Posted on February 14, 2012 by Miller
Photo courtesy of Marc Goldberg
I’ve been writing music for over a decade now. Rock songs, folk songs, fast songs, slow songs. The only common thread has been that I’ve tried to write what I know. Making records and making music with people is something that it seems like I’ve always just done, and while it’s a performance and I want people to connect, in many ways it’s something I’ve always done for myself. Create something you love and hopefully other people will get it. It’s certainly not a guarantee.
This past week I received an email from someone who had come to an acoustic show 6 months prior and who walked away from the show with a CD. They wrote to tell me a story about how my songs (two in particular) have been the soundtrack to a couple of pretty important moments in their lives and relationship over the past several months. That anytime the tracks come on, they’re instantly reminded of star gazing on summer evenings. I was insanely grateful that they took the time to send a note.
Photographs, writing, film, music – we’ve all become creators and curators lately. We can share information, things we like, things we’re reading and listening to with our entire network at the click of a button. Personally, I feel like I have an inherent need to build, create and share those projects and things that are important to me, but I haven’t done a great job of paying attention to the way that things like the music I’ve written has (or hasn’t) resonated with others.
You may not play an instrument or write music, but the act of listening, of going to a show, of dancing, and of having it as such an engrained part of your life means that you’re constantly associating those songs with moments, with stories, with people, sights and sounds. This act of association is in itself, a remix. An eternal remix.
For example, while I may have wanted to tell a story or get a point across with a particular song, that initial idea is re-interpreted by each listener, and then re-re-interpreted by the context in which it was heard. It goes on and on. As a songwriter, photographer, film maker, writer – you can never anticipate all the different ways that people will remix your art, whether it’s a physical or mental remix, but getting that piece of occasional feedback or interpretation makes the hard work worth doing.
What songs have resonated with you and do you remember where you were, who you were with and what you were doing? I could probably go through dozens of examples….but I won’t. Do you have one in particular? And if you had a better understanding of how your art, your music or your business was perceived and re-interpreted, how would it affect the way you produce it? Fire away in the comments…
Posted on May 11, 2011 by Miller
Yesterday I was listening to the Diane Rehm program, as I often do – and really got into her interview with Suzanne Marrs who had written a book covering the lengthy correspondence between Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty and her New Yorker editor and fellow writer William Maxwell.
For more than 50 years, they corresponded about work and family, likes and dislikes, griefs, joys, moments of dispair and humor. In the introduction to The Norton Book of Friendship, Welty wrote, “All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth – or perhaps untruth – some flash of light is just occurring… To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship.”
Listening as they read through some of these letters made me step back and think about not only the format of our communication but the length as well. So much of our correspondence now is done on a whim – through Tweets, Facebook messages and SMS. But because they are rattled off on a whim in most cases can be a problem. Taking the time to sit down, collect your thoughts and then attempt to articulate them is for many people a lost art.
I’m not lamenting the death of the letter as an object, but rather challenging myself (and you if you’re reading this) to take the time to be eloquent. To think through a thought. To be, on occasion, a person of long format. There is a different emotional reaction to receiving a letter, postcard, or even a long email than we do with a Tweet or Facebook message. Social media has made it so easy to communicate with a larger group of friends on a more regular basis but it’s also in bite-sized chunks. This, I think puts even more value on long form communication.
I’m guilty of printing and saving so many old emails, travel logs, post cards and letters that I’ve written and received over the years and it’s these long forms of communication that really give us insight into those around us and ourselves. To me, they have more mass than a Twitter stream or a series of Wall posts. I wonder if biographers of the future will piece together (or have access to) the life stories of their subjects through social media interactions, Tweets, and cell phone videos as primary sources. Will we have many other options?
So my challenge to you (and to myself) is to on occasion get back to the long form. To sit and articulate thought. To try to be eloquent from time to time, instead of relying on 140 characters. When is the last time you’ve written a letter, or a long email that wasn’t business related?
Update: I’ve neglected to include one of my favorite blogs that illustrations the power of the letter. Letters of Note. Check it out. You’ll be hooked, promise.
Posted on July 13, 2009 by Miller
I was listening to This American Life online over the weekend. Normally I try to catch it live but hit up the podcast this time. Before the show plays, you get a nice message from Ira Glass telling you that the podcast is very popular and eats a lot of bandwidth – and bandwidth is expensive. So it’s very important that you support the program with a financial contribution. And it is. I try to pledge my support every year to my NPR station (you kick ass, WRVO). You should too.
Bandwidth had to be one of the most expensive costs for NPR. But I have a theory about it that I wanted to throw out to the web to see what comes back at me. For streaming live audio, I don’t see a lot that can be done to get around the cost of pushing that data to thousands of happy NPR listeners. But I wonder about the archived programs, the podcasts, the non-live chunks of audio that make up a large percentage of the audio bandwidth that NPR is responsible for pushing out.
Why couldn’t NPR use a decentralized structure for distributing its archived programs to listeners – via the bittorrent network – instead of dumping the cost of delivery on itself and relying only on contributions to support it. If they were to open the floodgates of archived shows from This American Life to Morning Edition and all points in between – curators would emerge that would volunteer to host a small collection of archived NPR data files on their home computers and serve them to other users. This would decentralize the bandwidth issue, using small amounts of the individual pipes from ‘Platinum NPR Digital Super Awesome Supporters’ instead of NPR’s servers. In much the same way that people collect and share complete shows of Dave Matthews Band, The Dead, etc. the redundancy of that data being shared would result in an even smaller impact on the individual user – since now we’re only pulling pieces of each file from each user.
What do you think? Is this even feasible? Would it build community or would it crash and burn? Regardless, what opportunities and challenges exist for organizations to decentralize their data? I’d love to know – leave a comment and show some love.
