The Cocoknot Theori

The Cocoknot Theori is both a duo as well as a train of thought. This account is a repost of our blog posts. Join the mailing list at: http://www.theckt.net/subscribe/

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Making music with the apes: The interspecies internet

“Music is a universal language.” We must have heard this statement often without pondering about it a lot. Maybe it’s time to get obsessed with this thought though. Adler and Doren in their book, How to read a book talks about how language is often a hindrance to communication as it is not an effective medium to convey knowledge. That's why interpretation is so important when it comes to reading and listening. By deductive reasoning, we can say that music is also about interpreting several emotions and feelings and hence, can to a certain extent resolve the hindrance to communication. The project, Interspecies internet makes use of this idea. Below are some of the highlights from the TED talk on Interspecies Internet, an idea that’s in progress. The project is a result of curiosity on how other species behave when they are provided with the same tools as the humans are. “Other animals are conscious. They’re emotional. They’re aware. There have been multitudes of studies with many species over the years that have given us exquisite evidence for thinking and consciousness in other animals, other animals that are quite different than we are in form.We are not alone. We are not alone in these abilities. With our growing awareness about the consciousness of others and our relationship with the rest of the animal world, that we’ll give them the respect and protection that they deserve. I wondered how we might interface with these animals. In the 1980s, I developed an underwater keyboard. This was a custom-made touch-screen keyboard. What I wanted to do was give the dolphins choice and control. These are big brains, highly social animals, and I thought, well, if we give them choice and control, if they can hit a symbol on this keyboard. What was remarkable is, they explored this keyboard on their own. There was no intervention on our part. They explored the keyboard. They played around with it. They figured out how it worked. And they started to quickly imitate the sounds they were hearing on the keyboard. They imitated on their own. Beyond that, though, they started learning associations between the symbols, the sounds and the objects. What we saw was self-organized learning, and now I’m imagining, what can we do with new technologies? How can we create interfaces, new windows into the minds of animals, with the technologies that exist today? Peter Gabriel: I make noises for a living. On a good day, it’s music, and I want to talk a little bit about the most amazing music-making experience I ever had. I work with a lot of musicians from around the world, and often we don’t have any common language at all, but we sit down behind our instruments, and suddenly there’s a way for us to connect and emote. Perhaps the most amazing tool that man’s created is the Internet, and what would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces, visual-audio interfaces that would allow these remarkable sentient beings that we share the planet with access? The possibility of making a web server for a dollar grew into what became known as the Internet of Things, which is literally an industry now with tremendous implications for health care, energy efficiency. And we were happy with ourselves. And then when Peter showed me that, I realized we had missed something, which is the rest of the planet. So we started up this interspecies Internet project. We’ve been video conferencing with cognitive animals. Orangutans share 97 percent of our DNA and are incredibly intelligent, so it’s so exciting to think of all the opportunities that we have via technology and the Internet to really enrich their lives and open up their world. We’re really excited about the possibility of an interspecies Internet we thought we were building a system to connect computers together. What we very quickly discovered is that this was a system for connecting people together. And what you’ve seen tonight tells you that we should not restrict this network to one species, that these other intelligent, sentient species should be part of the system too. What’s important about what these people are doing is that they’re beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us but share a common sensory environment. We’re beginning to explore what it means to communicate with something that isn’t just another person. Well, you can see what’s coming next. All kinds of possible sentient beings may be interconnected through this system, and I can’t wait to see these experiments unfold. What happens after that? Well, let’s see. There are machines that need to talk to machines and that we need to talk to, and so as time goes on, we’re going to have to learn how to communicate with computers and how to get computers to communicate with us in the way that we’re accustomed to, not with keyboards, not with mice, but with speech and gestures and all the natural human language that we’re accustomed to. So we’ll need something like C3PO to become a translator between ourselves and some of the other machines we live with.” Watch the fascinating TED talk here and watch how apes can recognize octaves and music here and here. Also, check out a related article - the consolations of music. If you see any value in this blog post, please share the post with any ten people you care about. You can subscribe to our mailing list below. *Email Address Website

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Takeaways from the music business/industry

