are we playing overachiever again, Melissa?

I can take another lesson from Cosy, who has managed to survive and thrive as a music artist for 25 years, and who openly states that she has never been good at following rules. The stuff you’re “supposed” to do never seems to work for her. And yet she’s forged ahead anyway.

So maybe I need to roll my eyes at those voices that tell me what a successful artist/musician/writer/blogger is “supposed” to do, and just do what works for me. It’ll probably all work out in the end.

It always does.

July 5, 2010

Weekly Review #14: Swingin’ in the trees, and the long drop down

So how am I doing in my quest to re-invent my life, follow my evolving Blisses and create the life I really, really want? Usually posted on Saturday, Review #14 is a couple of days late because I was far away from internet access all last week. Read on…

Imagine that you have a ticket to utopia. For just over a week, you get to leave your daily worries behind, and hang out in a little slice of heaven, pouring your heart and soul into your Bliss (or one of them, if you’re Multi-Passionate, like me). Eden on earth.

Pretty awesome, yes?

The only problem: your stay only lasts 8 days, and then you’re unceremoniously booted out of utopia, and back into your normal life.

That’s what it’s like to go to music camp. A week of heaven, and then wham, back to normality.

(Complete with annoyances such as non-functioning computers, which were supposed to be fixed by the new hard drive that was installed during your absence, but are instead even worse than before, making it utterly impossible to work on urgent client deadlines.

But let’s not go there, or this post will turn into a moaning stress-fest.)

Can you tell I’m in post-camp let-down? In fact, right now I feel rather like a wrung-out washrag. If past experience is any indicator, it will take a good week to recover.

So why put myself through it, you may ask, if re-entry is so difficult?

It’s rather like Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam: 27, 1850:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Tennyson could have been writing about music camp.

Music Camp: my little slice of heaven

I have three little islands of wonderfulness in my year: my Spring Retreat with my calligraphy guild in March, Jazz Camp West in June/July, and CCMC (California Coast Music Camp) in mid-July. Each one is magical in its own way, and each inevitably results in some degree of letdown after I come home. Sometimes it feels like the rest of the year is just marking time until I get to head to utopia again.

If you’re wondering what’s so wonderful about music camp, here’s a list that represents just the tip of the proverbial iceberg:

I get to completely retreat from the stresses of daily life (no cell phone service! no internet!)
I get to focus 100% on music all week (a Bliss of mine that lately has gotten short shrift)
I’m around people, feeling connected, rather than my usual state of isolation, working home alone
I don’t have to cook – all food is provided
I’m out walking – in the woods! – every day, multiple times a day
I get to perform and get feedback
I get to mark how far I’ve come since the last camp
I get a much-needed reminder of how important my Bliss is to me
Since I went to Jazz Camp thanks to a generous work-study scholarship, I get to help with the running of camp, which means I get to feel useful
I get to push myself in ways that are less likely to happen in a less intensive setting
I get to try new things (this year I took a looping class with Kid Beyond)
I get to witness some of the most amazing live music on the planet at the nightly faculty concerts
I get to support other campers at the student performances

And to paint a more vivid picture for you, imagine this: you wake up to a brisk, misty morning in the mountains that caress the western edge of Silicon Valley. You step from your cabin or tent to head down to breakfast, and on the path to the dining hall you pass a piano and a drum kit sheltered in a grove of redwoods. (There are – get this – 40 pianos scattered throughout the camp, many of them outdoors in the woods. A full-time piano tuner on staff keeps them in tune, with the help of dehumidifiers and tarps to protect them from morning dew.)

Later in the day, as you walk to your class in an outdoor amphitheater or redwood grove (or, yes, an actual indoor room), you hear the strains of a gospel choir from around the bend, a salsa dance class behind you, conga drumming on the dining hall deck.

Close to 300 other jazz lovers take over the woods for the week: vocalists, pianists, brass and woodwind players, guitarists, violinists, dancers, drummers, percussionists… If you get a chance to perform, it’s in front of the most musically knowlegable audience you can imagine, but also the most supportive.

People often refer to Jazz Camp (and CCMC) as a “family,” and it does have that feeling. Warm. Loving. Connected.

