We plan to track the 14 song album over the course of two months during winter 2010/11. Being that our musical style combines bluegrass with film-like soundtrack/scores, we require several hire on musicians to perform the symphonic sounds we are aspiring for. On our first album, we had a very talented harpist, french horn, oboe, clarinet, flute, trumpet, trombone, and bowed contrabass players. We are hoping to continue through that vein of style and so most of the budget would be going toward adding all the extra instrumentation. Essentially we require a small symphonic orchestra to complete our vision of this next album.
In addition, the budget will go toward other production costs, including several weeks of mixing engineering in post.
We are also hoping to really have the time to create, like our first one, a pure and organic album. We don't use auto tune on vocals and we don't quantize instrument performances. We take the time to get take after take until we are happy with it. And we believe that creates much more of an honest sound that is missing these days in the music industry. So this also requires a bit more time in the studio than normal and a lot more attention and devotion to detail.
This band/project have released to me, clearly the best record of 2010 in Epilogue Well now they are working on their 2nd record and are looking to do as much as they can with it budget-wise (as Jessy says in the video, he mentions more or less having to sell everything he could to fund the 1st one).
28 Days, $8,000.
kickstarter.com link
I just pledged $25. When I win the Powerball one of these times, I imagine my pledge will go up ;)
So I've shameless-ly plugged that in as many spots as I could, although possibly more to follow.
But in being totally honest with this. For one, I have seen a handful of projects use Kickstarter:
-The Age of Rockets
-Water & Bodies (twice, one successful, one not)
-Kevin Moore
-Field Mouse (aka Rachel Browne)
none of them I don't recall had not only that high ($8,000) of a GOAL. But also none of them had that short of a expectation as well (28 days or 1 month in effect).
I guess while I obviously hope they meet that goal and in that short of time, I am not expecting it. Stranger or more surprising things have happened. I believe Water & Bodies original goal was $5,000 and it was maybe 2 months. And they possibly were helped by the following they already had from Kaddisfly at least. Although the counter argument to that point is The River Empires has a following from Falling Up. But the number of listeners on last.fm for example doesn't totally support that really
(355 listeners as opposed to the 110,000 on Falling Up's last.fm ..which honestly, that is rather baffling. Forget The River Empires reaching widespread/mainstream success, that is a huge number of fans that haven't caught on to them. The only reason behind that might be the fact Falling Up is kind of molded in the Christian Rock genre/scene and TRE are not. But it still doesn't add up).
So, we'll see in 4 weeks what happens. If they don't make their goal, I hope they consider setting up another, maybe more realistic goal soon after. How about $3,000 and 60 days? Baby steps may become more effective.
I do wonder why I haven't seen Casey Crescenzo talk much about TRE's. Why? maybe he has and I haven't seen it. Or maybe he feels it's Jessy's thing to promote? I dunno, but with 4 weeks to raise $8,000, I would think any and all the help it can get would make sense. I also wonder if spreading the word to people who are into music like Sufjan Stevens and The Decemberists namely might be an untapped resource. But who knows.