A few weeks ago, we had attended the Ra Ga Carnatic concert in Aurora temple. We were wondering why the duo wasn't singing any original compositions and kept singing the older ones again and again. We found a possible answer to the question on one of our favorite blogs on the web - Seth Godin’s. And, that’s the lesson number one. 1. Familiarity and nostalgia. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t. 2. Keep reinventing your music business. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. The music business had a spectacular run alongside the baby boomers. Starting with the Beatles and Dylan, they just kept minting money. The co-incidence of expanding purchasing power of teens along with the birth of rock, the invention of the transistor and changing social mores meant a long, long growth curve. As a result, the music business built large systems. It was a well-greased system, but the fundamental question: why did it deserve to last forever? It didn’t. Yours doesn’t either. The shift that is happening right now is that the people who insist on keeping the world as it was are going to get more and more frustrated until they lose their jobs. Individuals who want to invent a whole new set of rules, a new paradigm, can’t believe their luck and how lucky they are that the people in the industry aren’t noticing an opportunity. If your focus is on music, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate, and vinyl, it’s horrible. 3. Suing customers on copyright grounds is a bad strategy because firstly, everything is a remix in the music business and secondly, due to an apparent paradox described below. The paradox in the music business - you want ubiquity, not obscurity, yet digital distribution devalues your core product. Most items of value derive that value from scarcity. Digital changes that, and you can derive value from ubiquity now. The solution isn’t to somehow try to become obscure, to get your song off the (digital) radio.The solution is to change your business. The idea of paying for music to this generation would be like asking them to pay for breathing unless of course, you shut it off. It ain’t gonna happen, not in my lifetime, and maybe not even yours, or your children’s. - John O’Rilley 4. You are the media now. The more interesting thing to me is who is going to control the playlist. If there is an infinite amount of music available – and I would argue that as soon as the amount of music available exceeds the amount of time you have in your life, that’s infinite – somebody will have the leverageable spot of deciding what to listen to next. And it’s unclear whether someone will charge to tell me that or will pay to tell me that. It’s still up for grabs in every one of these vertical silos. Who are the tastemakers and how do these ideas spread? If you find any value in this blog post, please share the post with any ten people you care about. You can subscribe to the mailing list below. *Email Address Website

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How can musicians form their own tribes?

A few days ago, we had written a blog post on how musicians can build a true fan community. This post is a sequel to that. Marketing guru, Seth Godin in his interview on The DIY Artist Route talks about how musicians can form tribes in order to spread their ideas and music and make the intended change in the world. Below are some of the highlights from the transcript. 1. Think hard about how music is vital to our self definition. “Very few people care about you. They care about themselves. They care about how your work, your life would make them feel. Too many artists become so self-absorbed that they don’t pay attention to what other people want, what other people need. Other people’s narrative on who they are, what it means for them to wear your t-shirt. Purple cow is the idea that people talk about you because you are remarkable and in a way that makes them feel more alive. So, we need to think hard about how music is vital to our self-definition. We got to be that kind of artist that some people can talk about.” 2. Be a meaningful specialist rather than being a wandering generality. Focus on farming your own land rather than go hunting. “Everything we do, tells a story. We have to decide if that story is coherent, if that story is going to resonate with people that we are telling it to. The best artists tell them consistently. What do you remind someone of - it’s the reminding that does 80% of your job. Touring is a great solution for a certain kind of musician. You need to stay in one town for a while then work your way up the ladder getting gigs that are difficult to get and that will build your following. Running from one place to another doesn’t make any sense. No one can tour the world. Running and running to the next easy town almost never pays as many dividends as focussing on a community, on a concept whether it’s geographical or not. That said, it’s possible now, more than ever, to have people hear your stuff without ever meeting you. You are already in the promise land. Believing that the grass is greener on the other side is not going to get you anywhere. You have already got the grass. Now, you need to farm it and not go hunting.” If you see any value in this blog post please share this post with any ten people you care about. You can subscribe to our mailing list below. *Email Address Website

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Radiohead's experiment with 'In Rainbows' was a huge success. The band did a name-your-own-price experiment, and it worked. This only goes on to show that the 'Free' business model works, says Chris Anderson in his book, Free. The record labels still accuse the 'Free' (or piracy) model but, that cannot be generalized to the music market. While the record industry is not growing, the music industry is still growing and virtually every other part of the music market, outside the labels, is growing, embracing the 'Free' model often. The concert business is thriving since memorable experiences are the ultimate scarcity. Derek Webb of INO Records shares his experience as follows: I've been able to filter that email list by zip codes to find out where my fans are and then email them to get them in the rooms. I sell shows out now. And sell a lot of merch. I have a career. One aspect musicians can steal from the non-fiction books, and authors are how they make use of customizing their music/songs for a particular target audience. I believe, this is one idea not many musicians have exploited until now. You can have the abundant, one-size-fits-all version of the author's ideas for free, but if you want those ideas tailored for your own company, industry conference, or investors meeting, you'll have to pay for the author's scarce time. This varies from place to place depending on the socio-economic climate. Chinese musicians use piracy as a form of zero-cost marketing to promote their work to the largest possible audience. MicroMu, a music company, uses this strategy to attract gigs. Music is a luxury for the middle class in China, a flippant expenditure. We simply use free music and media as a way of saying that 'everyone is welcome,' building a dialogue, building a community, becoming the trusted brand of the grassroots music movement in China. To do this, though, we have to become all things to all men: record label, online community, live events producers, merchandise sellers, TV production company. Lastly, the author says despite all these changes there are still certain constants in the music industry. In a world where the definition of the music industry is changing every day, the one constant is that music creates celebrity. There are worse problems than the challenge of turning fame into fortune. If you see any value in this blog post, please share the post with any ten people you care about. Subscribe to the mailing list below. *Email Address Website