The imperfect part of utopia

Okay, okay, it’s not all roses and light. Or shall we say, the roses come with some thorns.

Sharing a cabin with 8 women means not a lot of privacy (tenters have a leg up here), not to mention the inevitable sleep interruptions from snoring, stomping around, getting up early, coming in late.

And the bunk beds, with their pathetic so-called mattresses, leave me longing for the comfort of my European Sleepworks bed.

And although I love that I don’t have to cook, I have to admit the food leaves a little to be desired.

Then there are the mosquitoes, the raccoons (an intrepid specimen invaded our cabin one midnight, plundering one of my cabin-mates’ stash of chocolate), the cold (believe it or not, I dress for a New York winter at the outdoor evening faculty concerts), the long walk to the (very rustic) bathroom in the middle of the night, and the ever-present dirt.

Did I mention the dirt?

It does make one appreciate the comforts of home. Still, given my druthers, I’d rather be there.

Ephemeralness: a required ingredient?

But of course, part of what makes utopia so utopian is precisely because it is limited to one week. Much as I might fantasize about Jazz Camp lasting for weeks, months, even years, I know the reality wouldn’t be as sweet as the brief week I long for during the rest of the year.

Personalities would no doubt grate. The beds and the food would be intolerable. The sleep deprivation would be more than my system could handle.

As it is, the week has a lovely arc. A perfect, and perfectly sweet, beginning, middle and end. Always with unexpected growth, revelations, connections and lessons.

A few highlights from this year:

a breakdown that led to a breakthrough in the second day of the Vocal Intensive class with jazz vocalist and teacher extraordinaire, Kellye Gray
singing my friend Ron Karr‘s song, Seventh Street, at the Monday night open mic
helping the camp videographer record the open mics and final night performances
several singers (including faculty and seasoned pro, Denise Perrier) asking for the chart of my song, He’s Just Not That Into You, after hearing me perform it on Thursday night at the Vocal Intensive concert
selling a dozen copies of Online Dating Blues and donating all of the money back to the scholarship fund
Grammy-nominated Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto calling He’s Just Not That Into You “the coolest song ever!”
dancing like a mad woman at the Friday night dance party

And, as always, just refocusing on music, and reminding myself how important it is to me.

This last one is perhaps the most important, and lasting, effect of my week in utopia. The slings and arrows of normal life, the frustrations of trying to get gigs and keep motivated in the face of so many obstacles, including the efforts of having to make a living – all of these make it hard to keep my Blisses, particularly music, at the center of my life. Music camp is a little burst of energy, propelling me forward just when my energies are starting to drag.

Yes, the week after is always hard, but it’s more than worth it. Besides, I get to spend another week in utopia at CCMC in less than two weeks.

Needless to say, all other Blisses got put on hold for the duration of camp. Now the challenge is to get back to work integrating and balancing them. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

And right now, it’s off to bed, where I hope to dream of music camp.

July 3, 2010

Behind the Scenes of Making an Independent Music CD – Part 4

Ever wondered what’s involved in making a CD of original music? At the end of 2009 I recorded and self-produced my first “official” release, Online Dating Blues, and here’s a glimpse inside the process. (Originally published 1/18/10 on ketubahdiva.com)

Part Four: Support from Unexpected Corners, and Finally In the Studio!

I’d done my homework: thanks to suggestions from friends I’d met at Music Strategies, the email I sent to my fan base included links to a web page tricked out with PayPal buttons for donations and pre-orders. I have a modicum of html skills, and thankfully PayPal makes it super-easy to make a “buy now” button, even for a non-techie.

I also offered people the option of sending a check, calling me up with a credit card, or giving cash if they preferred (which turned out to be very wise), but I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to donate on impulse!

Would people contribute? My guitar teacher, Carol McComb, had raised an unbelievable amount for her CD 10 or so years back, but I think her list of (incredibly loyal) students was a lot bigger than my list of fans (about 500 strong), and being a performer with an erratic (to put it mildly) gig schedule, rather than a performer and teacher with multiple ongoing weekly classes, meant that I didn’t have quite the loyal following that she did.

(But then again, with a budget of about one-twentieth of her last CD’s, I didn’t need to raise as much either.)

