I’m off!

This is my last blog post at MySpace (due to posting convenience); to keep up with my Tales From the Road please visit my website.

In an hour the adventure will begin! I have an 11:30 flight to connect in Philly, then I'll have a luxurious five hour layover (I'd much rather lose a lot of time in the middle of the day than miss a flight so I chose this option over a shorter-but-more-uncertain layover) before flying out to Rome this evening. Exciting stuff!

I must be more nervous than I thought. My mother, a teacher, would throw up the first day of school every year and has a similar reaction to other sorts of big events (up to and including dentist appointments). While I didn't go that far this morning, I did have some surprising dry heaves. But everything is packed, the dulcimer is disassembled (taking off all the strings takes about fifteen minutes, putting them back on takes a day and a half), and I've checked US Airways' baggage restrictions to double check everything.

I hope this finds all of you doing really well, and I'll most likely send a brief arrival message late Wednesday night. Ciao! (For Genovese usage, insert a long stream of decrescendo ciaos here).

5:07 AM - 3 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment

Stomach Butteflies

I'm packing up to head out to DC this afternoon to spend the weekend with my sweetie. I'm really excited about spending time together before I head to Italy, especially since we'll be in the neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia where we had our first date. It's a little bittersweet, of course, but mostly I'm just thankful that we've been able to spend as much time together lately as we have.

My preparations for Italy are almost done, which kind of surprises me. In order to really enjoy the weekend I need to have all my ducks in a row, so I've done almost all the work for that trip during this week as well. The main part has been a serious packing list of things which I'm hopeful will all fit into my luggage, and just having that reference point is incredibly comforting.

So I'm pretty jazzed about everything, and checking the extended forecast for Rome (highs in the low fifties Fahrenheit next week) on the best weather site I found for Italy last time, http://ilmeteo.it. Fat Tuesday is supposed to be a little chilly but still buskable; anything much below 10 C/50 F gets unpleasant. It's also nice to see that my prospective itinerary is pretty weather independent because in southern Italy the east and west coasts are pretty similar (in the north they are radically different because they're separated by the foothills of the Alps). All in all I'm only mildly nervous, and quite excited, to be getting ready for liftoff!

7:37 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

L’Inverno Italiano is off to a great start!

I had a fantastic time at the SCA's Septentrian Twelfth Night event outside of Toronto! I got to see a lot of old friends (one or two that I hadn't seen since the closing of the much-lamented Ontario Renaissance Festival) and made a few new ones. I spent a lot of time hanging out with my very good friends Tim and Truly, at whose house I'm staying for a few more days, which always makes for a great time.

The fact that I'm only nine days away from Italy is starting to get intimidatingly thrilling. I worry that I was a one-note flute yesterday because the trip loomed large in pretty much every conversation I had. I tend to worry about becoming a boor about the whole thing, not to mention the possibility of crossing the line from excited to self-satisfied egotism. I have a lot to do in the next few days (taxes being high on the list) but not so much that I'm actually worried. Just a little anxious.

On a total tangent, I was just editing the above paragraph and I noticed I use "worry", or some form of it, three times in five sentences, which is pretty horrific writing. I was recently talking to a high school friend who had moved to Taiwan, and we discussed the fact that when you operate in a foreign language your mother tongue's usage tends to shrink to match your daily language. Her situation is exacerbated by having a one-year old at home, of course, but it's been interesting (and depressing) to see the way my writing has deteriorated compared to a year ago. It's not that I don't know the words; my vocabulary is as large as ever (or possibly larger, due to the injection of more Latinate cognates), I just don't think to use them. When I get to Rome one of my first purchases will be an Italian thesaurus...

7:02 AM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Business Theory and the Music Industry

I ran across a business theory in an audiobook recently. I've been listening to The Omnivore's Dilemma, and at one point the author compares industrial and artisanal business models (in this case, with food production). The general point is that industrial systems create standardized commodities sold at high volume and low margin, while artisanal systems involve individualized products, high margins and lower volumes.

So, of course, I started to think about how this applies to the music business. The comparisons just jump out. The industrial model is the record companies, of course, and the artisanal is the independent musician. Record companies (and the musicians who work with them) try to sell many CDs at low margins; lower for the musician than for the company, of course. Independent musicians keep a lot more of the sale price of the CD, and many act as their own retailer as well, which also helps.

Another quality of industrial models is that they involve specialization. Marketing, promotion, management (booking gigs), and other tasks are all assigned to specialists. Independent musicians often perform many of these tasks on their own, which leads to much lower expenses (and therefore higher margins).

The biggest thing that seems counter-intuitive, however, is commodification. Any industrial process involves taking individual products and making them indistinguishable; it doesn't matter which Ford Focus I drive because they're all identical. This is where any intellectual property will always differ from a manufactured one. I'd argue, however, that the slavish devotion of record companies to a genre system that pigeonholes artists is a pretty close approximation. Whether it's pop, techno, industrial, oldies, new wave, or emo, such labels serve to make music easily digested to an industrial consumer. Bands that aren't easily categorized have a notoriously hard time getting signed to labels, and established bands have heard the devastating phrase "I don't hear a single" and been forced to modify their work.

The point of the original business article that brought all this up is that industrial processes are effective, and artisinal processes are effective, but that when you try and mix the two together you end up with all the inefficiencies of an artisinal process with all the problems associated with an industrial process. So the question is how I, as an independent musician, can maximize my artisinal advantages without succumbing to the difficulties of industrialization.

I'm still working on that part, but it's an interesting question to ponder.

8:45 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Two weeks left!