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With the rise of niche busters, one of the solutions to escape the long tail is to find 1000 true fans, says Kevin Kelly in his article. “The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply: A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living. A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They cannot wait till you issue your next work. They are real fans. The point of this strategy is to say that you do not need a hit to survive. You do not need to aim for the short head of bestsellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for. It is a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. Moreover, you are much more likely to arrive there. If you increase your group size by 33%, you need to add only 33% more fans. I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom.” — Kevin Kelly Hence, the new strategy is not to find audience for your music but to make music for the right audience. The micro-patronage model is going to be the future of art, says Amanda Palmer in her interview. “With technology and internet, we are going backwards in terms of how artists made a living 500 years ago. ” — Amanda Palmer If you find any value in this blog post, share this post with any ten people you care about. You can subscribe to the mailing list below. *Email Address Website

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“The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.” — Ernest Becker Jason Silva of Shots of Awe, in one of his videos talks about art out of pain. “This notion that tragedy can lead to breakthrough, can lead to rebirth, that the instances of suffering in our lives can actually inspire us to make beautiful art is a sort of paradoxical ecstasy, that we can take our wounds and turn them into something larger, that we need not have suffered in vain is a wild idea. We’re able to take that pain, take that aching rhapsody and output something in the world and make a contribution. Because at least that way we validate the fact that we exist. We affirm ourselves. We have no choice but to do so. In the face of entropy, in the face of death, to not say that we exist is to not live at all.” Our yet-to-be-released original single, Jalam is influenced by a tragic incident that happened in India - the Andhra farmers’ suicide. Do check out our original single, Meghangal composed for the short film, Path to Forgiveness. The song is based on a tragedy that happens in the movie. Watch the movie here, and the song video here. [UPDATE] Pain or lack of peace of mind does help one make music. We made some good music after a long time last week as we were feeling a bit disturbed. We decided to channel our negative emotions towards making music. This made us analyze our past behavior and look at instances when we had created some great music. An interesting pattern emerged out of that activity - we had created some of our best poetry and music when we were feeling down. This reminded us of the video in which an artist confesses as to how he feels guilty in using his wife’s death’s pain as an inspiration to create some of his best work. This phenomenon of making art out of suffering has been mentioned by Annie Dillard in her book, ’The Writing Life’ as follows: “A. E. Housman, almost predictably, maintained, “I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health.” This makes sense too, because writing a book, you can be too well for your own good.” If you find any value in this blog post, share this post with any ten people you care about. You can subscribe to our mailing list below. *Email Address Website

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A TED talk by fellow Milwaukee resident, Archit (Archie) Baskaran resonated with our philosophy about music and life a lot and hence, we decided to share a few pointers here on our blog. In his talk, Archie emphasizes on the power of narrative in music as he tries to strive to find a common link between disparate frameworks. Two important ideas emerged from his talk. 1. Cross pollination of ideas - Archie explained this concept through intersectionality of different music genres from various cultures and the birth of fusion music. This goes on to prove why everything in music is a remix. 2. Art in context - Putting one form of music in the context/framework of another is a beautiful thing as it helps find the similarities among differences. So, why does this synthesis of music matter and what does it mean in the grand scheme of things? Because cultures are not mutually exclusive. The way we lead our lives is an intersection of several different mosaics. Archie concludes by saying: Even if it is difficult to find unity within a variety of traditions, there always exists a manner by which we can find and transcend those borders whether it is the beat of our own drum or the sound of our own music. When we innovate to tradition, and when we try to take it in terms of a progressive standpoint then we bring light to the famous Chinese proverb that ‘you cannot clap with one hand, you need two.’ On that note, let us realize that our legacies lie within our capacity to harness chaos and create beauty from the mundane. Together, let’s make music. Watch the TED talk here. If you find any value in this blog post, consider subscribing to our mailing list below. *Email Address Website

