Inaugural Post

I'm Here, here at Blogger. This is my new blog. I like the setup of this service better than bravejournal. There are more options and whatnot, so I moved my blog. Once I figure out how, I'l lmove all my old posts here as well. I just wanted to get one post up to begin with so things didn't look so blank.

Anyway, we played at Starbucks in Saratoga tonight, and it went really well. It was our second show there, and our second success. Despite the reputation of the establishment, we've always had very good experiences there. I don't mean that I'm ever going to forego a local shop in order to buy a latte at Starbucks, but playing there is nice. The staff are friendly and helpful (one barista even gave me allergy medicine!), we get free food and drinks, booking goes smoothly, and patrons are generally attentive.

The downsides are that the performance space itself if rather small, and there is a strange divider cutting the room in half. It's also a pretty noisy room for a coffeeshop, but the blender is significantly quieter than at a lot of other places.

We got a few new names for the e-mail list as well as sold some discs, made a bit in tips and presented our invoices to be stamped. You see, with Starbucks, you have to make an invoice, fill it out, get it stamped and signed by the shift manager, and send it in to the national office. You also have to fill out a w-9 and pay taxes on your income at the end of the year. It's sort of a big process to make a buck, but it's worth it, and it's not that hard now that we have a standard invoice.

Dave and I also developed a standard contract today. We used a generic one my dad (head AASS) found on the web and altered it to work for us. Emma Willard and Green Mountain College both require contracts, so we thought it would be best if we wrote it out ourselves and made sure we got what we wanted in there, rather than relying on a standard one the venue might present to us.

We had our public debut of the new song "The Slight of an Impass...Stalemate" at Caffe Lena open mic. last night (to which we carpooled with the awesome new trojan musician Gregory Rosenthal) and the gig debut of it was tonight. I really like the song, as does Dave. It's in 6 and it was inadvertantly inspired by Elliot Smith. The chorus and bridge don't have words, just sounds, which is fun, and certainly cut down on the lyric writing.

Also, I'm in the process, with my dad Richard, of getting all my songs copyrighted and registering Switchback Music as my publishing company so that I will own the rights to all my songs. I think that's very important. My songs are my creations, my children, and owning the copyrights and publishing are like having legal custody.

Anyway, I think that's it for the moment. Hang in there folks, and keeping humming that tune in your brain until you infect someone else with it and you are free.

*C*