Well, here we are! The start of another new year. It’s traditional to reflect on the last year & to plan for the coming one. Honestly, I do this constantly. I may not look back an entire year, although sometimes I will look back as much as five years or more while thinking about what I should do differently or what I should do more of. I’m also not one to wait until January to make resolutions; I’ll do that as I go. If I need to change something up, why wait until the start of another year? Or month or week, even? I make the change as soon as possible and get on with things.

All that said, the new year is a good time to lay out a broad overview for the coming months, as we just had a nice break from the daily grind due to the holidays. Let me share some of my thoughts, plans, and hopes for the next year or so.

I hope this year you’ll be able to catch my band at a gig somewhere. I think I said that last year, as I had recently completed the search for a bassist to finalize the line-up for live shows. Then, just as I began the booking process, things changed. Rather than dwell on that, let’s just leave it at this: suddenly I had no bassist due to something unfortunate in his world, and I also was mostly without a drummer, due to something really cool for him. I recruited my friend Darren Moon to play bass and found Tallon Schwantes to play drums. This took a while, but the band absolutely smokes, and we have already started playing shows. If you’re in the Midwest, you really should try to catch us live.

We won’t be doing hardcore touring. Darren is actually a very skilled guitarist, and his main gig is with a band called Beyond Threshold, so we’ll be working around that a bit, and Tallon is about to become a new dad (yay!) and will need to be present for that. So, we’ll be playing perhaps 2 or 3 shows a month for a while. We may up that number at some point. For now, though, if you see we’re playing near you, grab some tickets & come rock with us!

I plan to get back to recording new material during the time between gigs. I’m struggling with what to do with the recordings, though. No one buys music very much any longer, and even with having my own studio, making a final product for release is expensive. Even if I plan to only release it to Spotify, I need to hire a bigger studio for recording the drum tracks, pay a mixing engineer, pay a mastering engineer, and spend money on copyright fees, distribution fees, and promotion. Unless you’re Taylor Swift or Jay-Z, Spotify won’t pay you enough to cover these costs, so I need a better plan than what I have now. Most people don’t even own CD players or turntables, so physical releases may not make sense, either.  It’s hard to know what to do. I’ll keep you posted as things develop…

I’ll continue to work on my YouTube Channel, too. I actually make a little money there, as opposed to Spotify, where I make essentially zero, so we’ll try to grow that a little more this year. Part of the YouTube strategy is to make videos that will be only for members of The Secret Club. Speaking of The Secret Club, we’ll be doing more Members Only things this year, because we want to see the Club expand & offering more exclusive content & events will hopefully make it more attractive to more people.

So, no earth-shattering changes in store, but definitely a lot of fun shows & videos & possibly some new music coming up, so stay tuned.  And by all means, if you’re anywhere near one of our gigs, please come rock with us!

Until next time, live well and rock hard!