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A few days ago, we wrote the first part of this series. In this one, we will share the perspective of the book, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson on the same topic. According to sociologists, hits are hard-wired into human psychology. It's a consequence of a combination of word of mouth and human conformity. As artists and fans, we tend to assume that hits are a far bigger share of the market than they really are. Instead, they are the rare exception. This is what Nassim Taleb calls the 'Black Swan Problem'. This assumption happens because we have a hard time putting rare events in context due to power-law distribution, where a few things sell a lot and a lot of things sell a little. While this notion holds true in the world of scarcity, the long tail of digital world has established a market, where the biggest money is in the smallest sales, that rivals the hits. This change is hurting the music industry for sure but, it's hurting the hit-making side more. That said, it's never been a better time to be an artist or a fan since the internet is now the ultimate discovery engine for new music. Afternote Musician and author, Amanda Palmer in her book The Art of Asking shares the story of her struggle to get a record deal. The story emphasizes on our obsession with the hit culture and familiarity with the music. One of the reasons her band struggled to get a deal was that it didn't sound like the then current favorite bands. Despite selling 25,000 records, her band was still considered a failure by the record label. The band was not in the hit-making business but, it believed in the connection it makes through its music. Since internet enabled us to connect with our own fans directly Amanda's philosophy about her music is illustrated in the following excerpt. A 2010 Princeton University study conducted by two economists concluded that money DOES buy happiness, but only up to the point (which turns out to be an annual individual income of about $75,000) where you have your basic needs met along with a few extra comforts. After that, the ability to buy happiness with money nosedives. Right: it’s not rocket science. We need to eat, we need shelter, a meal in a restaurant is nice. But there’s a satiation level, a happiness threshold you hit when you have enough. I don’t know of any such formal studies of working musicians, but I see the same patterns in artistic success. The happiest artists I know are generally the ones who can manage to make a reasonable living from their art without having to worry too much about the next paycheck. Not to say that every artist who sits around the campfire, or plays in tiny bars, is “happier” than those singing in stadiums—but more isn’t always better. If you see any value in this blog post, consider signing up for our weekly newsletter/mailing list below: *Email Address Website

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Adler and Doren in their book, How to read a book explains the steps to read a lyric poetry to derive maximum out of them. Poetry is a kind of spontaneous overflowing of the personality, which may be expressed in written words but may also take the form of physical action, or more or less musical sound, or even just a feeling. It can be made by anyone at any time, in a kind of solitary sensitivity session. It is words that are arranged in a more or less orderly and disciplined way. The essence of a poem can never be found in its first line. We must read it aloud and all of it to comprehend its unity. The very act of speaking the words forces us to understand it better. Your ear is offended by a misplaced emphasis that your eyes might miss. Moreover, the rhythm of the poem, and its rhymes, if it has them, will help you to understand by making you place the emphasis where it belongs. However, there is no guarantee that we will understand a poem even after having a vast knowledge of its context. Any great lyric poem must be read over and over, and it deserves many return visits. During vacations from a given poem, we may learn more about it than we realize. Aristotle wrote, "Poetry is more philosophical than history." It means that poetry is more universal and more general. A good poem is true in all times and places just like good history. Do check out some of our lyric poetry here. If you find any value in this blog post consider subscribing to our mailing list below. *Email Address Website

