Rainhat – the band

Writing and persisting

I’ve managed to get into a good kind of stride with writing lately. I’ve written five new songs in the last couple of weeks, which is more than average for me. I’ve written songs since I was about 13, but never with any kind of regularity. I would have a good idea for a song, write it down, and then not write anything until the next time I had a good idea. But becoming good at something takes practice, and writing is no exception. To write good songs, you need to just keep writing and ‘get in shape’, so to speak. So I write.

Sometimes I have no ideas whatsoever. I just stare at a blank paper for hours and not a single good idea comes to mind. Sometimes I have an idea, and I write down two or three sentences, and then I’m out, there’s no continuation. So I keep writing down short sentences, and maybe they’ll combine into a song at some point. I had an idea a couple of days ago, and wrote down the first verse and half the chorus. After that I was completely stuck. Whatever I wrote down sounded stupid, and I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything more to say, even though the story I had on paper was obviously not finished. So I picked up a rhyming dictionary and dug my heels in. I can be pretty stubborn sometimes, and now I was hellbent on finishing this song. I read articles online, I flipped through the dictionary in search for ideas, I listened to other bands, studied their lyrics, and piece by piece I slowly added stuff to my song. After spending hours on trying to come up with different options every day, I finally finished the song today. It feels pretty good. After really working myself through this obstacle, I’m feeling quite creative, like it’s much easier to write now. I had another idea and wrote down a draft for a new song in about half an hour. It’s not finished yet, but I know more or less what the result will be. The rest is just tweaking.

The concept of a “hit” song is kind of funny somehow. Of course, not every song I write (or any other songwriter, I’m sure) is good. Some songs just suck. Some are more or less OK, and some songs I really like and feel like “Wow! This is going to be my number 1 smash hit breakthrough song!” Out of the dozens of songs that I’ve written, I don’t really like most of them. I have maybe ten songs that I think are any kind of good. But I’ve noticed when performing that sometimes people like the ones that I think are bad, and sometimes they don’t like the songs I think are great. What exactly a “good” song is, is different for different people. So how do you pick what to put on a CD, or which song should be a single? I don’t know. But fortunately, the internet is not going to run out of space like a CD would, so I think I’ll skip that problem and just record all the songs I write. I’ll leave it up to my audience to choose which ones are the good ones. Then again, do I want to be associated with songs I don’t like? Maybe not.

Coding a website

I’ve started making myself a cool website. All big, successful bands have fancy websites, so it seems like kind of a requisite if you want to be a big band. That way people can easily download your music, read stuff about the band, see if the band is coming to their town, and so on, I’m sure you know. I want to be a successful musician, obviously, so I decided to get a website too. I looked around online and found some sites where you can sign up for a free website, then easily create a fancy page without having to know anything about html or css and stuff, and tadah! There’s a fancy website. I tried some of them out. Sure, it’s free, but you get a big, fat, blinking ad at the top of your page. I deleted that one and tried another one. No ads. Pretty good. The easy drag-and-drop editing was easy enough, but incredibly annoying after a while. There’s a fairly basic template, and you can change this, this and that, but nothing else. There’s so little stuff you can actually customize that the result is bound to be one out of a million very similar variations on the exact same theme. A page that is identical to the one three thousand other people have, just made in a different color and with a different font. Lame. I deleted that one too. The others I found were pretty much the same stuff. I guess I have to do it the harder way.

Ok, I used to know a thing or two about making websites and html coding and stuff, so I opened up a blank text file and wrote html and body at the top in angle brackets. Then what? I guess my html is a bit rusty. I looked up a few html tutorial websites for reference and went at it again with the code. Slowly I managed to type up a bunch of code that looked fairly decent in a browser. Not bad, but nowhere good enough. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I want a great looking website, not just a decent one. Apparently I suck more than I thought at html, so I googled some website editing software. I’ve used Frontpage before and remember it being pretty good. But all the good programs, like Dreamweaver and Expressions Web are quite expensive. I don’t have that kind of cash to put on a program. I found an open source one called Kompozer. It does what it’s supposed to, more or less, but it’s quite lacking in functionality compared to all the fancy stuff you could do with Frontpage.

Next option. I found a website with really nice looking website templates for free. Well made, good looking and completely free, so I downloaded one that I like. I can easily customize the template to look the way I want it to. It’s way easier to change a code that’s already there than to write it yourself to look the way you want it. It’s still going to take a bit of tampering, but I have a cool website in progress. Then I just have to find a place to host it, get a domain, and put it up.

