It’s Late but I’m Still Here

Showing up matters. Even when you’re not at you’re best. Especially when you don’t want to do it. When it’s inconvenient. When you’d rather do anything else. Showing up in those moments is a testament to your resilience. It’s a reminder that you are capable of more than you may think. And you’ll always feel better because you kept your word. Your consistency is valuable. It makes you reliable, which is more than can be said for a lot of people. Keep showing up.

-J.P.

You Might Drown!

Happy Friday! Happy birthday to my Dad! Happy Virgo season whenever that started! (I don’t really subscribe to astrology like that I just wanted a third thing to be happy about because rule of threes u feel me?)

Anyway, I don’t have much to say this morning, just checking it tot keep it moving and remind myself again that you can’t take yourself so serious. Have more fun. Go do something fun this weekend. Then have fun all week. Keep it light. Get too deep, you might drown.

-J.P.

What’s in a Draft?

When I was in my last year at Chapman pursuing a degree in Screenwriting, I brought an idea to my thesis class that was maybe a little too abstract for me to even put on paper. My professor read my first ten pages and said “…this isn’t a movie.” I took that feedback and immediately transferred into another professor’s class - one who was more encouraging of the idea I was trying to realize. By the end of the semester I was only about 40 pages in, but The New Hippies were opening for Wu-Tang at the Palladium and I was chasing a dream, so my professor gave me an A and told me to keep going down this sacred path.

It’s been about six years and I’m deep in the woods. Turns out this path is mostly just uncharted territory. Or maybe I took a wrong turn. Who knows? The point is, I never finished that draft. There are concepts and ideas that I’ve held very close to me all along the journey but that draft lacked a structure that would make the idea palatable. I’ve since honed in the idea to try to imagine a more attainable goal and tell a clearer story. To be honest, it’s often been difficult and very confusing. I’ve started over about a thousand times and never made it past page ten.

When we went on our road trip in July, I had hopes to shoot some footage that I could make something out of, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t have the time, the focus, or even a desire really to pull out the camera all the time. I wanted to enjoy myself and take in new places. New experience is necessary to keep yourself fresh. Then, about three days before we were scheduled to get back on the road, an idea came to me. I was swimming - most all my ideas come to me in water, be it a pool, the ocean, a shower… that’s just where I think the best - and a framework finally made some sense to me. I put down the beats of the story in a note while I was still in the pool, and sat with it for the rest of the trip, letting it simmer.

Upon returning to LA, I set a new schedule for myself, reminiscent of the one I kept to when I felt the most productive last summer, at the very beginning of all this Beautiful Idiots stuff. I dedicated a two hour block to writing in the morning, and wouldn’t you know, after about eight days I had a full first draft of an idea I’ve been trying to get out of me for six years.

Now, the reality is that this draft is probably kinda shit. The bones are there, and I’m sure I’ll keep some stuff, but the most important thing was to get to the end. Now I can go back and find the heart of the story and hopefully make it into something that resonates with people the way it has with me for all this time. Very exciting.

-J.P.

Growing Pains in the Age of Saturation

How’s that for a title?!

Today The Prophet told me:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Amen. Now, in context.

I’ve struggled mightily this year to effectively break through the noise. There are something like 9 BILLION songs on Spotify alone, so even the 50 we’re doing this year amounts to less than .000000006% of the music catalogue on the app. That’d be pretty hard to find without strong marketing (and a sizable advertising budget, I’m learning).

Even though those odds make chances of success highly unlikely, the game doesn’t come without disappointment. There’s been a little light inside of me that dims momentarily every time I check the streaming stats.

The good thing is, it doesn’t last too long these days. The pain that comes with these relative failures subsides when I shift my perspective a bit. If I consider this year a learning experience, and year ONE in hopefully a long, fruitful journey, these are tribulations I have to go through in order to understand how to be more effective when we try again.

If I take it one step further, I can find some joy and wonder in the fact that I’m trying something I’ve always wanted to do, and I’m following my heart’s desire, like The Prophet implores me to do. I’m usually not all the way there, but I try.

I do have to say, reading Gibran reminds me so much of the Rumi poems I’ve read. The language is so similar and a lot of the lessons contain the mysticism of the Sufis. Which is why it blew my mind to find out that The Prophet was first published in 1923! Rumi dates back to the 13th century. There is a timelessness to Gibran’s lessons that I appreciate, and I’d like to believe that these beliefs can be applied to the modern world. We’ll see how it turns out.

-J.P.

Irony and the Recording Process

Today I recorded a song called Patience, which will come out later this year. It took me approximately 5 hours and 137 takes.

Also, I’m trying to get more creative with my titles.

-J.P.

Asking for Money

I really don’t wanna do it. But I might have to do it. But I really don’t wanna do it.

What’s that? “Get a job” you say? At what cost? Who has the time? I already have a job! I just need to get paid for it.

-J.P.

Rainy Sunday

I think technically it would be an understatement to call it a rainy day, and I don’t want to be insensitive to anyone who was seriously affected, but the weather isn’t really matching the hype today. Just a rainy day. Stay inside. Stay safe. Watch a movie.

-J.P.

B.I. Monthly

I had a pretty busy day today and I’m kinda tired so I’m just going to put this here because it came to me as a shower thought and we’ve been talking about ways to adapt and progress next year and I think B.I. Monthly could be a more engaging evolution of this blog and I believe it could be an effective way to build our community and our narrative and this is a run-on sentence now so I’m signing off.

G’night.

-J.P.

Songs For Sale

It’s been an interesting year for me on many fronts. I’ve been a witness to the changing of my own mind in many ways, and I’ve experienced a shift in my priorities to the business side of music. I’d love to have the luxury of waking up and concerning myself only with art. That’s not how life has gone this year. If there were someone content to tend to our business, or we had generated enough demand to warrant hiring a business manager then maybe I could slide back into a more purely creative role, but we’ve been left to fend for ourselves, which requires me to think differently and spend my time differently.

There have been lots of days where I’ve found myself debating myself over the value of our songs. It’s something that’s hard to put a number on, because it may feel a little arbitrary, and the range of pay is so massive. For instance, I read in a book that a big Hollywood Blockbuster might pay something like $250,000 for a license to use a song in their end credits sequence, but at the same time I’ve taken meetings with music supervisors who want to pay $500 for a library of songs to use multiple times throughout a season. Sure, things like resumé and demand have to be taken into account. You might be a great negotiator and be able to push your prices up. I’m just saying it’s hard to value art, and you have to value yourself in order to believe you deserve what you want.

I mentioned yesterday that I started reading Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, and it provided me with another timely quote from the lesson “On Buying and Selling”:

“And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players, - buy of their gifts also.

For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.”

- Khalil Gibran

It’s a nice reminder that however abstract our creativity may be, it’s a noble pursuit, and it deserves to be valued same as any other trade. It’s particularly funny universal timing because I also received a royalty statement from BMI today, where I can see reported earnings from the first quarter of this year, which includes the songs we wrote and licensed to the Wu-Tang show.

So, while my modern American greed may leave me with a desire to create more value, it is nice to know that there is at least some value to the work in this moment. We’re doing something right.

-J.P.