Brian D. McTear to me
May 12, 2009
Hey Bobby,
I am glad you are sending me this. I know just what you mean in your message below and I commend you for so thoughtfully making your point. I am also glad you have so much drive to boost your health. You can do it! I know you can! It sounds like you have renewed patience too, which will help you.
I am glad you are excited about the Weathervane stuff, Bobby. That really makes me feel good. I am sorry that the explanation for it usually takes so long! That is why I am working on an “introductory video” with Devin right now. So hopefully when it’s up it will explain the whole thing really well. I can only hope at this point.
The end goal is to improve the state of music in our culture and in doing so, to reset the bar on the potential careers that independent artists can strive for. It’s all going to shit right now. Everyone seems okay with the fact that artists have no chance of making a living anymore. Even artists! That needs to be changed.
We hope to achieve our goals with a couple projects, the first (and most likely our “main” project for years to come) is the Weathervane Project Series (I hope to come up with a better name….). Basically, we find great artists and provide studio resources and production staff to record their music. These projects are also documented in a series of videos made for the web. With video we can cover some important aspects of recording that maybe the average person might not understand. Slowly over time, I hope that we can raise the cultural understanding of music, the artist’s vision and the production process. The more people understand, the more they will appreciate, we hope. So if it all works, we provide a really unique opportunity, as well as resources and exposure for the artists, and we educate the public in the process.
I think it could work. For right now, I am pretty much choosing a small handful of artists myself. There will probably be 4 to 6 this year, and the selection is all but wrapped up. But the real push in this start up year is to get the idea out there, and to bring as much exposure to the organization as possible. Moving forward, the series will be curated by a different well known figure each year. As an example, I always say it could be curated by a great musician like Kevin Sheilds from My Bloody Valentine, or even someone who’s NOT a musician, like, say Quentin Tarrentino. This person would head up the selection process for that single year, and the fact that it’s a different person annually will easily push the focus in a different direction that year from the previous year.
Ultimately I hope we can build a campus like facility in Philadelphia (around the Wissihickon, I hope) that has studios, video production studios, and artist residences, so the series can happen in an “artist retreat” like setting. I went to a boarding school, and I always kind of imagine that when I picture it. I think that the city itself would benefit greatly, as it would essentially host what we hope are an elite group of artists every year. Think about the attitude people have about Philadelphia now! It would slowly change and much for the better, if every year say, 10 or 12 groups (that could be 50 people!) have this experience! … This is a WAYS off, but it’s kind of the original vision for the whole thing, anyway.
There’s other project ideas coming along the pike, as well. A very simple one, for instance: I want to build a catalog of unreleased material from great artists. The music will be “donated” by the artist for whatever period of time we can agree on, and we’ll in turn give it as gifts to new donors/members. So what it does is allow artists to donate their music, while hopefully receiving a great deal of exposure in the process. It could be a good way to promote an upcoming record, for instance. And if we are lucky, I could imagine a really huge artist, partially out of support, but also in order to be a part of the good vibes WV has, donating a song and really helping us raise our membership. Like if Pearl Jam had a new record coming out and they were planning to release a song for free, maybe we could ask them to release it through us for the first day. We could put a $2 download price tag on it, and benefit from the race to hear it first. They were probably not planning on making money from the song anyway, so they won’t miss a couple thousand bucks, but meanwhile they are supporting something cool. I just need to plan this out. This will probably get off the ground late this year or early next… I hope.
I also want to start a high school level summer seminar, or something of the sort, in which we teach concepts of music production and engineering in a studio setting.
Phew. I look up at the paragraphs and paragraphs above and feel like such a wind-bag! I hope it gets the idea across!
So let me know if you need anything else while you are in there. I could bring things to Marianne and Giovanna. It would be my sincere pleasure, as I’d feel like I could do something nice for you. Maybe I’ll look for some books? Music? You need a guitar or anything? Drum sticks? Something to bang on?
B
