When the leaves have curled away with the last of summer’s life, when the fickle have abandoned the waste places, when there is naught but you and the ghosts of what was and what seems so far from returning, there is nothing to do save light the lamps of the otherland, stand vulnerable before the naked moon and rock. And should you feel alone—should you twitch for a moment toward the far-off windows of others and what warmth seems to lie within—you need not want. In the veils of night, they hear you from the other side, and they smile.
When Turkeys and Telecasters Collide
What happens when you awaken one morning to wonder, “What would it look like if I combined a Telecaster with a turkey?” In my case, you get this—a quick image created this morning as a Thanksgiving-themed social post for Royal City Studios.
Possibilities
Do you see your possibilities?
They say the world is a resonant realm of quantum possibilities—a canvass, if you will, that reflects and shapes itself according to what we think and say each day. If that’s so, I hope to awaken on more mornings in a Roger Dean frame of mind, as I was today when I cobbled together this quick fantasy landscape (appropriately called Possibilities) in tribute to both one of the greatest album artists of all time and the ever-present truth that we ultimately see what we want to see.
New Poster for the Classic Covers Cool Cars Concert Series
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to create a new poster for the final Classic Covers Cool Cars concert, a free concert event happening on October 6th at Royal City Studios in Guelph, Ont. Hope you like it. And if you’re looking for something similar, drop me an email at abmcreativeservices@gmail.com.
Gullwing Thunder: Event Poster for Classic Covers Cool Cars
Oy! I guess it’s been a while since I posted something. And thankfully, it’s about art.
What I mean is, as much as I would enjoy making a full-time living creating digital artwork, I’ve long made a living by writing, and please don’t misunderstand. I love writing, and I’ve been doing it professionally since leaving college.
Yet working with actual images has always been a prime passion. So, when Royal City Studios in Guelph, Ont., asked me to come up with a promo image for their Classic Covers Cool Cars concert series, I was thrilled to push back from the keyboard after a long stretch of writing (which accounts for my lack of recent posts), cue up some artwork and photo elements in Photoshop, and create this poster.
The car is a real car—a vintage gull-wing Porsche. I took the photo during Royal City Studios’ first Classic Covers Cool Cars concert on August 11th, 2019. After I posted the image, the owner of the car was so thrilled by the image that he contacted me for a version of the image without the text.
He said he wanted to print it and frame it, and in exchange, he’d give me a ride in his Porsche at the next Classic Covers Cool Cars concert.
Yah, it took me about a tenth of a second to say yes.
Real Beauty Has a Name (It’s You)
I may be alone in this but I find the approach antiquated and outmoded—and I’m not even the target audience. What I mean is, I find it bewildering that marketing shame tactics for beauty products remain after all this time.
If you’re not familiar with the approach, it basically goes like this: “You are flawed. You are lacking. You do not look the way that others look and you should be extremely frightened of looking older. But if you buy our product/procedure, you can escape your predicament.”
While I understand the leveraging of pain points in marketing, I’m also willing to bet real money that women do not enjoy being told they are fundamentally not beautiful as they are.
So for today’s copywriting project, I decided to produce a beauty-product message that says, “You are already beautiful just the way you are, and our product simply supports your decision to be the best version of yourself.”
If this message were to be produced as a real ad for a real beauty product, I would simply fade up the product image at the end and say little else.
Hope you enjoy it. Oh, and happy Easter! 🙂
Copyright © 2019 Xristopher Bland for the script and original soundtrack (“Absinthe”). All rights reserved. Royalty-free and CC0 video clips/still images adhere to all non-commercial usage guidelines.
Save a Noun Today (World Wordlife Foundation)
With near-daily posts about the decline of spelling and grammar, it occurred to me that words may be an endangered species. This copywriting project is a word-conservation video (done in the style of the World Wildlife Fund) for a fictitious organization called the World Wordlife Foundation, encouraging businesses to save a noun (and lost revenue from poorly written content).
For more information, visit https://abmcreativeservice.wixsite.com/copywriting.
Are You Signing Away Your Rights to Email Privacy With Your Music Site?
Royalty-free image courtesy of Wix.
I’ve done what you’ve likely done. With so many companies emailing out notices about revised terms and conditions, I stopped clicking through to read the revisions and just sent them to the trash.
However, something told me to click through the other morning to read the revised terms and conditions of a leading music website where artists can hire “top music pros” to get “great-sounding release-ready songs,” and I was shocked to discover that the revised terms included releasing my rights to privacy in any email correspondence with them, and let me tell you. The scope of what they were asking me to release was mind-boggling.
Before I go any further, though, let me assure you. As a journalist with many years of experience writing for newspapers, national magazines and websites, I can tell you that the normal rules and rights surrounding email correspondence are clear to many individuals and companies, and they follow them.
