this blog needs a new tagline. i'm taking suggestions.

Autumn does weird things to me. Autumn is the best season of the year, but I find that I’m generally the most dissatisfied with life during these months. Something about the changing colors of the leaves, the coolness in the air, rainy afternoons, darkness coming earlier. It makes me quiet.

Autumn is the season of time slipping away.I find myself listening to highly emotive music during autumn: Sigur Ros, Fionn Regan, The Frames, the new Radiohead album. This music seems to capture everything I feel, but I can’t tell you what those things are. That’s just between me and the song.

It’s raining right now. I’m sitting at a coffeeshop outside of Chicago. Radiohead’s song “Reckoner” sounds like the sun rising.

I wonder if artists ever give thought to the time of year that they release their albums. Music has a season. Well, I should say, that certain types of music remind you of certain seasons of life. Autumn is not the season of pop music. Autumn is for Sigur Ros, Fionn Regan, The Frames, and the new Radiohead album. This is when they should release their album. Matchbox20 should have waited until summer. But labels don’t think about that – they just want to get it out in time for Christmas so that their stock price goes up and shareholders are happy.

Work has difficult recently. With so much music, much of it sounding the same and mediocre, it’s easy to get jaded. Many of these artists are legit, and they mean what they write, but I’m so far removed from all that that it’s often hard to tell the difference. “Can you get me homepage on iTunes?” I don’t know… maybe… can you make your album not suck?

I think I’ll get some coffee.

I’m not sure what I’m passionate about right now. Some days it’s music, some days it’s climbing mountains. Some days it’s theology, and others it’s… well, whatever… I feel mediocre at a lot of things. I hate mediocrity. I have trouble staying focused on things. Time is slipping away with the autumn and I want to keep moving. I do not want to sit in a cubicle anymore.

I’m in Chicago this weekend helping Beau book some gigs with college campuses. I love talking to the college kids, I wish we had more time to do it. That’s hands on music industry right there.

If I could make some of these side businesses profitable I could easily get passionate about that. They don’t seem to want to be profitable right now. I might be stuck in the cubicle for a while.

I think we should move to Montana, live off the land, and climb mountains.

And study theology.

And write music.

Autumn just makes me feel empty. I’m happy that the colors are changing and that the air is cool, but I don’t feel happy. The rain and darkness do not make me feel sad. It’s just quiet and quiet equals empty, and I’d rather not talk about it. It’s good for a drive, across Indiana – long, flat, boring, endless Indiana, with the rain coming down and Radiohead’s song “Reckoner” playing asking the sun to rise.

Yesterday EMI Music, the company I work for, restructured and layed off 20% of it’s North American workforce. Crap. There’s no good way to say that. In Nashville we lost almost 30 people in our company of 200.

I feel like Treebeard, one of the Ents from Lord Of The Rings, when he stumbles out of the forest into a clearing and sees all of his young trees chopped up and lying on the ground, and says, “…many of these trees were my friends….” So sad. Work was just not the same today without them.

Some of them had been working at EMI for 10 to 15 years. Some for just a few months. It was like a tornado coming through… a few people here, a few people there, and then they’re gone. It was odd, awkward, and very very foreign. In the midst of it all I almost feel guilty still being here. I just happened to get hired into a division that was growing in sales two years ago, so here I am. As much as work frustrates me many days, I feel very blessed to still have my job.

The fact that the music industry is suffering, and that people are illegally downloading music, became very real yesterday. The growth in sales at services like iTunes is not countering the decline in CD sales. People are getting their music off the internet and burning it from their friends CDs.

And yesterday it cost 30 of my friends their jobs.

Today you should listen to…
Future Of Forestry “You And I“