I heard you on the radio…
A few weeks back when we were playing the Winter Fair gig in Brandon, we got a call from Golden West radio, which runs a number of stations across western Canada. They were the first to play Janzen Boys songs and for a long time they were the only reason that we got a royalty cheque for radio plays!
They have a radio show that introduces Manitoba artists that we had been on before, so they called for an update. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me, but we ended up getting into some of the divorce stuff that characterized the last few years. I say it shouldn’t surprise me because many of the songs that we are releasing document and reflect on the events, issues, and feelings that arose from that conflict. Still, it leaves you feeling a little naked and awkward. But I guess we chose it, so we are going to have to figure out how to talk about it in a good way. A bit more about that later in the email.
So this is kind of how it works in the band these days: Mick is taking the semester off so he is the quarterback. Simon is full-time in school and I have a full-time job, so we get assignments from Mick as he figures out what needs to be done. Bit of a weird reversal - having your kid telling you what to do after all these years, but he's got a good eye for it, and it has been working. It has become easy to trust his planning.
For example this week we were writing a pitch for the next song that is going up on Spotify (Couldn’t Get the Girl). The gurus say you are supposed to kick the pitch off with some impressive stat and because of the recent success of Mick's plan that was easy to find. In the month of January – before we got serious about working at the social media story-telling side of things – we had 52 listeners per month. This past month we reached 2202 listeners per month. That is 42 times the listeners in the space of 2 months.
For now, the idea is to slowly release singles and build a fan base. Instagram and Facebook allow you to gather a growing group of people who like the music you are making. It's the kind of thing that in the old days you could only do of you were signed to a label, and then the label took the majority of the income, because they were the ones doing the promoting. But now we are doing our own promoting, so we can keep much more and, ideally, make enough to sustain some sort of musical career. Many are managing to do just that. It is a time of remarkable opportunity for independent bands that want to put in the work.
We are finding that there is A LOT to do though. And it seems like the thing that is getting pushed into the background right now is the creative part. Mick is somehow managing to find time to write new songs and the snippets of those are spilling out onto our social media, but I know SImon is trying to get through a week of exams next week, and I haven’t written a new song in about 5 years, so that needs to change.
Partly, that creativity desert makes sense because of what the last 5 years was like. As mentioned, the boys’ teenage years were characterized by marital breakdown and divorce proceedings that were a real challenge to walk through. And, as you will see, both the ugliness and the hidden beauty one can find within an experience like that have made their way into the songs we are releasing this year. In fact, when everything in released, the eventual album will be called “2.”
It is hard to know how little or how much to say about the details of that time though. It was absolutely the defining issue for us for a significant amount of time, but I don’t want to whine on and on about it constantly or get trapped living in the past. Of course it will tint many things we do going forward, but I don’t think it has to define us. We have documented that chapter in the album to come, but even now, we are moving forward with all the good and joy-filled things that have come our way in spite of the heaviness and pain.
Thank God for music to help make that possible.
