Tom Ray

I know people that work and go home and maybe do something on the weekends. My parents are like that. I don’t get that? Not trying to work towards something different in your free time. Seems foreign to me.

Counterpoint, when I explain what I do with free time I’m the told same thing. So fair enough.

I knew a guy once who was a machinist. He loved it. When I asked him what else he does or wants to do, he just looked at me funny. “What do you mean?” he said. He was doing it. It was all he wanted. Work, get paid & go home. And good for him, he was happy. It was all he wanted and I respect that.

I just need to do more I guess.

I have what I call my second day. My day is split into 2 parts. Much so it seems 2 days in 1 for me.

It goes like this.

##First day

• Wake up for day job.
• Do that.
• Go home.
• Take a 30 minute nap.

##Second Day (still technically the same day)

• Wake up from nap.
• Workout (have to do this or I never fully wake back up).
• Make dinner.
• Then work on personal projects.

This is where I do things I think about all day. It can range from, write music or podcast show I do, make cartoons or art and so on.

If I don’t do that I get depressed. Sometimes it helps me shake things I keep thinking about that are dragging me down.

Case in point, I had a particularly frustrating day at work. Even while driving to band practice I thought about it the whole drive. Wasted effort to think about it really. I’m not even sure I remember driving there I was so immersed in these thoughts.

When I get in the room with other guys to create songs and ideas, I thought about nothing else.

Then on drive home all I thought of was what we did and how to improve it. That’s what should be on my mind in free time. I don’t want to just watch TV and hope that the stories distract me. I want to do something I can say I accomplished at the end of the day. My second day.

Related to this night Eric, our keyboardist is a brew meister and he brought the first prototypes of the commercial beer that he’s been working on. Put that on top of making something creative with people you know? Ain’t a bad mix.

I’ve been watching the Rockford Files recently. It’s a private detective television show starring James Garner from the 1970s.

There’s one thing I noticed about shows from that time period. It may just be me, but I think that 40 year olds from 1970 look different from today’s 40.

Reason I say that is, when I watch it Jim Rockford, at the time of filming, is my age. But when I look at him, he looks like someone my dad’s age. But in reality he is my age.

Maybe it has something to do with the way life spans have extended over the years. In the Middle Ages most people would only live into their forties. But now, you could live way beyond that.

Or maybe it’s just because now that I’m 40 it doesn’t seem as old.

Is it healthy living? Or is it just extended living?

Personally I’d like to think I don’t look like 1970s 40 year olds.

It was a memory that just popped in my head for no real reason that I could think of. It was a stupid insignificant memory. In movies people have revelations, times they remember that inspire. I have songs that get stuck in my head and dumb shit like the following that plague my thoughts.

I had a flash of a show from the mid-1990s enter my brain. It was a morning show that the newly launched FX network had. It stared TV’s Tom Bergeron, who you may know from America’s funniest videos. But it also starred a puppet, Bob.

This wasn’t a kid show. It was a legit morning show like Good Morning America or The Today Show. They just had a puppet for some reason.

That’s not even the weird part about the memory. I remembered an interview I saw on it.

During the same time period there was show called Mr. Rhodes. Wasn’t a good show. It was a cross between “Head of the class” and “Welcome back Kotter” staring a comedian I had never heard of named Tom Rhodes.

After all this, here was the thing that I just remembered.

Tom Rhodes was on this morning show trying to promote his show, doing an interview. The job of the puppet during interviews was to add light hearted comments in a morning show fashion.

Well Tom Rhodes was not liking this set up. And I remember he would stop talking and just stare at the puppet when he said something. Looking at him annoyed. The puppet. He starred down a puppet.

The puppet, not having real eyes, didn’t really get this I don’t think. Then I remember, he finally started mocking the puppet. Poorly. And whoever was the puppet guy was on his game and started slinging the barbs back at him. Quicker, faster and funnier than Tom was. To the point where he gave up and walked off I believe.

Now this is all just he way I remember it. I have not been able to find this interview online anywhere.

No idea what made me think of that.

With all the talk about music streaming and if it’s good for artists. I feel contentID is just as problematic. No one talks about how it’s not perfect, at least that I’ve seen or experienced.

ContentID is the thing YouTube has that looks to see if your song is being used in videos. The main selling point is- earn money by collecting ad revenue from videos using your music. Simple right? It can also stop people that use your music and tell them to take it down.

All this is done through third parties.

My problem is, it seems to just be accepted they will serve you well. No questions. They don’t ask you what’s okay and what isn’t. They report back and tell you what you made. And that’s all I’ve really seen. If you need to deviate from this system, that’s where it becomes a hassle.

I release my music under creative commons so originally I thought I had no use for this. Then a year or so ago some company or person I had no affiliation with began sending take down notices to video creators telling them to pay them for using my music. Saying they owned it.

I started getting emails from the video creators who were rightfully confused about this. They were asking if we were doing this, which we were not.

After disputing this company’s claim I had to add our music to contentID in order to have ownership and stop it from happening again. So I did.

You can’t just sign up yourself to do this. It can only be done through “YouTube approved” services. I’m not sure what the approval involves but I didn’t really question it.

Our music has been distributed through 2 services over the years. One for our earlier albums and a second that we started using not to long ago. Both offer YouTube as an option so I just tuned it on.

What I wanted and what I should be able to do in my opinion, is approve people that are using the creative commons license properly. Sort of like “white listing” those accounts from being contacted. I found out this isn’t really possible, or at least isn’t easy.

The first company we used for distribution pretty much told us that they wouldn’t do that and we would just need to turn off contentID. I found that odd.

Why would we not have the ability to control this? It seems like the old school record label model.

Our current distributer at least got on the phone with me and tried to talk about what we could do. We had to come up with a work around to whitelist accounts, like I wanted.

While I was happy that he took my concern seriously and worked with me to fix it I still have to contact someone else, tell them the info of what I need done and wait for them to get back to me every time it comes up.

I’m an indie artist. I get that doing this for large established acts could be a daunting task and probably more people are abusing the use of the music in that situation. But Individual artist expect to have more control over what they make. Fans that get these messages aren’t necessarily aware it’s not you directly telling them no. They might even be turned off by this and you could lose them as fans.

So i ask, why isn’t this access given to approved artists? Why only companies that you are forced to work with just to use it?

That’s a real problem that I think should be addressed.

Can you do this? Am I just not aware of it? If so, then it needs to be easier for musicians to know how.

Crammed so many things into a drip of weekend. Monday seems past already.

A feeling of time passed. Has it not been days? It can be.

Want was further gone. Uninterested in the drum of humming along to what I thought was gone already.

It’s not better to do the same time.