Tom Ray

I got the chance to talk with Ethan Tufts this weekend on my podcast.

Ethan, is a musician that goes by the name State Shirt. Had him on the show before and this time he was back to talk about his new album “Lost Hills”.

This isn’t out of the ordinary to have a guest on promoting a new album. In fact, it’s usually one of the main reasons we have someone on the show.

But being a podcast focusing primarily on creative commons musicians, we don’t normally talk to people that promote themselves as other bands do.

That’s not to say bands we talk to don’t promote their music. But a lot of creative commons musicians don’t necessarily do it for fame. They just do it– to do it.

It’s one of the things I love about the culture.

But people do contact me with questions, asking for ways they could get their music out there and still maintain status in the creative commons realm.

So when we get a guest that has, hit the pavement. Sent out his stuff. Knocked on some doors, things like that. I take the opportunity to get more of that process out of them.

I got so wrapped up in this, I didn’t even get a chance to talk to him about his “Seedie Release” concept. If you order his physical CD it comes with seeds you can plant.

Get it? “Seedie”?

I love meeting people that find different and unique ways of doing this. It’s one of the best reasons for doing the show.

Check out the State Shirt interview here.

I was out at the studio with my friend Rob. It was a cold October night. And at one point I went outside to have a cigarette.

The door to our recording studio is at the end of a long alleyway between two buildings that leads out to a sidewalk. And there’s not really any lighting there.

As I walked I thought I saw something lying there. Of course at first, me being paranoid, I thought it was a dead animal or something. But it wasn’t.

What was laying there was a pile of clothes. Now I’m not talking a laundry basket of clothes, what was there was specifically, a pair of grey sweatpants and one of those hippie wool hooded pullovers.

First after staring at the clothes, I looked down the street one way and then turned and looked down the street the other way. Nobody was around.

Just to make sure that I wasn’t going crazy and seeing things I went inside and got Rob. Had him come with me to witness the pile of clothes that I saw. They were still there. They were real.

He did the same thing as me and look down the street one way and look down the other. And again we didn’t see anybody.

We both agreed it was very strange. And we were both confused and concerned at the same time. What the hell are these clothes doing here?

Anyway there was nothing more we could do so we went inside.

At the end of the night we had kind of forgotten all about it. As we left and walked out into the street, both Rob and I stopped at the same time and turned around. The clothes that were in the pile there before were gone!?

What in the living hell is going on? No one would come by and be like, “Hey, a pile of street clothes! Sweet!” and take them?

I just thought the whole thing was very strange.

For days now I’ve been doing transcriptions. Pouring over huge audio recordings of band practices.

I’m doing this because, I got this idea to document and piece them together as audio scenes in a series format.

At first I thought I could wing it. On the fly. Put it together in my head and arrange the pieces.

The more I listened, the more I forgot…Where things were said, on what take, at what time in the recording. It became overwhelming.

So I realized I was just making it harder by not doing it. Writing time signature and quotes. Key elements & sound reference.

Surprisingly it only took a day or so, in my free time. Still much but not unreasonable.

What I found from doing this is, with a greater understanding of what I had recorded, I found a different perspective. A different angle to tell the story I set out to do.

I think knowing what had happened after the fact, shined a light on what I missed. Even though I was there.

I’ve been a member of medium.com for a while but actually haven’t really used it. Like everybody else, I got an email about its updates today.

One of the main points seems to be they’re actually talking about using it as a CMS type platform.

As I was reading that, it seemed interesting they were telling people to move their stuff there. I’m always leery of that because you never know how long they’re going to be around. And then you have to migrate all of your stuff again if they don’t survive.

That’s what sparked this thought in my head.

If you know the history of the creator of medium.com, he is also the guy that created Twitter. And before that, he was one of the guys that created blogger (aka blogspot)– which was bought by Google a very long time ago.

I still use blogger.com for many of my websites, because it’s just a simple free CMS and I don’t need to manage a web server for it.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have it’s problems. One of the frustrations I’ve had with blogger lately is they haven’t updated their interface in a very long time.

I keep having to go in and customize it myself, leaving me to worry that they are not actively developing on this product anymore. Usually that’s an indication it may be subject to the dreaded Google house cleaning that they do every year to some of their programs.

As I thought more about this, it occurred to me Medium.com may just be re-creating blogger in a more updated manner?

I mean think about it? The entire thing started as a place to put a blog which was the original intent of blogspot.

Then then they opened it up to the public and people could post articles like a news site.

But now you are actually able to host all of your content there and have people search it on your own web address.

This is exactly the direction that blogspot went from its start to its current inception.

The advantage the medium platform has is, it’s an updated interface with a far better mobile application.

So did he just repurpose the idea? Or was it an accident that he’s kind of created the exact same thing years later?

The weirdest thing happened. I was on a bike ride, it was a gray sky October afternoon.

A neighborhood street right off the main road there was a park I passed. In the park a ways there was a group playing a game in the volleyball court. Their belongings set on a nearby picnic table.

I wasn’t really paying attention to them, I just knew they were there.

In my peripheral vision, for a brief second, the pile of their things on that picnic table looked like an old Fisher-Price cash register toy.

Enough so that I turned and looked. Like it made sense that’s what it was? Why would that possibly be what was there?

I spent the rest of the bike ride thinking about that. First, trying to think why my subconscious would pick out that particular object to identify?

Then, the rest of the time I thought about what a silly toy that was. A cash register?

It just had 3 coins, they only fit in the designated slot and the drawer would open when you pulled the lever.

I would have loved to have been in the room when that idea was pitched. If someone asked you to think of a toy for kids I doubt anyone would go: “Got it! Cash register!”

But it did work. Not one person I know growing up doesn’t know what you I’m talking about I’ll bet.

A cash register?!