Where comments on social media and other public forums, for example, are the same as someone saying something in front of a crowd (meaning such people have released their rights to privacy through public declaration, and their words can be quoted and re-used by others), email correspondence falls outside of public channels. As such, people have not made a public declaration in anything they write and thereby have not released their rights to privacy. In order for someone to secure the rights to quote something from a personal email or use ideas contained within it, an individual must personally contact a sender and formally request such rights, and the sender always maintains the right of refusal.
The exceptions tend to be instances like sending emails (or actual letters) to newspaper editorial departments, where senders are well aware that their emails may be re-published (commonly under Letters to the Editor), and the act of sending an email releases rights of privacy. Beyond such instances, the confidentiality of personal email correspondence has always been implicit to countless people in all kinds of professions, even if they’ve felt constrained by such rights. And perhaps that was the impetus behind the website’s revised terms and conditions.
Although the company encouraged its users to send emails, the company (to its credit) gave users fair warning. All emails and communications sent to them, “including, but not limited to, feedback, questions, comments, suggestions, and the like,” came with the right for the company to freely use “any ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques contained in your communications for any purpose whatsoever, including but not limited to, the development, production, and marketing of products and services that incorporate such information without compensation or attribution to you.” All of this (and more) was declared publicly within their revised website terms and conditions.
Now the people behind the website may have felt that they had good reason to ask for such rights release. If a user wrote to suggest an improvement to the website, for example, the company could make that change happen quicker for all users without spending weeks or months entangled in negotiations about ideas and rights and who can do what. If the website is providing a basic free service (which many music websites do), and a user is availing that free service, then free use of their idea by the service provider may feel like a fair exchange.
The downside for anyone sending them an email was that, in wording their terms and conditions to cover every possible contingency, the company had given themselves carte blanche. The company could lift a quote from an email and use it as an endorsement. They could take someone’s knowledge, include it in a blog and post it as their own, and if someone gave them an inspiring idea, they could develop that idea into a product and sell it without giving a dime to the person who gave them the idea.
The irony of all this, of course, is that where many music websites have billed themselves as the heroic alternative to record companies, streaming services and other companies popularly vilified as being evil rip-off organizations that ask artists to sign away most or all of their rights, the evidence is that at least one music website is seeking the same.
The worst part is, you don’t even have to sign such agreements to agree to them. Many agreements simply kick in the moment you log back into a website.
Now I’m not in the habit of emailing music websites too often. So an outside observer may wonder, “Why then are you worried about email rights?” And my answer would be that the website did not tell me which specific sections had been revised in their terms and conditions. They simply sent out a few vague sentences informing me that they’d generally made changes. They left it to me to sift through reams of obfuscated paragraphs within their website terms and conditions to discover what those changes actually were, which naturally led me to think:
“If this website has asked me to sign away all rights to email privacy in deference to the normal rules and rights surrounding email correspondence—and did not make it easy for me to see the specifics of their request—what will they ask for next? Moreover, what have I perhaps already missed?”
Although the website’s email notification informed me that I “didn’t have to do anything” in response to their notice, I felt there was something I needed to do. I didn’t log back into my account and ditched the service altogether.
So I suppose the point of all this is caution. If you’re an artist signed up with a music website (or thinking about signing up), I encourage you to read their terms and conditions carefully, and if you don’t like what you read, you may wish to consider switching to another site whose terms and conditions do not include carte blanche over any personal correspondence with them.
Failing that, you can simply choose to never send an email.
Sure, many websites advertise themselves as being your best possible chance for fame and fortune, but there are plenty of music websites around with fair and equitable terms and conditions, and if you still don’t find one that suits you, don’t worry. The music business has been around for decades and will be around for decades more, meaning another music website will be along soon.
Are You “World-Class”? (You Just Might Be)
Royalty-free photo courtesy of the awesome folks at Wix.
You hear it all the time: “[He/she] is a world-class artist”—a term that denotes some elusive shining realm where only the steeliest of hearts dare to tread.
But what does the phrase “world-class” actually mean?
The term certainly has a history of arbitrary assignment. When I was a kid, for example, I knew a guy whom people swore was a world-class pain in the ass. Yet as far as I could tell, he’d never traveled much beyond the borders of his hometown. So technically speaking, he could only be called a local pain in the ass. Was “world-class” just about reach and numbers?
Though people tend to use fan numbers and music sales to bestow the mantle of “world-class,” such measurements have never made much sense to me because numbers do not change the innateness of something.
Here’s what I mean.
After Queen recorded Freddie Mercury’s six-minute song “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1975, record executives felt the song was too long, too weird and would never be a hit. Queen ignored all that and today, “Bohemian Rhapsody remains one of the best-selling singles ever produced and was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the #1 song of all time.
Now by the numbers of people who love the song, and by the sheer dollars generated by song sales, there’s little question that “Bohemian Rhapsody” is nothing short of “world-class” by how people commonly gauge it. But here’s the important bit.
Queen never listened to the those record execs and changed “Bohemian Rhapsody” before releasing it, meaning the song already had the innateness of world-class potential before anyone heard it, and the resulting numbers had nothing to do with creating that world-class-ness.
