August Contest: Gossip

[Jonny Quest]

this whole thing is a crap shoot.

Finally, it dawned on you

I once ready in a pamphlet regarding Absurdism philosophy: The great casino of life suggests freewill may allow us to determine at which stakes we play, on what odds we place our bet, and at which games our money shall be taken. Nonetheless, the house always wins, the air is thin and the woman at 4 am are up to something. As such, we must assume, as Camus noted, poor Sysiphus, destined to push that rock up the hill again and again, must have found happiness in his job.



Your job is to create music. Just do it

FWIW, for whatever reason, I love your style. Even when you do a song that's "quirky", for lack of a better term, I like it. Your stuff never bores me. There's always something fresh about it.

Now I know, from looking at some of the scores you got, not everybody feels that way. I don't understand it. Not when I hear some stuff that bores me to tears and it's topping the voting.

Musical taste has and always will baffle me.

And yes, the job (I hate that word) is to create music. And I do, tons of it.

Maybe I'll go back to doing just that and leave the nonsense behind me.

I always enjoy your stuff too, mate, probably because at my core, whether I can execute or not, I am a fan of pop song structures (from any time time frame really), so I appreciate very the craft of form, melody, harmony, and chorus, in that context--and these are areas in which I see you as talented.

In my pure honest professional opinion, if you could get (perhaps even hire...and maybe you do this for your work) a real vocalist and collaborate with a producer or (I know you have mentioned you had some high frequency hearing loss) I think your material could be fully realized in a splendid way. As a odd suggestions, maybe do a collaboration with someone like Donkey Tugger. An pardon me if I have overstepped my bounds, but I am quite serious when I realize we only get one shot at this game, so we need to make it count.

All that pyschobabble aside, I have great respect for all the musicians here. Not everything is my cup of tea, but I try to embrace the aesthetics of each contributor, to the best of my own ability in the face of my own biases. For example, this month I quite enjoyed both Periperry's and Tbase's entries and gave them both high marks, even though these songs don'g fit within my favourite things...in terms of genres. But the execution transcended my expectation, so, in a sense, the fact that I didn't favor the genre, and I liked the songs anyway, speaks to why I gave them such high marks.

In contrast, and I feel like I am always invoking Donkey without his approval he always serves up stuff that fits into one of my personal listening wheelhouse faves (slightly offbeat singer-songwriters who do-it-all) and his production quality, to my ears and on my speakers, is always top notch. So, in a strange paradox, I find myself judging him against his other entries from the past, perhaps even subconsciously.

When there is no theme, like this month, it becomes quite difficult to put everything in a voting context. And that's fine.

Of course, I enjoy when folks dig my tune, give it a good review and rank it highly. And it slightly saddens me for a moment, when I see my name at the bottom of as list. Sometimes I frown to myself, "Oh well, I ain't never gonna dazzle the fellow." But, I gave it a shot. My best shot.

Just like Pitbull, Picasso, Piscopo, and the guy who wrote Pinochhio

[wagtunes]

In my pure honest professional opinion, if you could get (perhaps even hire...and maybe you do this for your work) a real vocalist and collaborate with a producer or (I know you have mentioned you had some high frequency hearing loss) I think your material could be fully realized in a splendid way. As a odd suggestions, maybe do a collaboration with someone like Donkey Tugger. An pardon me if I have overstepped my bounds, but I am quite serious when I realize we only get one shot at this game, so we need to make it count.

This subject comes up so often. Hiring a real vocalist isn't an option because I'm dirt poor. Even $5 is something I can't afford. Trying to find somebody to work with, in the past, has always turned out to be a disaster. Most people don't even follow through when they say they'll work with you. Eventually it got to the point where I figured it was easier to just do everything myself. That way I'm not constantly disappointed by things not working out.

Ultimately, I like working by myself. I like the songs I write. Not all of them. Some of them really suck, like "Plug Me In" and "Repo Man." Have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote them. But every once in a while I write something like "Destiny Rides Again" or "Three Minutes To The End" and I start to consider looking for a publisher to try to give this business one more shot. But I'm too old for that and end up putting those thoughts aside and just going back to writing music.

As a pure songwriter, I think I'm one of the better ones here. But I can't sing. I don't play an instrument all that well and my mixing skills, while improved, are basic at best. So nothing I do is really going to sound as good as it can. I think Vocaloid helps because at least it can sing on key without its voice cracking. Of course if you hate the Vocaloid sound, you're not going to like the song no matter how good the song itself is. So entering these contests is like a paraplegic entering a 100 yard dash and expecting to come in anything but last when going up against guys who can run it in 9 seconds flat. It's pointless. That's how I feel about this contest now.

Years ago I wrote a song that was so good that it got published. It was going to be recorded by Crystal Gale. She ultimately decided against it and it died there and then. That was the closest I ever got as far as the business end of this stuff.

That is really my only disappointment in my life, that I never had any success as a songwriter. No, I don't consider my songs being sung by church's and charity organizations success.

Maybe that's part of my problem.

[Jonny Quest]

No, I don't consider my songs being sung by church's and charity organizations success.

Maybe that's part of my problem.

If that's part of your problem, gratitude must be part of the answer.

If someone sang my song, I'd consider it a success of the highest order.

But maybe that's part of my problem.

[DrApostropheX]

If it's any consolation, when I had time to write music, and was a regular contributor to this contest for many years, I don't really ever recall breaking into the top 10, when it came time to vote (except maybe once or twice?). But it was worth it to me to enter to challenge myself to write different kinds of music and hopefully give poeple a laugh now and then. We all have different things that motivate us, though, and I found out early on that there are a lot of people better at doing music than I am, but no one in the world is better at doing MY music than I am.

[wagtunes]

If it's any consolation, when I had time to write music, and was a regular contributor to this contest for many years, I don't really ever recall breaking into the top 10, when it came time to vote (except maybe once or twice?). But it was worth it to me to enter to challenge myself to write different kinds of music and hopefully give poeple a laugh now and then. We all have different things that motivate us, though, and I found out early on that there are a lot of people better at doing music than I am, but no one in the world is better at doing MY music than I am.

Do you have a Soundcloud account? I'd like to hear some of your stuff.