Writing songs

The hardest part about writing a song is coming up with something to write about. Once I know what I want to write about, I can grab my mighty Moleskine notebook and just keep at it until the song is done. I write, ponder, look things up, rewrite, edit, rewrite some more… I don’t like being stuck in front of a computer too much when I’m writing, so I prefer the old-fashioned way with a pen and a notepad. Usually it’s a somewhat chaotic and messy process, and the result ends up looking like in the picture below. Sometimes I like the result and sometimes I don’t, but that’s how it goes.

My notepad

Sometimes I have these flashes of inspiration where an idea pops up in my head and I know exactly what I want to say and more or less how to say it, and it’s all just a matter of writing it down on paper. I had an idea like that yesterday and wrote a song from start to finish in about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often. How great it would be if I could do that every time…

I don’t have much music available online yet. There’s some old stuff on my MySpace page, but that’s it. I’m traveling in Spain and writing some new stuff right now, but once I get back home I will record some new songs and put them up online.

Introducing

Hello everyone!

Since this is the first post in this brand spanking new blog of mine, I guess I’ll start from the top and introduce myself. I’m Sam, and Rainhat is a musical project of mine that I’m going to post stuff about in this blog. I’m a musician, singer and songwriter, and (hopefully) up-and-coming famous rock star. The music industry is notoriously fickle, so actually “making it” as a rock star is by no means just a matter of writing a good song and singing it decently. The world is full of seriously talented musicians and songwriters, so if that was all it took, we’d have an incredible surplus of music on our hands, if there is such a thing when it comes to music and entertainment. No, making it big is a rather weird combination of good luck, knowing all the right people at the right time, being in the right places at the right times, loads of hard work and at least a decent amount of talent. At least if you by “making it big” mean getting signed with a major record label and then becoming famous and selling loads of records and doing loads of gigs. Nothing wrong with that, it’s what millions of people dream of.

I’m not such a big fan of major record labels. Did you know that within the terms of a “normal” contract between a band and a label, the label will start making money long before the band sees a cent from record sales? That is, if the band manages to sell enough records in the first place to make any money. In a way it’s fair, I guess. The label provides the studio and people working in it, the marketing, publicity, manufacture of CDs, etc. So they get to make money from the first CD sold. But on the other hand, the label charges the band for all of this stuff and takes back its costs from the royalties of sold CDs that would go to the band. So the band doesn’t actually earn anything until all the costs have been paid back to the label first, after having sold quite many thousand CDs. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like major record labels. Another reason is the whole copyright thing. I’m not so keen on the normal kind of copyright that applies to a band’s music either. Some kind of copyright is good, I wouldn’t want just anyone who feels like it making money off of my work for free, so I’m all for copyright. But I’m not a fan of fans not being able to listen to a band they like without having to pay loads of money for it.

So, for these reasons, I’m going to do this whole thing the independent way instead, and on my own terms. Rather than relying on the (costly) help of a record label, I will use the tools available to me to market and sell myself and record my own music.

All the songs I write and record as Rainhat will be made available online. Anyone who likes my music can download and share my songs with others online perfectly legally. I do need to make money somehow, so there will also be an option to pay money to download the songs. It just won’t be the only option. If you like my music and want to support me, you can buy the songs for a dollar a piece. Or you can download them for free. It’s up to you.

Why? Because I believe it’s a win/win situation. A band is nothing without its fans. Fans get to download and share my music for free, and that way my music reaches more people than it would otherwise. It’s free publicity for me. So assuming my music is good enough, and enough people become fans, I will start making money from doing shows. Fans get music they like without being charged through their nose for CDs or downloads, and I get to continue doing what I love. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Now, all that’s left is just the hard work part. Writing, composing, recording, mastering, marketing, promoting, playing and succeeding. This is my livelyhood at stake here, but it’s also a kind of experiment to answer the question: “Can you leave luck and sucking up to the right people out of the equation, and actually make it with only talent and hard work?” I know I have a fair amount of talent, and I’m certainly going to work hard for this. Will this take off? Time will tell.

Wish me luck! – Or actually, don’t wish me luck. Instead, once I’ve put up some music online, download it, listen to it, and if you like it, share it with your friends.