Still, there was a fair amount of fingernail biting. $2,000-2,500 isn’t enough to bankrupt anyone, but without outside contributions it would certainly be going to debt…

And then there’s The Economy… I knew I wasn’t the only one with a lot less disposable income to play around with these days.. Was my whole idea just completely crazy?

Then lo-and-behold, 52 minutes after sending my email my first contribution rolled in, for 100$! Talk about validation.

Especially validating, and surprising, was that it was from a friend from the calligraphy and book arts world, Carol, who has never seen me perform, and whom I hadn’t seen in more years than I can count.

Within 24 hours, I received eight donations and pledges, to the tune of $285. Not a bad start!

******

Now that money was actually coming in, the pressure was on. This CD project was becoming more real! I was going to have to deliver a CD, and one that would, I hoped, satisfy all of my contributors!

My first recording session was scheduled for December 21, and as the date drew nearer and friends left and right were catching colds, I felt as if I were holding my breath, praying that I would stay healthy. I recorded myself singing my songs and playing my guitar and uploaded these “scratch tracks” to a page on my website and sent the link to the guys in the band so they could get a (rough!) idea of what we’d be recording.

Into the studio!

The morning of the 21st I packed up charts of all my songs and drove an hour to my drummer John’s garage studio, Idea Room, in Concord. John spent the next hour setting up mikes and plugging in cables until the tiny space was a tangle of black cable.

With a drum kit, an upright bass, an electric keyboard, music stands, mikes and various large boxes of sound equipment, I had about a 2-foot square space to stand in. The four of us were in a for a long day of very intense work, in very close quarters. And honestly, I can’t imagine much that would be more fun!

After much fussing with cables and computers on John’s part, we all had big (tight!) earphones on, through which we could hear everyone: John’s drums, Doug’s bass, Jake’s keys, and my voice.

We spent a few minutes on sound checks, trying to get the mix right in the earphones, so everyone could hear themselves and each other. After all the sound checks were done I pulled out my charts and we started practicing.

We hadn’t met to rehearse, so this was the first time the guys were playing my songs. Being the consummate professionals that they are, however, they took my ideas and ran with them. Until that moment my songs had mostly lived as ideas in my head. I played them in my living room, but (inexpertly played) acoustic guitar and voice give a completely different feel than a full jazz trio!

I can’t tell you what a delight it was to hear a band bring my music to life!

And the guys had fantastic ideas! It was like being in a creative stew pot, with ideas popping up like dried corn kernels in a hot pan. Over the course of our two studio sessions we worked out intros and endings, where breaks would come in the music, and what kind of groove each song should have.

Doug started playing a “Killer Joe” intro to Online Dating Blues and we all said “let’s use it!”; Jake suggested a straight-8s feel for I Need A Vacation (brilliant); John used brushes to create a mystical, dreamy intro to Geary Street; Jake pumped out a Gospel feel on the keys for Married Men (a hilarious contrast to the content of the song) while Doug created a “overweight marred men in Dockers” solo.

Here’s how the day went:

Rehearse a song, work out feel, intros, endings, solos
Record the song
Assess our performance, make notes of what to change, and record the song again
Repeat as needed, until everyone was ready to move on to the next song
Start process over with another song

I have to confess that there was no point during our 11+ hours of recording over two Saturdays when everyone was 100% happy with his or her performance! If we’d had unlimited time I suspect we’d still be working on it today (or at least until we all got completely sick of it! A certain amount of perfectionism is the curse of being an artist and wanting your work to be the best it can be).

However, I did not have the budget for unlimited studio time, so (thankfully) we didn’t have that luxury. Instead, we moved on whenever we felt like the song we were working on was “good enough” for the CD.

Understand that with four professional musicians, “good enough” is a difficult determination at best, and a little distance can turn something “awful” into “not bad” or even “pretty damn good – hunh!” Jake was convinced he needed to re-do his solo on one of the songs, but when we reconvened the following week and listened again, he decided it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought.

Musicians’ memories of our own performances are rarely reliable… This truism came back to haunt me in the mixing studio, but more on that next time…

—

Next: Mixing and More

July 1, 2010

Behind the Scenes of Making an Independent Music CD – Part 3

Part Three: Scheduling the Sessions and Raising the Money

Once again I was faced with the question of how to produce the CD.