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Drummer John O.Reilly in his book, The High Paid Musician Myth talks about the importance of creating a passive income source for musicians. He lays down some ideas as to how musicians can make income outside of playing gigs since the music business is at a decline. He starts off by saying relying on music as the sole source of revenue is a broken business model. The idea of paying for music to this generation would be like asking them to pay for breathing unless of course you shut it off. It ain't gonna happen, not in my lifetime, and maybe not even yours, or your children’s. He goes on to make a case for increasing intrinsic value of musicians using the Rolls Royce v/s BMW as an example. Practical Value + Intrinsic Value = Total Perceived Value. Practical value is the thing that you do; you play or sing as well as or better than any other high paid hired gun out there. All things being equal, intrinsic value is the unseen perceived value that’s created mostly by positioning and promotion. The differences are largely cosmetic. Increasing your intrinsic value will do two things: it’ll increase your profitability and keep you in demand. The author suggests specialization as a way to increase the intrinsic value of musicians. Another suggestion is to start a business outside of the music industry. However, the author asks musicians to avoid any brick and mortar business such as rehearsal/recording studios and physical locations for music lessons because the cost of failure is enormous. A good starting point would be diversifying musicians' business interests by going for the low hanging fruit such as information business and online courses. The great thing about starting a business online is that it allows you to fail fast, pick up the pieces, and start over while learning from your mistakes. Since we are musicians, we know all about failure. The author argues that being a product creator, at the right timing, adds more value than being just a songwriter. Also, as musicians, we must learn to see things instead of merely looking at them to position ourselves in the marketplace. One way to do this is to focus on something that is not common knowledge and to build a mailing list of prospective fans. Additionally, musicians must learn how to problem-solve by asking the right questions, in order to thrive. “The quality of our lives is directly proportional to the quality of questions we ask.” — Tony Robbins When you ask quality questions of importance, you'll get quality answers. It really is that simple. Despite the decline in the music business, the author encourages musicians to chase their musical dreams. Listen, we all seek fortune and fame at some point in this business. If you're going to pursue a career in the music industry, shoot for the top, don't fall into the trap of, “I just want to make a living at this, and I'll be happy.” Don't let that stop you from going for it though because it's a great life. You get to see things, do things, experience things that people who aren't in your position will never experience in their lifetime. The book also has some relevant quotes from other popular writers in this context. “You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.” — Elizabeth Gilbert “Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.” — Albert Einstein “Whoever plants a tree, winks at immortality.” — Felix Dennis The author concludes by leaving us with some food for thought. I was recently at an informal gathering of friends when I was asked by someone whom I'd never met before what I did for a living. I told him I'm a professional musician, at which he sort of scoffed. Sensing the challenge, I asked him what he did for a living, to which he cheerily replied, “I work on Wall Street.” I then told him I could learn his job in 90 days or less, but it would take him a lifetime to learn mine. If you find any value in this blog post, consider signing up for our weekly newsletter below. *Email Address Website

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This is how a creative human works. Collecting, Connecting, sharing. Says, Amanda Palmer in her book The Art of Asking. Collecting dots can either be experiencing or emotionally and intellectually processing the world around us: the ingredients that go into the poetic metaphor or the wider and longer-term collection: the time it takes to fall in and out of love, so that you can describe it in song, or the time it takes a painter to gaze at a landscape before deciding to capture it on canvas. Some artists prefer to connect the dots from the already collected dots. For example, a novelist who takes five years to perfect a story or a musician who takes a decade to compose a single symphony to attain an excellent piece of art. All artists connect the dots differently, though. We all start off with all these live, fresh ingredients that are recognizable from the reality of our experiences ( heartbreak, a finger, a parent, an eyeball, a glass of wine) and we throw them in the Art Blender. My songs are personal and intimate; a lot of them chronicle my inner life. I mine the depths of my own experience and lay it on the page, sometimes naked, sometimes in costume. I fictionalize to protect myself and my targets (though I’ve still had to organize several apology dinners with ex-lovers to ask forgiveness). Most stage performers, however, are interested in the final phase: sharing, even though it's difficult. This impulse to connect the dots—and to share what you’ve connected—is the urge that makes you an artist. If you’re using words or symbols to connect the dots, whether you’re a “professional artist” or not, you are an artistic force in the world. When artists work well, they connect people to themselves, and they stitch people to one another, through this shared experience of discovering a connection that wasn’t visible before. Some artists even follow a monastic schedule. A balanced artist/musician knows which working style works best and when. If you find any joy or value in this blog post, consider signing up for our weekly newsletter below. *Email Address Website

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Many of us hesitate to share our art with the world thinking our art is not good enough to show others. Amanda Palmer in her book The Art of Asking argues that our art is the gift that we can give to this world as a contribution. Our first job in life should be to recognize the gifts that we've got, cultivate them and give them back to the puzzle of the world. Our second job should be to accept where exactly in the puzzle we are at each moment. The gifts can be in the form of love, time, and stories. By telling stories, we are essentially telling people that 'I understand you' and they understand you in return. Even though we cannot always give people what they want, we can always give them understanding. Here is a quote from the book that beautifully describes the point of sharing our gifts with the world. The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own. When the gift circulates, we feel the very essence of art and life not just in the words and songs, but also in our deep desire to share them with one another. However, sometimes, it's hard to understand the economics of gift exchange. We are comfortable as long as there is money flowing in any direction. People can understand a price tag, no matter what it’s stuck on. But some can’t understand a messier exchange of asking and giving—the gift that stays in motion. This could be a reason many artists always involve middlemen (a.k.a managers) to stand behind the cash registers. Giving and asking is not as easy as it sounds. The essence of crowdfunding shows that times are changing and it's high time we became comfortable in this artistic exchange of gifts. Sign up below for our weekly newsletter to receive useful articles on art and music. *Email Address Website

