#vanessamcgowan

[tattletalesaints]

Yup, we’re sick of crowd funding too!

We’re at $5800 with 10 days left so it looks very likely we won’t make our goal of $20,000. And I totally understand why.

We raised $20,000 3 years ago for our last album, and since then we’ve traveled the world playing to hundreds of people, sold over 2000 copies of our first album, built a very strong mailing list and created, what I still believe to be, an incredibly strong bunch of people who believe in what we do and support us in continuing this career as a band.

But the thing is, people are sick of crowdfunding. I’m sick of it. I know most of you are. The way the music industry is now every independent band has to crowdfund to make albums (alongside all the people raising money for vacations, courses, products etc). Unless you have a wealthy family who can just give you tens of thousands of dollars, this has become the only real tangible way to do it, pre-selling the album and various fun merch items. Trying to be an independent touring band, living from the money you make on the road, it’s near impossible to keep up with the costs of keeping a band running… gas, pressing CDs, maintaining websites, paying for promotion… earning enough to stay afloat and make rent each month is a tall enough order without also putting aside $20,000 to make the next album.

I don’t want to diminish the incredible support of the 101 people who HAVE contributed. We sincerely appreciate you pre-ordering something before it even exists, and want you to know how much that vote of confidence does for us, besides the financial help it affords us. But when it comes down to it, it’s highly unlikely at this point that we’ll make our goal. So what happens? Why did we go for $20,000 if we could make this with less? We can’t. So we’ll take out a loan for the shortfall and spend the next 5 years paying it off which, because I’m being completely honest here, is going to be incredibly difficult and put an even greater financial burden on a business which, at this point, is barely staying afloat.

You’re not supposed to admit these things. You’re supposed to present an “everything is great! we’re killing it!” facade because, you know, everyone says that people like to get on board successful wagons… but the reality of the situation isn’t that all the time. We love playing music together. We’ve been incredibly lucky to find in each other another musician who’s musical voice inspires us and creates a sum-is-greater-than-the-parts musical connection.  We work incredibly hard to write the best songs we can. Surround ourselves with the most genuine, talented and inspiring musicians we can. Since moving here from New Zealand we’ve dedicated everything we have to Tattletale Saints. But it’s hard. Part of the reason I stopped writing blogs is that every time I sat down I felt like all I had to say was, this is hard. It’s worth it, because we feel like we have something as a band worth pursuing, but at times it’s really, really hard.

We started pre-production yesterday with Josh (Kaler, who’s producing and engineering this album) and I couldn’t be happier with how things are happening musically. Having him oversee and guide this album is such an exciting thing and I truly believe we are going to come out with an album to be incredibly proud of, and that is a huge step up from our last. This album represents Cy’s growth as a songwriter and guitarist (he is truly killing it on electric guitar these days), my development as a vocalist and bassist, the new sound of the band with drums and electric guitars - something that we are both so excited and inspired by, the influence of living and working out of Nashville surrounded by all these amazing musicians and bands.

Moving to Nashville was the first giant step for us as a band, and though it has been the most challenging 18 months of my life personally, I’m so happy we took that step. This album is the next, and it is both exciting and terrifying in a way that I just have to keep telling myself ALL the best most valuable things in life are.

Vanessa

www.tattletalesaints.com/indiegogo

[tattletalesaints]

Music, music, music

It’s Monday afternoon here in Nashville and the fact that I’m writing my Friday blog entry now is testament to the incredibly busy weekend I had. Since Cy and I are now in the USA on O1 VISA’s, and are legally entitled to work with other bands, we’ve been focused on getting ourselves a little more established in the Nashville scene - both for work reasons and because playing with other people helps inspire us creatively for Tattletale Saints.

On Friday night I played my first show with Modern Inventors, new friends who moved to Nashville at the end of last year just as I was heading back to New Zealand for the holidays. Their first gig in Nashville, and my first gig with them,  was at Mercy Lounge opening for The Revivalists. It was actually a pretty big gig to play as our first together - it’s a big room and, though we were opening, the crowd was really full when we started. We’d had all of about a 7 minute sound check, so I wasn’t feeling incredibly comfortable with the sound on stage, but despite that it was really fun and the crowd was incredibly receptive to the band. I’m playing electric bass and singing backing vocals and, though there is definitely a commonality in influence and sound between Tattletale Saints and this band, it’s been fun playing electric bass and doing something that heads in a more rock/pop direction occasionally. I’ve also really enjoyed not being in charge of anything and just turning up to do my job and play as best I can - being both the band as well as the management certainly adds a constant level of stress to playing shows that you don’t realise until there’s some respite. Also playing in the band was Alex Wong who is a producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He was playing drum set, dealing with click tracks and also triggering sounds using an SPD-S pad which definitely puts the multi-tasking required to sing and play bass into perspective. He’s a great drummer though and part of a nice scene of people who are relatively new to town that we’re finding ourselves falling in with.

On Saturday Cy and I played at Fat Bottom Brewing with Rachel Baiman, half of our long-time touring buddies 10 String Symphony. Rachel is one of my favourite people and I love when we do shows for her solo project. It’s a really eclectic mix of folk, pop and fiddle music that somehow totally comes together and works really well. I have no idea what I’m doing on the Scottish tunes we play but it’s so much fun and I think I feel the Scottish McGowan bloodlines stirring when we play those sets.