The numbers were a result. They were not a cause.
There are plenty of similar stories spanning all kind of fields, but I think you get the point of all this.
If someone ever tells you that your music is too long or too weird and will never be a hit, just ignore them.
Ignore them even if you’re not a musician but your passion is for something else.
You know your innateness. You know your artistry and value, and the simple fact is, you just might be world-class.
Music Versus Fake Job Security
Royalty-free photo courtesy of Wix.
“You’ll never make money at music. It’s a fool’s pursuit. You need to get a real job.”
Sound familiar?
If someone has ever told you something along these lines, let me share a heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring true story that will show you the real truth:
As well-meaning as such words can be, they’re also complete twaddle on multiple levels—and just may leave you regretting your decision to buy into such misconceptions but with little time to wipe your regrets away.
Sound too dramatic?
If so, I’m glad, because if this wakes you up and compels you to spend a moment reading this story, it may spare you from what my father experienced.
Back in the 1930s, my father’s first passion as a child was to be a musician. So he sat down at the family piano one day and started teaching himself how to play cover songs. However, when his father found out, he roundly proclaimed, “No son of mine is going to be a musician!” My grandfather saw any musical pursuit as not only impractical but effeminate as well. In fact, my grandfather was so threatened by the mere whiff of not being seen as “manly” that he literally went to his grave having never told his son that he loved him.
Now you may be wondering why my grandfather had a piano if no one was supposed to play it. Well, back in the 1930s, owning a piano was a social status symbol, like owning the latest iPhone today. Yet granddad didn’t have much use for a piano beyond that, and when he found out that his son was actually playing it, the tool sold it.
I can only imagine how much that impacted and hurt my father, or what anger he buried because of it, and the only way he could enjoy playing the piano was to do so in secret at other people’s houses. But he couldn’t last long under the Inquisitional eyes and steady pressure of his father to become a doctor, and God love him, my father tried and spent a year at medical school.
Trouble was, the sight of blood made my father sick to his stomach, and after he mustered the courage to tell his father that he couldn’t continue, his father expressed profound disappointment before shuttling my father off to become a foundry patternmaker—someone who engineers industrial forms used to make molds into which metal, resin and other material can be poured to make anything from machine parts to toothbrushes. And my father was great at it. While history does not record it, he invented one of the first methods for plastic mold injecting (which makes things like plastic iPhone cases possible today), and from there, he went on to become a machinist and quality control professional—all in the trust that such jobs would guarantee him a steady and secure future, just like his father had informed him.
Yet my grandfather hadn’t been some diviner of seer. He hadn’t owned a crystal ball, and if he had, he probably would have sold that too. He’d lived his life like the rest of us, mucking ahead as best he could while buying into beliefs of certainty because that always feels better than admitting that life is just one big unknown. He couldn’t foresee how technologies and economies would change, just as he couldn’t foresee that patternmaking would one day be replaced by 3D printing. So his “assurance” of job security was just a guess that became a starkly different reality for my father.
Jobs came and went over the years. Sometimes the bills were easy to pay. Sometimes they weren’t, and when times were extra lean during periods of unemployment, there was little in the fridge but powdered milk and bologna sandwiches. Up and down it went, always on a budget to buffer against rainy days and downright torrents until my father realized one day that for as much as his father had convinced him that he could never make ends meet in music, he’d barely fared better at a “regular job.”
Then something remarkable happened.
He decided to stop worrying so much and embrace a balanced life that included his love of music, which had never really left him.
Jobs were going to come and go. He couldn’t control the shifting economic tides or shortsighted corporate decisions that caused companies to go out of business and rendered the idea of job security as a little more than self-medicating hope. That didn’t mean he didn’t always work and study to be the best at what he did. Yet where he’d watched others consume themselves in such pursuits at the expense of everything else whispering from their souls, my father realized that such lives commonly ended with people lying on their deathbeds in shattering realization:
You don’t regret the things you’ve done in life. You regret what you didn’t do.
So in his 60s, my father re-taught himself to play the piano, and he taught himself to sing too. He performed with barbershop quartets at large and small shows. He also spent years performing at retirement homes around Southern Ontario while making enough money along the way to support touring and even finance a few recordings, and sure. He played “old folks” music, but he didn’t give a flying funk because it had never been just about the notes and chords. From the first time he’d placed his hands onto a keyboard and felt that calling and connection to something higher than himself, it had been about his soul, so easily sold.
My father played and sang until the end of his days. Even after his health failed and he could no longer sit behind a keyboard, he still sang—even when his voice was failing—and when they buried him, they did so in an urn of my father’s choice: a gold box fixed with a gold treble clef, wrapped in his favorite sweater as a final message to everyone that the constancy and warmth of what lives in your heart is the only real steadiness and security you’ll ever have. And while he arrived late to evidence the practical and arguably mundane matter of making music pay, he thankfully didn’t miss the opportunity to sleep within the grace of knowing that the price of playing or not playing music involves far more than fleeting dollars.
abm creative 