[sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://www.nquit.com/sounds/semperThou/BugsWineDemons/02semperThouCicada.mp3″]Cicada, by semper Thou

This song drove some people crazy because he’s out of tune by just a little. For people with perfect pitch it bothers the CRAP out of them. It doesn’t bother me as much.

At the end, he says something about being drunk and off key, so at least he knew 🙂 This was recorded in one of our drunken one take sessions but I felt like he did a nice job with it!

He says something about hiding for 17 years, the cicada hiding in its shell being a metaphor, I guess, about him and hell us in general. One thing about running the label and making records is in the studio you’re very isolated from everything and everybody. Even though ultimately music is supposed to be for other people, you’re so isolated in the studio, and you can end up hiding for years and years and years if you’re not careful. A lot of times, if I’d been in the studio (or doing something computer intensive) all day and I had a gig or even just an open mic to go to that night, I’d be really really nervous and afraid. When I got to California, since I wasn’t committed to actual gigs much, I’d just skip the open mics most of the time.

That’s a promotional nightmare. Getting isolated and anti-social is not what you want from a rock star, or really any member of a record label. You want the whole thing to be a constant party, in a way. But you can’t get any work done that way, which is the other frustration. And party people tend to be people who don’t get anything done. I had trouble in Oakland getting somebody to simply mail one bubble mailer off, even if I’d already packaged it.

So right there is a sort of paradox that make the business of entertainment a bit hard. You have to be a serious master of changing between opposite energies, which is really rare; most people lean far one direction, and even those who can do both it can be a real chore and take a long time to get from one mode to the other. Newton’s law of inertia works on modes of being that way. The other option, I guess, is to have a team comprised of some connector/party people and some worker bees. But as it turns out, that never happened with our group. A few of us tended to be shy a lot of the time, but not productive. And most people who have a sense of sort of down home work ethic probably will just work for a real company, rather than invest their time for free in the hopes of a big payoff at some point. Hoping for that wild payoff after years of partying is kind of nonsensical, so you usually end up working with people with no sense.

That seems a bit harsh to say, but of course I include myself in that group. We all had SOME sense, but I think most of us NQuitter’s would now admit that we had less sense than we thought.

The biggest trap for me right now is in saying this stuff, I start to think that perhaps I could make it work by doing things right and being productive. Problem is, I always thought that, and so I’d keep getting myself in, and then not being as productive as I’d hoped. Now in other aspects of life, I’m trying to work things in a way that allows for my lapses in integrity and doesn’t have the flawed design of unrealistic expectations. The problem for NQuit right now is that I don’t have a design that leads to solid success that includes room for error. The only design I know requires an integrity and work ethic that nobody *I* know has, at least not when they’re making music or art and/or selling it.

But it was fun to be “drunk off the summer” with Eric.