After that I went downtown and played my first Nashville Broadway gig. It was at The Wheel with The Date Nite band I mentioned last time (led by Zach Ryan and Shane Tutmarc). The NRA convention was happening (yay guns!) and lower Broadway was closed off to cars and swarming with people when I first arrived to start playing at 10pm. Lower Broadway is a fun hang sometimes, just last week a few of us went down and did the tourist thing for a laugh. And of course there’s always great musicians playing at Robert’s and a few of the other better venues, but there’s an element to the tourist vibe that reminds me of what I hated about living in Las Vegas. We played 10pm-2am with no breaks and I tell you, I think it’s one of the physically hardest gigs I’ve ever done. Growing up playing in Queen City Big Band I played 4 hour dance gigs, which were hard work, but we still took breaks! Close to 4 hours straight with only one break to use the bathroom while Shane kindly played bass on a couple of songs left me totally and utterly destroyed. It was with Nic Wiles on drums and we had fun playing all the rock n roll songs The Date Nite band is becoming known for. I sang lead on a couple too and I realised part way through singing Bonnie Raitt’s “Angel From Montgomery” (actually written by John Prine) that singing one of my favourite Bonnie Raitt songs, in a honky-tonk, in Nashville, may have been a dream I didn’t realise I even had until it was coming true. It’s moments like that that I really realise how far I’ve come since London days when Cy could barely get me to sing backing vocals with him.

( Modern Inventors at The Mercy Lounge - by Michael Weintrob )

[tattletalesaints]

David Rawlings walks into a dive bar...

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here. Starting over again in yet another city and giving up the years of contacts, work, bands, friends I’ve built up in every previous city I’ve lived. This is the 4th time I’ve started over again, moving countries to pursue study, love, music or a mix of all. And when times get especially tough I’ll be wondering why it’s worth doing it all over again, to be based in Nashville when I could live a much more comfortable, easy, financially stable life in New Zealand, and then David Rawlings walks into the dive bar I’m playing a rock n roll gig at, and I remember why this city is worth it. Being based in the place that so many of my musical heroes live is worth the step back in career, stability, finances we’ve had to take to move here. Playing that night in the smokey, noisy dive bar with The Date Nite Band (led by the impeccable Zach Ryan and Shane Tutmarc - check out what it’s all about here), I not only saw David Rawlings (producer, musician and half of Gillian Welch’s duo), but guitarist Laur Joamets who played on one of my favourite albums of last year (Sturgill Simpson’s, Metamodern Sounds In Country Music) got up and sat in with the band. Yes it was incredibly loud and no we didn’t exactly get to have some kind of amazing musical moment on stage, but the ability to meet and jam with these people, as well as just be able to check them out so frequently playing around town, is why Nashville is worth it.

On the days when I’m feeling weighed down by car troubles, taxes, insurance decisions and the overwhelming feeling that I’m failing at life by how frequently I have to turn to my (generous, kind, wonderful) mother for financial help - I have to trust that being here, moving the band, moving our lives will ultimately be worth it. That the experiences I’m already having here, are worth it.

The last few weeks Joe Pisapia, who produced our new single I Did This To Myself, has been playing a residency at The Five Spot. I managed to get along twice and the total creativity that was pouring out on stage was wonderful to witness. He surrounded himself with fantastic musicians and basically just let rip. His energy on stage is so un-self-conscious and so genuine. So un-pretentious. I love that in this town where, granted, there are many douche-bag singers who are trying to be the next “big thing” (whatever that really means) with no regard for creating anything truly beautiful or genuine, we’ve managed to fall in with some amazing people who are all about the exact opposite. It was amazing to be at The Five Spot, watching Joe and his band perform their fantastic songs, surrounded by wonderful friends who are also fantastic musicians and songwriters… all for $7 entry.

Here’s a song that Joe wrote called Sing It Loud, recorded by KD Lang on the album he produced of the same name. Last night he described it as being about his niece and the joyfulness she had as a child, that he hoped she never lost, that he wished we could all retain. The whole album is awesome, Cy and I both had it on heavy rotation on our headphones on the last tour. Video - KD Lang, Sing It Loud  

Check out Joe’s version of the song and his whole album (art work above) here https://joepisapia.bandcamp.com/album/nightvision

At the end of last year we met Aaron Tosti from new Nashville based music licensing company Levelo at The Five Spot. We had just played a set with Jamie on drums and Aaron approached me saying that he’d loved it and did we have anything recorded that he could check out. I was a few beers into the night and my first reaction was a dismissive, yeah right - like this is going to go anywhere. I left him sitting at the bar, went outside for a while to talk to friends, honestly forgot all about getting him an album and only barely remembered to grab one and find him before he left for the night. I assumed that it was a wasted $4 (or however much they cost per unit here) giving him an album, but a week or so later we were emailing and discussing Tattletale Saints joining the Levelo family. Aaron has been playing drums for the rock n roll band I’ve been playing with the last few weeks and now that I know him a little better I was pleased to regale him with the story of how close I’d been to writing him off as another one of those big-talk goes-nowhere encounters. I’m not exactly sure why I was so quick to assume he was all talk and it was a waste of time. It wasn’t anything to do with him or the way he approached me. Aside from it possibly being the beer, I think it’s maybe just that I’m so used to having to do all of this ourselves, so used to fighting so hard for everything we do and achieve, that I just assume that nothing really great will fall in our laps. But Levelo is great, and I’m very glad I gave him an album that night. Check out our Levelo artist page here.