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Many of us have social media artist pages to share our work with the world. However, not many of us know the art of connecting with our fans and engage them effectively. This whole connecting with unknown people virtually is a weird business and many of us try to avoid it as far as possible, even though deep inside we know we shouldn't be doing this. We always tend to create a safe distance between us and anything that felt uncertain and anyone who could possibly hurt us. Amanda Palmer in her book, The Art of Asking shares an honest account of how she connects with her fans in an intimate fashion. Distance is a liar. It distorts the way we see ourselves and the way we understand each other. The best way to find light in the darkness is not by pushing people away but by falling straight into them. For Amanda, her fanbase is like thousand-headed significant other who she constantly, asks for help, and offers support. She also has occasional break-ups with her fans the way she would do with a lover. She always had to argue with security officers in the signing lines to not shoo away her fans for her to talk, and hug them after her shows. During such moments, there will be other musicians who hand over their CDs to her. I see those CDs as something more than just some local kid trying to get his band a break. They’re like a thank-you letter, a way for one artist to wave a flag to another, like two lighthouses; part of the must-never-stop, ever-circulating gift. And you do not refuse that gift, ever. Amanda believes in building the fan community slowly one person at a time to keep the ecosystem healthy. Her fans had let her couch surf whenever she had gigs in new cities. This has only made the bonds stronger and added to her creativity. There’s an inherent, unspoken trust that happens when you walk through the door of your host’s home. Everybody implicitly trusts everybody else not to steal anything. We leave our phones, our wallets, our laptops, our journals, and our instruments lying scattered around our various mini-couch surfing campsites. To my knowledge, I’ve never had anything go missing. I’m often asked: How can you trust people so much? Because that’s the only way it works. When you accept somebody’s offer for help, whether it’s in the form of food, crash space, money, or love, you have to trust the help offered. You can’t accept things halfway and walk through the door with your guard up. When you openly, radically trust people, they not only take care of you, they become your allies, your family. Looking at the weird shit people keep in their medicine cabinets. Cats to pat, who are at first standoffish then decide they love you at four a.m. when you’re finally asleep. Walls of Elvis plates. The recaptured feeling of having a sleepover party. Dodgy electric blankets. A chance to try on hats. Morning coffee in a wineglass for lack of enough cups. Children of all ages and temperaments who draw pictures for you. The ability to make your own toast. Record players. Wet grass in the backyard sunrise, where the chickens are roosting. Out-of-tune pianos and other strange instruments to fondle. Candles stuck to mantelpieces. The beautiful vision of strangers in their pajamas. Weird teas from around the world. Pinball machines. Pet spiders. Latches that don’t quite work. Glow-in-the-dark things on the ceiling. Late-night and early-morning stories about love, death, hardship, and heartbreak. The collision of life. Art for the blender. The dots were connecting. Staying in your own home can be corrosive and stifling, especially for creative work. The surroundings can smother you with the baggage of your past and the History of You. Staying in a hotel can be a blissful blank slate. There’s no baggage, just an empty space onto which you can project anything. But staying in a stranger’s home can inspire like nothing else. You get to immerse yourself in the baggage of someone else’s past, and regard someone else’s mess of unsorted books piled up in the corner of the living room. How crowd surfing is an act of bonding with fans? Crowd surfing is where this moment of trust is at its physical paragon, and best of all, it’s set to the climactic soundtrack of the art itself: the music. You stand at the lip of the stage, you trust, and you dive. Amanda also brings in this connection element when she differentiates her experience of doing house parties v/s official shows at clubs. An official show in a club or a theater is repetitive work: soundchecks, dressing rooms, testing lights. The environment is set up to do business, not art: security checkpoints; cash registers ringing open and slamming closed; bored bartenders loudly scooping ice into drinks, waiting for you to finish your screaming and swearing so they can clock out. At a house party, everybody improvises and cobbles together space; there’s nobody who doesn’t want to be there. Dogs and kids run freely, curfews don’t exist, strangers become real friends under the magical umbrella of a unique, shared experience. The music is important—I always play for at least an hour or two—but it isn’t the absolute center of attention. However, we can truly connect with our fans when we are not afraid of their judgment. If we are scared of their judgments, we will be preoccupied with the task of impressing them. One simple way to connect with fans is to maintain a permission-based mailing list where we keep email addresses of our fans and potential fans to communicate what we are working on a regular basis. UPDATE: Sometimes, this connection can go beyond an artist-fan relationship to more of a therapist-client relationship. Unlike the pre-internet days when there is an unnatural distance between the glamorous stardom and the fans, the internet era has opened up a channel that helps cultivate a more real and honest way to connect with people making it easier to reach their hearts. The below conversation between Anthony and Amanda in the book, The Art of Asking beautifully explains how songwriters are also, therapists in a way. Have you ever heard of a “sin-eater”? No, I said. Tell me. It’s when a local holy man, or a guru, takes on the sins and sufferings of the community by opening to those who are in pain and filtering the pain and suffering. He takes all the emotional trash and, through his body, through his love and capacity to stay present, clarifies the pain into compassion. Lots of religions have their version of it. Jesus does it for the Christians. A community confession-booth attendant, basically, I said. Ha. Basically. There were professional sin-eaters in England. A guy, for money, would come around and eat bread over the corpse of a dead family member to purge the body of sin before it went to heaven. It’s also the magic and mystery of what we do—when we nail it—in psychotherapy. We take on the suffering of others, digest it, transform it. And artists? I asked. Sounds like art. Yeah, good artists do it. You know, the “Artist” and the “Medicine Man” used to be the same guy. “Musician” and “Shaman” used to be the same characters, in a way. Our jobs aren’t that different, you and me. I’ve seen you in the signing line, I’ve watched you. Eat the pain. Send it back to the void as love. Can I ask you a question? Ask, he said. Do you ever have days where you can’t take it all in, and it just makes you too sad? Yeah, beauty. It happens all the time. Interacting with fans - reading and writing letters - can provide instant gratification, unlike writing songs. That way, Amanda's blog and writing actually started to feed her music. I am, first and foremost, a musician. Writing a book was great, but I desperately want you to hear my music so I don’t lose track of myself. I made a playlist of all the songs used/mentioned in this book, and I threw in a special “welcome to Amandalanda” page of my website for those of you who have just read this book without having any idea who I am or what my songs sound like. It all started with the Art Itself, and I hope the book leads you back there. On that note, do sign up for our weekly newsletter to receive useful tips and ideas to thrive as a musician. *Email Address Website