I toyed for awhile with doing a live CD recording concert, reasoning that I perform best for an audience. Plus my radio show was live, and I got a handful of acceptable tracks from that, so surely I could do the same again. Also I could ask for donations in advance and at the door to help cover production costs.

Finding a venue I was happy with, and actually making it happen, though, proved harder than one would think. I was blocked again, though I couldn’t say exactly why.

Weeks went by…

Margo, my voice teacher thought I should “do it right” and hire a professional producer. She’d been working with this guy for months, was impressed with the performances he was getting out of her, and I figured why not at least meet him? Though I expected working with him would be pricey. And would I encounter the same issues I had with the first producer?

All my concerns ended up moot, because somehow, although the producer in question was apparently interested in meeting me, and Margo was willing to make the hour-long drive with me to facilitate an introduction, nothing happened.

Weeks went by, I didn’t follow through, and suddenly I realized holiday shopping season was right around the corner, and damnit, I wanted to get a CD made NOW! No more waiting!

It didn’t have to be professionally produced (no matter what Margo said) – my home-burned radio show CD had proven that! Hell, if it was better than my radio show CD it would be a clear win, and for that all I really needed was a way to record me and my band.

A Cheaper Way to Record…

A year before I’d gotten together with a trio in my drummer’s garage studio (John Lazarus – Idea Room) to rehearse and record “just for fun.” My big goal at the time was to get a recording of my first song, He’s Just Not That Into You, to use as a soundtrack for a video I wanted to make. Now it suddenly occurred to me – DOH! – perhaps the most expedient and cost-effective way to go about this would be to record in John’s studio again.

I shot off an email asking if he and his band, The Big Beat Trio, would be interested and available, and how much they’d charge.

Within a couple of days I had two five-hour recording sessions scheduled (at $30o a pop; $100 for each musician per session), and two mixing/mastering sessions with an engineer John recommended, Nick at Earhythmic Studio, who only charged $50 per song for both mixing and mastering.

(To give you an idea of what a deal this was, $100-200 per song is not uncommon for mastering alone, and mixing is way more involved…)

Great! It may not be Capitol Records, but given my time and budget constraints (did I mention I was broke?), I managed to let my inner perfectionist take a breather and remember my goal to just make this CD better than the last one. Not an impossible task, which also had the added benefit of making a future CD that’s even better than this one seem achievable as well. Baby steps…

Paying For It All…

Wow! Blocks busted! No more paralysis! I was moving forward!

Now, how to pay for this thing..

Although I was doing this on a shoestring ($150 per song is a helluva lot better than $1,000 – see Part 1: Background – but that didn’t include the costs to replicate the actual discs), it was still going to cost more than I had on hand, especially given that this was December, the deepest, darkest depths of cash-flow darkness for my mostly wedding-related art and design business.

My estimates were at least $2,000-2,500.

I had met artists at Music Strategies who had raised CD production money from their fan base, and knew of still others who’d done the same. Earlier this year I randomly sat next to my guitar teacher, Carol McComb, on a flight. I spent the entire time picking her brain about her phenomenally successful fundraising campaign, which brought in something like $40,000 from students, friends and fans. !!!

Carol sent me a copy of her fundraising letter, from the days before everyone used email and paypal. Ah, technology! No stamp-sticking for me: as soon as I’d scheduled the recording sessions I composed an email to my fanbase, using Carol’s letter as a skeleton, asking for their support and offering certain “premiums” for different levels of support.

(I had a lot of fun with this: since my songs are mostly themed around the trials and tribulations of dating, I offered different kinds of [totally platonic!] dates with me for each of the $100-and-above levels. I wasn’t sure how this would come across, but the comments were all positive – as I’d hoped, people got a good chuckle out of it.)

I accepted pre-orders for $10, and here are the “Executive Producer” contribution levels I offered:

Executive Producer Levels:

$25 – Web Executive Producer
Your name on my website and 2 copies of the CD

$50 – Web&Print Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, and 3 copies of the CD

$100 – “Coffee Date” Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, 4 copies of the CD, and a coffee date with me!

