Spring 2023: March 13th
It’s been almost a year since my first NFT sale. Amazing how quickly it’s flown by. It has been a time of discovery, experimentation and a lot of art. So why am I here? What am I looking for? What does this space hold for a middle-aged producer and songwriter who comes from the traditional music biz, armed with a bunch of Grammy nominations, a Latin Grammy win, and songs and albums that have been heard by millions of people?
Let’s start with how I found Web3. For that, we have to go back to my college football days, when I sustained numerous injuries, from daily bumps and bruises to mild concussions, to a left knee injury that I barely noticed at the time. It took me thirty years, but I finally succeeded at tearing my left meniscus completely, and I ended up on the couch for a week awaiting surgery. After burning out on my unplanned Netflix-and-chill time, I remembered something SassyBlack had told me to look into. I met Sassy because I co-chair the Songwriters & Composers committee for my local chapter of the Recording Academy, and one of the first things my co-chair, Sue Ennis, and I discussed was setting up some fun co-writes to kick off the committee's inaugural year. During a conversation with Sassy about collabing, she mentioned she was busy prepping for a couple NFT releases. After peppering her with the usual, “What are NFTs?”, “Why would anyone pay for that?”, “You’re kidding, Twitter?” and many more of the typical noob questions, I did what most people do: file it away on a mostly forgotten to-do list. But lying there captive on the couch, I remembered her telling me about Discord and this weird phenomenon of people talking on Twitter. I lurked in a couple Spaces and though I didn't understand half of what was being said (or any of the acronyms), I was hooked.
I kept showing up, at first only as a listener. I realized I eventually had to face a long-standing hurdle: my intense fear of public speaking. Though no one seemed to know (or they were too kind to tell me), I was a mess at first. Just pressing the “request” button on the bottom left would make my heart race, and unmuting to speak would cause me to shake and start sweating. The first Space that started giving me more confidence was one hosted by NiftySax and Fifi Rong, specifically one they held for introverts. Thanks to Nifty and Fifi and others, I’ve overcome a lot of that fear and even spoken at 3 live events in the past year. I’m still an introvert, but it has been life-changing. The generosity of the community has been both incredible and, since I come from the very cutthroat and competitive music biz, surprising. I guess because there are so few people here, it behooves us to help onboard as many of the curious as possible. Spaces is how I met a lot of artists with whom I started collaborating shortly after. One of them, Julia Sky, showed up while I was testing an audio setup, hoping to improve my sound and ability to play pre-recorded material in Spaces. We ended up chatting for an hour, which somehow led to her convincing me to co-host a weekly Space with her, which then quickly turned into our collaborating on a Living Art piece called Driftin’. This not only became the piece that onboarded her to SuperRare, but was my first collab minted and sold.
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Julia helped break me out of my shell, and also showed me how easy it was to actually create and mint something. At that point, I was off and running. Though nothing had stopped me from experimenting in the past, it just hadn’t really occurred to me. I had always been working within the confines of the music business, and therefore creating with the sole purpose of getting placements. Of course, sometimes that led to writing inspired songs and working with some of the biggest artists in the world, so I’m not complaining, but Web3 woke me up to the possibility of making art for myself. Along my music biz journey, I had never stopped learning - starting as a songwriter and producer, but later adding engineer, mixer, and more to my bio, while exploring photography, videography, and during the pandemic lockdown, reviving my childhood love of drawing and animation. I often referred to these as my “useless skills,” because I only really got paid or was known primarily for my music, but now, here in Web3, I could start using all these talents. The past year has been all about experimenting, trying to figure out what works in this new phase of my career. To be honest, the pandemic had pretty much shut the door on the music biz for me; I didn’t feel the drive to create in that arena anymore after one of the last artists I’d been developing for 2 years got unceremoniously dropped by Universal. All of a sudden, I’m excited about creating again. It feels like a new lease on life.
