Greetings Loyal Listeners,

February can’t come soon enough! We’re excited to play a mini-tour through Kentukcy with The Lost River Cavemen. Hopefully we can convince them to head north later this spring.

In the last two weeks we’ll head down to Texas to visit our friends and labelmates Church Shoes. They were kind enough to set up a show in Austin, and we decided to visit Tennesee, Louisiana, and Missouri on the way there and back – including return to Farmington.

But before February can start, we’ll be playing benefit concert to raise money to bring two Ukrainian orphans to the US. Our good friend Hope Arthur will be there. If you haven’t heard her new EP, you badger her until she finds you a copy.

01/27 Fort Wayne, IN Pint N Slice w/ Hope Arthur

02/02 Lexington, KY Green Lantern w/ Lost River Cavemen
02/03 Richmond, KY Paddy Wagon w/ Lost River Cavemen
02/04 Bowling Green, KY Tidball’s w/ Lost River Cavemen

02/12 Chicago, IL Quencher’s Saloon

02/21 Louisville, KY Hideaway Saloon
02/22 Memphis, TN P and H Cafe
02/24 Austin, TX Skinny’s Ballroom w/ Church Shoes
02/25 Dallas, TX Double Wide Saloon
02/28 Katy, TX Dunn Bros
02/29 Lafayette, LA Artmosphere
03/03 Farmington, MO The Vault

Anyway, we’re sitting here in a warm but cloudy Tennessee and thinking of our freezing friends back north. Time to finish these coffees and put some Etta James on the stereo, I think.

Not long ago now we finished our longest tour to date. Nine days, eight shows. We swung through Michigan, drove out to Kansas and Nebraska, and returned via Indianapolis. If the others are like me, then we caught a giddy second wind towards the end and the last few days felt like we’d only just left. It was a success by our own standards, but we also know it hasn’t made us pros overnight. In fact one of the reasons I can’t wait to do it again is so we can apply the lessons we learned.

This has been one of the bigger differences between End Times and the other bands I’ve been in. If we’re doing the same things we did last month, we feel unsatisfied. We make as many mistakes as anyone, but within a day we’re saying to each other “next time, lets try it this way.” We’re always asking “what’s next?” even in the face of failure.

A few days after returning I listened to Merlin Mann’s 2009 presentation “With All Due Respect to the Seduction Community” for what must have been the fifth time. The presentation is about creative projects and the barriers that stand in the way of starting a new one. I highly recommended it for anyone who’s been meaning to get to work on a project, whether it’s an album, a novel, software, or some fantastic experiment in knitting. The last few times I listened to it, I heard it in relation to songwriting and it was helpful. But this time – because of where my mind already was – I heard it in relation to touring and tour-planning. Read that way, it sends a very clear message to every band out there.

You have what you need to book a tour right now.

It might be a 30 date cross-country tour. Or maybe a 75 date European affair. But more likely it will be two or three days through towns within a five hour drive from your home. The length doesn’t actually matter because at some point you will have to go “from zero to something,” as Mann describes it. Psychologically, it’s the hardest step to take, but what most don’t realize is that it’s identical to every other step you’ll take on your way.

There will always be a gap between what you’ve done and what you need to do next.

The difference between the people struggling to start and the people at the level the non-starters aspire to is that the pros have accepted that they’re forever blindly taking steps into the beyond, that they’ll never know everything. They’ve accepted that they’re going to suck sometimes.

Sometimes projects fail. Some novels will never be published. Some tours lose money. But a pro doesn’t let that get in the way. Success isn’t doing it right once on accident; success is trying again and again and again. To keep moving forward, you’re always going to have to take steps you’ve never taken before. Going to from zero to something feels like a huge undertaking, like an act of creation fundamentally different from anything else you’ll do, but ultimately it’s no different in nature than going from that something to a bigger, better something.

In the accompanying blog post, Mann lists some of the fears that keep him from starting.

• Fear of Apathy. “I can’t start this until I’m positive the work will never become dull or difficult.”
• Fear of Ambiguity. “I can’t start this until I know exactly how it will turn out (as well as the precise method by which I’ll do it).”
• Fear of Disconnection. “I can’t start this until I’m totally up-to-date and current on everything.”
• Fear of Imperfection. “I can’t start this until I know the end product will be flawless.”
• Fear of Incompletion. “I can’t start this until I’m already done with it.”
• Fear of Isolation. “I can’t start this until I know making it will never be lonely.”
• Fear of Sucking. “I can’t start this until I’m already awesome at it (and know that even horrible people whom I dislike will hail me as a genius).”
• Fear of Fear itself. “I can’t start this until I’m guaranteed that making it will never be scary.”

I think all of these can apply to a band who wants to hit the road but hasn’t yet. I know I’ve felt each of these while doing End Times’ booking. I wish there was a simple solution to dealing with these fears, but the list includes some legitimate concerns. The issue is that if you want to get started, you have to let go. You have to be ok with sweeping the project under the rug at the end.

This is an exciting time in music because we the artists have the power to make things happen. But it means continuously dealing with subjects with which you have no experience or expertise. You can read all the new music blogs’ advice on touring, but you won’t book one until you accept that failure is a possible consequence. Not having enough information about a venue, a city, a scene – that’s a part of touring. Just like forgetting your sleeping bag or not bringing enough socks. You will never have everything you want before it’s time to take the next step.

So if I have any advice, it’s to focus on one thing at a time. Do your research, but not too much at once. Target one city and learn about each venue there. Or scope out one band you’re envious of and study the route they take through your region. The point is to keep things incremental. It’s possible you could bribe your way onto a side-side-side-stage at SWSW, but if you don’t know what to do after that, you’re still stuck where you were. You don’t need to book a show 18 hours away when you’ve never played one two hours away. You don’t need to book a weeklong tour over spring break when you’ve never played two out of town shows back-to-back. Find the smallest thing that you’ve never done before and do that.

You have what you need.

Lyndsy and Bart offered up some of the things they discovered in 2011 (along with friends like Anthony, Morrison, Greg, and Lee).

Lyndsy Rae Patterson
Lead Singer and Snake Charmer, The End Times Spasm Band
Favorite Read of 2011: Patti Smith’s Just Kids
Favorite Film of 2011: Nosferatu (1922), White Zombie with Bela Lugois (1932) and A Clockwork Orange(1971)

Bart J. Helms
Guitarist, The End Times Spasm Band
Favorite Read of 2011: Ernest Nagel, James Newman and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel’s Proof. The original came out in 1959, but I picked up the revised edition this year on the strength of Hofstadter’s recommendation. The book explicates one of the most important mathematical papers ever written with an enviable clarity.
Favorite Film of 2011: I finally caught Suzuki’s Pistol Opera (2001) and loved it.
Favorite TV Show of 2011: “Downton Abbey.” Simply amazing on all counts.

Read the full article.

Even as the band’s computer geek, I didn’t join a 20s/30s-inspired jazz band expecting to draw on that knowledge. A linguist with computational interests, I assumed I’d shelve those skills along with my other academic interests while I took some time to focus on music. Yet the problems of managing a band where multiple members are involved on the business side turn out to be very similar to the problems faced by a team of software developers, and one of the more admirable things about programmers is that they like to solve problems. Consequently, we’ve adopted a few geeky tools to help us coordinate and divide the tasks that make the band function. Here’s three of them.

Dropbox
Once upon a time. learning new music meant making copies of a demo CD, printing out copies of lyric and chord sheets, and doing it all over again when the first round were inevitably lost. Dropbox is a way to share files computer-to-computer or person-to-person via each computer’s file system. Now whenever I complete a demo, I add it to our shared folder and it appears on Lyndsy, Zach, and Eric’s computers the next time they connect to the internet. We now have access to everything related to the band, from finance statements to poster art, wherever we take our laptops (which is everywhere). This has been useful on the road for set lists and contracts.

(Now if only Dropbox for iOS would implement an Open Document reader.)

Workflowy
The name disguises an excellent list-making tool that’s hard to describe. So here’s a 45 second video.

We use Workflowy for a dozen tasks small and large, from basic to-do lists (press kits to mail, gear to buy, stuff to do at practice) to a fairly detailed calendar where we note cities and venues we’d like to play, when to do it, and who we’ve already contacted. We’ve actually divided up a lot of tasks so that each person is doing a small, easy-to-manage chunk. Workflowy lets each of us concentrate on just our part without being overwhelmed by how complicated the entire business of running a band actually is. We probably wouldn’t be able to run as smoothly as we do now if  we returned to bouncing emails back-and-forth.

Google Calendar
Once a show is confirmed, the details go into our Google calendar which syncs with my phone’s calendar. We know a number of other bands use Calendar to note days they have other commitments or to power their website’s tour schedule. We used to do both, but found we prefer Workflowy for the former (despite the lack of native calendar) and wrote our own code for the second. Still, pulling up the day in my phone’s calendar and being able to click on the address or phone number of the venue is incredibly useful and certainly scales up better than a paper daily planner.

We had a lot of fun performing for Downtown Fort Wayne’s Fright Night as part of the zombie walk. Thanks to DID for inviting us and big props to our Indianapolis friend Tanya for driving up and daring to swallow fire on the wobbily float!

Photos via Douglas Photography.

Everyone in the walk looked fantastic. There’s some real (creepy) creativity running through this town! Here’s a video of some lovely zombies via WANE News Channel 15.

Not sure how it happened, but we’ve managed to make up for our lack of Northern Indiana shows these last few months all at once this month. We’ll also visit The Lemon Grove in Youngtown OH, where we had a blast in July.

Date	City	Details
10/09/2011	Fort Wayne, IN	Columbia Street West w/ Peter Case
10/14/2011	South Bend, IN	Quincy’s Cafe
10/15/2011	Fort Wayne, IN	The Brass Rail w/ Dag and the Bullet Boys, The Dead Records
10/21/2011	Fort Wayne, IN	Artlink
10/22/2011	Fort Wayne, IN	Fright Night (downtown)
10/23/2011	Fort Wayne, IN	The Brass Rail w/ Alyosha Het, Slow Pokes
10/28/2011	Youngstown, OH	The Lemon Grove
10/29/2011	Findlay, OH	Coffee Amici

We’ll also perform live on air for 89.1fm WBOI’s Meet the Music’s fall fundraiser episode, October 20. It begins at 7pm.

Finally on December 17, we’ll join other bands at the Brass Rail for a tribute to Billy Bragg. We don’t know which songs we’re doing yet, but if you have any ideas, throw them our way.

While the SpasmVan cruised north along I-69 for the hundredth time and Zach and Eric bobbed heads to Miles Davis up font, Lyndsy and I sat in the back and talked songwriting. She described her pile of partial songs needlessly gathering dust, and I admitted to having such scraps of my own. I think most songwriters have a folder or notebook filled with the same. Each song consists of a good line here, a satisfactory verse there, or maybe just an idea expressed hastily. Each midway between the idea pile and the first demo. Whenever we revisit them, we find our last attempt to bring the song to a close too weak or – attempting again – we find ourselves unable to summon the right words.

I was in a good state of mind to talk about these things with Lyndsy because last week I forced myself to stamp “Finished” onto four songs for End Times. This always feels like a major accomplishment because there’s often a big gap between the beginning and end for me. Months even. Up to a year in some cases. Since forming End Times, I’ve tried to become more aware of my own songwriting process, and have come to realize that there are two major reasons for the delay in my case.

1. Waiting for Inspiration

The American notion of creativity celebrates the individual who’s spontaneous, who creates because they must, who creates in a frenzy of passion. We picture Kerouac writing furiously at his typewriter surrounded by coffee cups and ash trays. We don’t picture the years of editing that came after the first draft of On the Road. Sitting down at a piano to clock in at 9 am and force yourself to compose doesn’t sound like songwriting to most of us, even those of us who know how many songs really are written that way. I think our contemporary notion of inspiration is very demotivating that way.

When facing an unfinished song, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’re just not inspired today and that maybe you will be tomorrow. This is true on occasion, but generally it’s not productive. I find it really is better to make a genuine effort to write regardless of how “creative” you feel. If the day’s work doesn’t meet your expectations, it can always be unwritten. Still, even believing this, to put that first new word to paper is a tough hurdle, but I’ve found a few tricks to help.

Combining partial songs. We decided that the song “My Dear So-And-So” was missing something. After struggling and failing to come up with anything appropriate, I looked through my unfinished pile and found a song that was clearly going nowhere. Its themes were very similar, so I cut out the best parts and made them into the introduction to “My Dear.”

Make a thematic checklist. When a song is meant to be part of a much larger project (like an album or musical), it’s unlikely that the song fragment has touched on all the major themes of the larger work. Reviewing the songs I’ve been working on, I noticed two major themes developing, and when I next looked at a song missing a second verse, I realized it only touched on one of them. The second verse was written almost instantly once I figured out how to add the second theme.

Make a list of simple alternatives. I don’t know of a list like Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work for songwriting, but I wish I did. I’ve long tried to develop my own, but I sometimes find that keeping things like fake books works toward the same end when it comes to chords and melodies. When I have one idea and need a second to get a song out of it, I sometimes look at what others have done in the same situation. This often happens with bridges and B-sections, and I’ll just run through a bunch of familiar ideas in the hopes that one will work. My go-to lyric-writing equivalent would be The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, but I’m not afraid to compile a list of rough ideas used by a few favorite songwriters (I find Morrissey and Paul Simon are particularly good at starting in one place and ending in another).

Find a partner. This one feels a bit like cheating, but when you have three talented musicians sitting around waiting on you, it’s silly not to ask them for help. Lyndsy finished “Frustrating Baby” and “Even a Red Hot Mama Gets the Blues,” when I realized all they really needed was a fresh perspective. A similar thing sometimes happens with Zach (usually when I’m stuck on writing a bridge or B-section again). He’s good at throwing out such random ideas that they almost always make me think outside my box.

2. Waiting for Perfection

Having taught writing, I’m big on editing. Most professionals will tell you that’s where the real writing happens. I don’t think it’s any different for songwriting, but sometimes it’s the editing process that bogs down a song. This can happen near the end or in the middle, when self-editing arrests the progress of that final verse. Before words hit the paper, there are so many possibilities for where a song could go, so many ideas and references to be included. When I get down to those last few lines, the pressure to include all those ideas makes any choice feel inadequate. This continues into editing. I tell myself that if only I could find the right word to change, I could convey the meaning more fully or more compactly.

I’ve realized that a song is really finished when I start making changes like the above that I later revert. Perfection isn’t shifting stacks of papers around on a desk. When a song reaches a state where I’m waffling over something as small as a word, I know I need to declare it finished.

It helps that an End Times song will go through a few stages before it’s performed on stage and again before it’s recorded. While demoing it out, I can tell myself that “this isn’t real, this doesn’t count.” I hear a lot of writers do the same, and that this is why author Neil Gaiman writes his first drafts with pen and paper: each decision feels less permanent given that the work will necessarily be edited when typed for the first time.

I also find it beneficial to work on a few songs simultaneously. If I bring one song to the band, the fear that it might not work is powerful. If I bring three songs to the band, it doesn’t matter if any one of them isn’t perfect yet: we’ll figure out what’s wrong together, put it aside, and focus on the other two.

We have new t-shirts, designed by Jarod at In Case of Emergency Press of Bloomington, IN. We’re pretty happy with how they turned out!

We’ll have them at shows, but if you just can’t wait, you can order them from Chain Smoking Records in heather red or gray. (While supplies last!)

We try to support native Hoosier artists when we can, which is why we chose In Case of Emergency Press. They’ve done graphic work for Indiana-based bands like Murder by Death, Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s and Early Day Miners. You might enjoy looking through their portfolio of past posters, many of which are for sale.