$250 – “Lunch Date” Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, 6 copies of the CD, and a lunch date with me!

$500 – “Drinks Date” Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, 8 copies of the CD, and a date for drinks with me!

$1000 – “Dinner Date” Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, 10 copies of the CD, and a date for dinner with me!

I sent the email off and waited to see what would happen…

—

Next: Support from Unexpected Corners, and Finally In the Studio!

June 29, 2010

Behind the Scenes of Making an Independent Music CD – Part 2

Part Two: A Free CD, and Busting Perfectionist Blocks

After my disappointing appointment with the cigarette-smoking producer, suddenly I was saved from researching expensive CD production ideas, at least temporarily, when a promoter I knew hooked me up with a live concert gig on KZSU Stanford radio.

It was college radio, with old equipment and somewhat limited production values, but hey, there was a sound engineer, and the gig would be recorded, so voilá, I’d have a CD of me and my band! Nothing fancy, no after-the-session mixing and mastering because it would be recorded as one track, but hell, it would be something.

The fact that the gig was LIVE on air (with a radio audience of maybe two people for all I knew [in addition to the four or five in the studio audience], but still…) led to a serious case of nerves (can you say “shaky breath support”? can you say “pitchiness”?).

But when all was said and done I came home with twelve tracks, five of which made me cringe minimally enough that I felt not too uncomfortable about turning them into CDs to at least have as samplers. (Can you say “perfectionist”?) When, on a whim, I offered them for sale at a gig, and – gasp! – people started buying them, and liking them, something clicked for me.

A Realization All Perfectionist Artists Might Benefit From

I realized (and this may seem obvious) that being “perfect,” or at least better than I am right now, or “as good as [insert successful music artist]” is not what it’s about. People liked those CDs because they are authentic expression of who I was in that particular moment.

Who knows, maybe the moments that make me cringe (when my pitch wavers, or my voice blips or wobbles) make some listeners actually like my singing better, because it’s so clearly not canned. No auto-tuning here, baby! This is the real thing!

Time for a New Addition to the Catalogue

For two years this home-burned disc (which I titled “Melissa Dinwiddie Live from KZSU”), packaged simply in a paper sleeve, was the only CD I had. My voice was evolving, I was beginning to write my own songs, rather than just singing standards, and it was becoming more and more bothersome that my only CD, much as I liked it (especially after several weeks’ distance!) was no longer representative of who I was now as an artist.

It really hit home when I started singing my first song, He’s Just Not That Into You, at gigs. Inevitably, people would come up afterwards asking to buy the CD… and I had to tell them there wasn’t one.

Ouch! I could hear the lost sale, the “ka-ching” that never was. Oh, the pain!

I added another original song, and another, which led to more “can I buy the CD?” responses, and pretty soon it was clear I needed to get these songs recorded and catch those listeners before they got away!

Music Strategies

Let me take a moment to rave about a music marketing seminar I’ve attended (three times), because it played a great part in my getting this CD made.

Music Strategies is put on by independent music marketing guru, Tim Sweeney, to give independent music artists the tools to make a living from their music without being dependent on a label, or anyone else for that matter. In addition to giving the lowdown on the industry and how it works, Tim teaches you to think outside the box, to be creative about how you market yourself, and to work together with other artists.

(In my other business, as a ketubah artist selling art and stationery for weddings, competition is fierce because couples, after all, only buy one ketubah and one set of wedding stationery. One of Tim’s signature speeches is that as music artists, we have no competition; nobody buys one CD, or listens to only one artist, in their lifetime!)

I have learned a ton at Music Strategies and from Tim, though I haven’t been diligent about putting it all into practice yet (can you say “overwhelm”?)

Among other things, Music Strategies freed me from the idea that a CD had to have ten or twelve tracks. Tim is a big proponent of artists producing a new CD every six months, with just four, five or six tracks, if that’s what you’ve got. Get your fans used to buying from you regularly is Tim’s thinking. (Smart guy, that Tim!)

With that in mind I decided to include only original material on my CD (written by me and/or the talented Angus Stocking), six tracks in total.

Now I was back to how to get the dang thing made…

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Next: Scheduling the Sessions and Raising the Money