[cocoknottheori]

In his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton takes us on a tour of an artist's profession. He beautifully paints a word picture of a typical day in the life of an artist. We got inspired by his narration and made our own version of how a typical day looks like in the life of a musician. [If only, we could articulate it in a poetic language as Alain's. Sigh!] “In time, there will be no reminders of the rustic recordings of the song. The different clips of the buzzing raw vocals and other instruments will be merged into a standalone musical piece, whose parentage will be unknown. The past and future disappear as the musician meticulously arranges each note in a musical grid.” Here's our word picture of a musician's studio. “Despite its diminutive size and cluttered-with-wires appearance, the studio emanates a positive vibe. The years’ worth of labour can be felt in a quick listen for 4-5 minutes.” If you are a patient reader, continue reading for the original excerpts from the book. A day in the life of an artist. “In time, there will be no reminders of the fleshly origins of painting. The dark magenta stains on the artist’s fingers, the red speckles on his shoes, the glutinous green and blue smears on his palettes – all of these will be dissolved away, leaving the paintings to stand by themselves, as silent about their material parentage as a newly laid-out country road. It is not unusual for Taylor to forget to eat while he is working. At these times, he is nothing but a mind and hand moving across a square of canvas. The Past and future disappear as he is consumed by the tasks of mixing paint, checking its color against the world and settling it into its assigned place in a grid. An insect may crawl unmolested across his hand or take up temporary residence in his ear or neck. There is no more ten in the morning, no more July, but only the tree before him, the clouds above, the sun slowly traversing the sky and the small gap between one branch and another, whose resolution and completion will constitute a whole day’s work. Taylor is tormented by a sense of responsibility for the appearance of things. He can be kept awake at night by what he sees as an injustice in the color of wheat or an uneasy fault line between two patches of sky. His work frequently puts him in a tense, silent mood, in which he can be seen walking the streets of Colchester. His concerns are difficult for others to feel sympathetic about, however, for few of us are primed to feel generous towards a misery caused by a pigment incorrectly applied across an unremunerative piece of stretched cloth. His progress is slow: he can spend five months on a canvas measuring twenty centimetres square. But his painstaking approach is in truth the legacy of over twenty years of research. It took him three years just to determine how best to render the movement of wheat in a gust of wind, and even longer to become proficient in color. Whereas a decade ago he would have used at least ten shades of green to paint the tree’s foliage, he now relies on only three, and yet his leaves appear all the more luxuriantly dense and mobile for this reduction in complexity. Taylor found his teachers on museum walls. The great dead masters are generous instructors: it is not uncommon for one of them to impart a piece of technical wisdom to a pupil born five centuries after him. Works which ordinary gallery visitors might regard as inert entertainment are, for artists, living prescriptions. It was Titian’s Man with a Quilted Sleeve (1510) that taught Taylor how to paint leaves. Titian taught Taylor about the economy, about how to imply things rather than explain them. He taught him that a painting of a tree should be the story not of each individual leaf but of the dynamic mass of the whole. There are only five blues in Titian’s sleeve; the genius lies in the careful choice and judicious combination of these hues, so that while the lower folds appear flattened and empty, the upper ones manifest the presence of an arm so clearly that a viewer might almost think it possible to reach into the painting and grasp its bulk. Taylor defines Titian’s place in the pantheon with the greatest compliment he knows: the artist was able to look at a piece of clothing as if he had never seen its like before. Precise delineation is central to Taylor’s conception of painting. The sky is never simply blue, he explains. In the region nearest the sun, at the top of a canvas, he uses ultramarine, to which he adds increasing amounts of turquoise as his brush descends towards the earth. ‘For most of my adult life, I have worked on certain observations of the physical world. In particular, for the last ten years, I have been interested in changes of light as you look towards and away from the sun’ – a summation of ambition finely