A PUBLISHING CONTRACT?

Just a small bright spot in the general poverty/unemployment/Squirrel House/not going anywhere or seeing anybody routine. I’m getting a publishing contract for one of my songs—from the Philippines. They want “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up” for a Christmas album. I’ll need to have the contract vetted by an entertainment attorney. Oh, what fun. Yes, I think the fellow’s legitimate—he writes songs (subscribes to one of the writers’ sites I do), and has a real job as well as having fingers in stuff like this, and I know a couple of other people who’ve been offered single-song contracts by his company.

The album will get circulation only in the Philippines—but like the fellow said, “80 million people leaving the Philippines.” (I’m sure he meant “live in,” but I haven’t corrected him. Besides, can’t you just imagine the flotilla of boats?) My first-ever foreign sales (heck, my first-ever commercial sales of any kind.) I am sure we’re not talking about a big run, and it won’t amount to a lot of money—but it sure is a neat thing to add to the resume and put on the “Joe is Great!” brochure.

THE “INNERVIEW” of Country Rose by Danny the dog has gotten a lot of attention; it’s the second most listened to of all of my tracks on Whitby Shores, and it’s only been up for a few days. And folks have been asking for more. It’s been suggested that whom Danny should “innerview” next is Len Amsterdam, deejay, veejay, and independent music promoter extraordinaire, and founder of Whitby Shores. That’d be good—Danny knows Len (and Danny needs to interview people he knows), and we could potentially get a lot of good discussion about the promotion of independent artists and writers, since Len’s been on the cutting edge of most of it for serveral years. (He’s been called “the Alan Freed of the Internet.”)

The Danny “innerviews” could become a series, I suppose, and that could be good. Mix hard information with canine cuteness and a good dollop of humor, and it might be something people will listen to. It’s like the songs in that regard: the tongue-in-cheekness sucks you in, and you end up absorbing hard information without thinking about it. If it were just the hard information, you probably wouldn’t give it the time of day to begin with.

A RAP? Yeah, I wrote a rap (I refuse to call it a “rap song”—as far as I’m concerned, “rap music” is a contradiction in terms). It was for another of those challenges—four of my last five songs have resulted from on-line challenges—this one calling for songs about “why?” Y is, among other things, a letter of the alphabet, and I couldn’t help envisioning how a rapper would do the alphabet. I ended up having to endure rap blaring from car windows in traffic for a whole day, as I drove to and from registering my daughter for college—so by the time I got back home, I had “Alphabet Without U” by “JaY-DuByA da Rappah.” (Lost love, again. What is with this fixation on lost love?)

People liked it, and I guess that’s good; I’m not going to make a career out of rap, and I was happy just to get it out of my system. I can’t record it—don’t have the technology to produce those “bump-bumps” and “scritch-scritches” that seem to be essential for that genre. I have thought about showing up at one of the Rogue Valley Poetry Slams (a “poetry slam” is apparently a gathering of poets where they drink a lot and listen to each other’s stuff, for prizes), asking everybody to just imagine the bump-bumps and scritch-scritches, and do my JaY-DuByA routine. And then I can be done with it.

UPDATES: I’m not sure I’ve accomplished anything at all. I will get to play with the Friday Night Group this weekend, and maybe we can talk about the potential benefit album. Still trying to line up more gigs in southern Oregon over Labor Day weekend, and maybe an opportunity to finish recording the album. And a place to stay. Bank account got down (briefly) to ten bucks—not a good place to be.

Joe