I started recruiting the rest of my talented family. My wife Cheryl and I have been writing songs for over 30 years. It’s how we fell for each other, and it’s how we have provided for ourselves and our children, with some worldwide hits to show for it. Our first experiment in Web3 was inspired by photos I took and the idea of a moving collage, which inspired the song Midnight Rising. In between more releases with Julia came Cosmic Love with Griffter, Aurora Mendez, Cheryl, and my younger daughter, Kaia Mei, and RISE, a collaboration with photographer Trent North and 3D artist EOIN.
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The next phase of my journey started with my older daughter, Kena Rose, coming home for summer break from her studies at art school. Thanks to Weinbagz and Terra Naomi, I ended up writing the first full-length pop song with Kena and Cheryl called WHATEVER, using the Async Music Blueprints tool which combines both generative art and music. This felt like the first moment where Web3 tech and the art merged seamlessly for me, removing previous traditional constraints from the songwriting process and pushing the medium forward. Kena was also able to include her visual artwork for the drop. I ended up doing a couple of my own solo drops on Async incorporating my own drawings and even tried a free PFP mint. Another new friend and fan of Kena’s, Chikai Ohazama, helped us with an experiment on Foundation for Kena’s song Ghost. An AI 1/1 and an open edition silly animation of my Dude character rounded out the new year, and when Kena came home for winter break, we released her latest Async song called Remnants. All the while we moved drastically from a bull market, which I only briefly experienced when I first arrived, to the bear we still find ourselves in. Of course, that meant it was harder to sell, and pricing and edition sizes became more of a concern.
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Phew, sounds like a lot of art, right? But this is just a sampling of my actual output! I was also taking tons of photographs, animating some of them and composing accompanying music, making animated music videos for brand new songs, experimenting in the intriguing world of ai art (a lot of times with my mom, who is both a writer and potter), writing tons of new songs, and shooting traditional music vids with Kena. So why haven’t I released more? From the start I’d been hearing that things need to sell out and that scarcity is important, and from a collector’s point of view, I can understand that. Here’s the problem for me. I entered the music business thirty years ago, at a time when you couldn’t record an album at home, and you needed the approval and money from a label to make and release anything. When people here speak of gatekeeping in the Web2 era, I tell them it’s nothing compared to Web1, when you had to answer to A&Rs and the whims of label heads. Consequently, much of my best work has never seen the light of day. After a while, by trying to adhere to these ideas of selling out and scarcity, I felt that I had just substituted collectors for those gatekeepers I was trying to escape.
Now that I’m starting my second year here, I wanna try things a little differently. I’m gonna keep writing blog entries*, including industry stories (I’ve got some good dirt to dish haha), stories about why I was creating the things I was creating, and how that connects to the stuff I’m creating now and in the future. I am going to start memorializing some past hidden gems on the blockchain (the stuff I legally can!) that should have been heard or seen a while ago, along with my future work. I’m gonna formulate some sort of utility - access and some kind of gift if you collect all the posts of one “season” (this is the first from Spring) - I dunno, we’ll see how it goes. I’m going to make stuff accessible, maybe open editions for a limited time. Of course, if inspiration strikes or the right collab comes along, I’ll still make 1/1s or whatever else makes sense (see below). I may even start calling on some of my Web2 connections, and who knows, maybe I’ll get back to the Grammys, but on my terms, creating something I want right here in Web3. I’ll continue experimenting, learning, and adapting. Mostly, I don’t want to play by the rules I’ve been imposing on myself.
Lastly, to help kick off this first long entry (don’t worry, they will be much shorter in the future!) and in what feels like a full circle moment, I’m psyched to be dropping a new song with NiftySax called Mr. Nifty Sax with Nifty Music’s new Floor Drop protocol. It’s an innovative system that encourages trading and a very accessible entry point. Click here to sign up for the drop:
Join me on my journey by subscribing to my Mirror and Twitter (@genzomusic), and if you see or hear anything you like along the way, help support me and my collaborators as we all build together (psst, there will be a gift for those who collect full seasons of this blog!). You can also subscribe (minus the collecting) on Substack.
*Big thanks to cxy and Carl of musicnerdxyz for the push to start contextualizing my work.