poised between self-deprecation and megalomania. The specialized vocabulary of biology is dear to Taylor. It is a sign of attention and of a community ready to honor details. Technical terms do not in his eyes insulate us from the natural world, they merely help us to cleave with greater fidelity to its most precious and discrete phenomena. He sees his art as born out of, and hoping to inspire, reverence for all that is unlike us and exceeds us. He never wanted to paint the work of people, their factories, streets, or electricity circuit boards. His attention was drawn to that which, because we did not build it, we must make a particular effort of empathy and imagination to understand, to a natural environment that is uniquely unpredictable, for it is literally unforeseen. His devoted look at a tree is an attempt to push the self aside and recognize all that is other and beyond us – starting with this ancient-looking Hulk in the gloom, with its erratic branches, thousands of stiff little leaves and a remarkable lack of any direct connection to the human drama.” Here is a description of an artist's studio. “Despite its diminutive size, it is a particularly pleasant room. There are few jobs in which years’ worth of labor can be viewed in a quick scan of four walls and even fewer opportunities granted to us to gather all our intelligence and sensitivity in a single place. Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party. How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object – whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug – and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see. Taylor knows that he is creating things which exceed him. He has a chance to get himself right on the canvas in a way that he cannot in the run of his ordinary life. He is not always the perceptive, patient observer. His social self is beset by frailties. He is nervous around others and apt to mask his anxieties behind an exaggerated laugh. Nor is he conventionally powerful. His journey has been dogged by peculiarly English discomforts. Achievements which might in other countries have come more easily – leaving behind a provincial, working-class background and asserting his artistic identity in cultural and intellectual circles – have been hard won and remain fragile. Yet when he is at his easel, he can, without arousing any impression of arrogance, say that he knows how to paint. At such moments, his peers are no longer just his drinking companions from the local pubs, and he is not merely the penniless son of a postman and a shop assistant; he is the confidant and heir of Titian.” Sign up below for our weekly newsletter to receive useful articles and ideas for musicians. *Email Address Website

[cocoknottheori]

Here's the first track from The Choir Board project. Presenting Spirit of Carnatic for you. The vocals were directly recorded from the live performance. Sign up below for our weekly newsletter to receive more music videos and updates on The Choir Board project. *Email Address Website

[cocoknottheori]

Yes, you heard it right. Our very own mundane everyday rantings could be set to musical tunes and there is a community supporting this initiative. How cool is that? Complaints Choir, having Finnish origins, is now, a global community encouraging musicians to organize their own DIY complaints choir in every city making ranting a communal and fun musical activity. If you are interested, do check their DIY tutorial out. You have got to check this video out to believe it. This is songwriting at its best. Sign up below for our weekly newsletter to receive interesting recommendations for musicians. *Email Address Website

[cocoknottheori]

Last year in August, we finally, visited a museum next door called the Les Paul's House of Sound. Here are some of the favorite quotes from the museum that we thought are worth sharing. “Once upon a time, there was a house. In this house lived a boy, who heard & saw the world differently than you or I. Even though his family had little money, he used the things he had around him. He was encouraged by his mother and inspired by his hero. He found others who thought the way he did, he was never satisfied with the way things were... So he took what he learned in his living room, & went out to change the face of the world. ” — http://www.discoveryworld.org/exhibits/les-pauls-house-of-sound/ “If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” — Thomas Edison “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work” — Thomas Edison “Technology is sometimes part of the problem. Innovation is always part of the solution.” — http://www.discoveryworld.org/exhibits/les-pauls-house-of-sound/ Here are some more pics from the museum. Sign up below for our weekly newsletter to receive useful recommendations for musicians. *Email Address Website