My flight to Rome leaves two weeks from today and the trip is starting to feel real. I've planned out the first three cities (Rome, Naples, Reggia Calabria) and I've got a list of potential successors. Today I started calling Roman hotels in order to make reservations for Moira's visit in March, which will accidentally (but probably niftily) coincide with Easter in Rome. I was surprised to find how natural the Italian language felt, but of course since I was talking to a Roman (they are famously bilingual) he switched to English almost immediately after hearing my accent. At the end of my last trip it was a great compliment to be able to keep a Roman speaking Italian for a full conversation, no matter how brief, and it looks like I have some work to do in order to bring my fluency back up to that point :)

6:44 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

They’re Here!

I just took custody of 1079 copies of L'Inverno Italiano! It's too late in the day to do it now, but tomorrow morning I'll be sending a bunch off to my distributor CDBaby.com, where they'll be available for all and sundry to enjoy! It will, unfortunately, take a few weeks from then until mp3s are available for sale at iTunes and other e-tailers but soon everything will be available online. Which is a good thing because, until early May, they won't otherwise be available in the US!

I'll let you know when CDBaby makes them available for sale, and keep you in touch on other progress as it's made. I'm thrilled to have them in my hands, and very proud of how it's turned out!

2:07 PM - 0 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

New Website Design

I've been playing with my website for the past week and I just took it live, let me know what you think!

http://www.vinceconaway.com

8:26 AM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

L’Inverno Italiano is on its way!

I don't usually answer the phone when it's a number I don't know; it's often easier to just get the voice mail. I know, I know, it's terribly unprofessional and probably deeply discourteous. But today I decided to answer, mainly because I wasn't doing anything in particular, and it was my CD manufacturer, Oasis. With a little bit of dread I asked what was up, wondering if my project was going to be delayed past my hoped-for CD release party or even past my departure date for Italy. Instead, I was told that it was finished a full week ahead of schedule and should be in my hands by Monday. This is yet another reason I love working with these people!

I'm really excited about the CD release, mainly because I've never done anything after having a CD come out other than start selling it at my next performance. This time, however, my next show is going to be a bit different. Since it's an SCA event, and one run by a friend, it should be a nicely intimate gathering. I've had friends in the area for years, dating back to my days with the Ontario Renaissance Festival, and a lot of them have been following my music for quite some time. It just seems like too good an opportunity to pass up and so, while I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to make the release special, I'm pretty sure it will be.

In the meantime I'm making some other changes here and there. I've been working on revamping my website for the past two days, its biggest redesign since I started it in 1998, and so I'm hoping that will be finished sometime next week. If anyone would like to help me out with beta testing drop me a line and I'll send you the temporary URL of the new site. More pertinent, I'm starting to move my blog to LiveJournal. MySpace has been really good to me, and I know a number of you subscribe, but while I'm in Italy it will be much easier for me to post and keep things up to date through LJ. Until I leave for Italy I'll be double-posting everything to both blogs, but once I'm gone it'll be exclusively LiveJournal.

Things are starting to feel intense between the album's release and my upcoming departure. Not intense enough for me to start working any harder to get things done, just enough to make it less comfortable to ignore little things like taxes. So I decide to do things like rewrite my website instead...isn't human nature fun? I think procrastinating can wait until tomorrow...

Ciao!

4:53 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Irrationality

I am not a rational being. I've always known this and I've never really regretted it. The past thirty years have been a fairly continual process of self-discovery as I figured out what makes me tick (my mother seemed less than pleased yesterday when she said a child would be a good tool for this and I retorted "so would a prison sentence or joining the Marines"). Having recently tattooed "Fortune favors the bold" on my chest is also an argument against rationality, since boldness and logic rarely go hand-in-hand.

The past few days I've been particularly irrational, although I prefer to think of myself as intuitive. There's a reason I'm an iNtuitive Feeler in Myers-Briggs, as opposed to Sensing and Thinking. Whichever way I choose to spin it, my decision process is a bit twisted. I very consciously do what most people do unconsciously; I determine a course of action and then try to justify it. This works fantastically well until I start to question my initial judgment. When I have doubts about myself then they automatically trickle down into the decisions I have made, since I know that those decisions were based more on my desires than any actual evidence.

I've been really abstract so far because there were three or four areas that this applied to at some point this week. Then last night I started to apply it to Italy. Not the trip I'm about to begin, which I'm extremely excited about, but the second trip next summer. Were my assumptions valid? Are my goals realistic? Is it a fools' errand?

So I did what I had done when I first decided to go - I made a spreadsheet. And I proceeded to show myself that every "logical" step that I had used to justify the trip financially was not only valid, but fairly conservative. It turns out that an off-the-cuff idea has a really sound basis in evidence.

Once I'd done that, I realized that all the doubts and fears that had been manifesting over the past few days were all part of the same general trend. Once I could see the trend it was broken, and this is a very good thing.

8:01 AM - 11 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Making Plans

I'm going through guidebooks and starting to come up with potential itineraries for my upcoming Italy tour. Last time I concentrated on the north, this time it's the south. For the past few months I've been really looking forward to the last month of the trip, when I'll return to northern Italy to hit some cities I regretted missing last time. The more research I do, however, the more I'm looking forward to heading south.

This past tour I spent a lot of time in cities I'd never heard of, places like Modena and Ferrara, where I can now close my eyes and give directions from the cathedral to the train station. This upcoming trip is no different. The two places I have heard of, Naples and Palermo, are getting brief or no visits as I concentrate on places like Lecce, Taranto, Bari, Reggio di Calabria, Syracuse, and other cities I don't know. Yet. But the more I research them, read about them, and check them out in google's satellite photographs the more thrilled I am to get to see them. There's even a slim chance I might even make it to Sardinia!

6:37 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment