Ever go through those periods where you listen to the same song over and over again, on repeat, until it gets to the point where you just associate that song with a period of your life?

I’ve probably listened to the Stones’ “Rocks Off” thirty times in the past two days. So many songs off Exile have specific memories associated with them, but five years from now when I hear “Rocks Off,” I’ll think of this summer, and what’s happening right now. (Could be a lot worse, right?)

I can back up through the past year or so and link certain songs to what was going on (not that that’s special, I imagine most people can).

For reference, here’s a list:

The Clash — “Death or Glory”
Elliott Smith — “Alameda”
Pavement — “Spit On Stranger”
Beastie Boys — “No Sleep Till Brooklyn”
The Decemberists — “Don’t Carry It All”

Also, if you haven’t read Keith Richards’ book Life, go grab it. Now. If I had a time machine, there’s no doubt I’d swing through the South of France in 1972.

Years ago, I used to live in downtown Boston just off the Common. It’s right in the middle of town, and I walked through it to get something to eat, go to a movie, or take the subway. I work in the music business, and month after month, year after year, we’re presented with new music. Some of it’s niche, some of it has the hopes of thousands riding on its back.

I remember at one point one of our record labels talking about a new band, LCD Soundsystem.

They’re a cool band from Brooklyn.
It’s a little different, electronic. We’re really excited about it.
It’s the kind of music that people would want to play at parties.

When the advance album showed up, it looked different than a lot of the other music we received. Dark green heavy cardboard, with an embossed mirror ball, and the band’s logo on the front. That’s it. It stood out.

Shortly after that, I had to take the subway somewhere. I always used a subway ride to check out new music. I grabbed the LCD album, transferred it to my iPod, and walked out the door. I hadn’t reached the sidewalk when the little yelp that kicks off “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” started.  Walking through the park and onto the subway, the song burned into my mind.  I don’t hear it anymore without flashing back to that walk, and while I’m not on the Common as much as I used to be, I almost always have it pop into my mind when I walk through.

Describing new music can be tedious, but it didn’t take long for the explanations to click. There was something instantly catchy and appealing about what I was hearing. A heavy, techno-ish beat, tons of percussion, and someone half-singing, half-talking over the music. A few falsetto squeals thrown in for good measure. I got it. I didn’t know James Murphy from the guys across from me on the subway. I never would have guessed that he’d remind me more of someone I’d play darts with at the pub, than a mustachioed Brooklynite.

Earlier tonight I drove into Boston, parked my car, and walked across the Boston Common to see LCD Soundsystem play at the Orpheum Theater. I had seen them years ago when their first album came out. I remember being struck by what a bandleader Murphy was on stage. Beyond singing, he was moving around, directing the band. He was a conductor. I loved the show, but the performance they put on now—years later—is in a different league.

From the first notes, the show is blast of lights, and grooves. Deep grooves. The stage was filled with vintage electronic equipment that would make Jonny Greenwood jealous. The band is super tight, with Murphy singing over the music, and whaling away on the percussion kit next to him.

I bumped into an old friend of mine from the Boston music scene. At one point he turned to me and said: “You know, we’ve been seeing shows together in Boston for fifteen years.” I know, I can’t believe it. “This is something huh?” Sure is.

It felt like it was 110° in the theater. People were dancing and dripping sweat. I was dancing and dripping sweat—and those are two things I generally try to avoid. There was a moment that I had sweat dripping into my eyes at the same time that the music was giving me the chills. That’s exciting, and that’s something that reminds you that it’s all worth it.

It’s really easy to be jaded about music.  I’ve seen a lot of shows over the years.  Only the best ones leave the crowd with a shared sense of euphoria when they walk out. I felt it when I walked out of the theater.  I felt it when I walked across the Common back to my car. And I felt it when those first notes of “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” came through the speakers on the ride home.

This is a new thing that I’m going to try here. Stories About Songs.  I touched on it here, and it got me thinking—over all the years and all the shows that I’ve been to, there are some songs, some moments, that stand out above all the rest.  Sometimes there’s a clear reason, and sometimes it’s a simple memory strongly connected to a song that was playing at the time.  There’s usually a story behind them, and I’m going to occasionally share some of them here.

—

One year ago today I was in Hampton, Virginia.  I was there to see Phish, and it was a big deal.

Five years after announcing their breakup, the band was back for a run of three shows at the Hampton Coliseum, itself a special place in the hearts and minds of fans.  This was a group event.  The band has gotten back together, but our band had gotten back together too.  Some of my very closest friends were gathering to take it all in together.

It was hard to have musical expectations in that situation.  Five years after a break up—fueled by apathy and (sadly) drugs—I just hoped to have a good time, and hear some of the music I loved.

As the first show approached, people got to chatting: “What do you think they’ll open with?” “Do you think they’ll play…?”, etc.  Unless you’re very familiar with Phish’s music, it’s hard to appreciate the weight behind any of these songs; why fans may groan when the band starts up “Bug,” but jump up and cheer when they break into “Tweezer.” The names don’t mean anything.  It’s what’s beneath the names.

For a band that’s so associated with improvisation, a core group of their earliest and most highly regarded material is based on long, composed sections of music. Sweeping. Soaring. Technical. Epic. The type of material that doesn’t lend itself to a lack of practice and a haze of pills. Some of these songs were pushed out of the rotation as a result, and the fans knew it.

One of these songs is Fluffhead.  The ultimate combination of old fan favorite and Sweeping/Soaring/Technical/Epic.  On the way down to Virginia, my friend Byte said to us “I wonder if they’ll bust out Fluffhead?”  We chuckled.  ”They haven’t played it in years right?” “Nope.”

When the time finally came for the first show to begin, the energy inside the coliseum was at an all time high.  This was it.  It may be hard to understand how much this band and this music means to people. Years and years of travelling, stories, frustration, memories, and special moments were shared with the four guys that were about to walk on the stage.  And while time had passed, and everyone’s lives were different now, this was a moment that really, truly meant something.

So what were they going to play, or more specifically, what were they going to open with?  Anyone, myself included, would have told you it didn’t matter.  Just taking the stage was enough.  But everyone would have been lying.  It did matter.  It set a tone no matter how you looked at it.

We broke up.  We went to rehab.  We swore we’d never play again.  Now here we are.

When the lights went down as the band walked on the stage, the roar of the fans was about as loud as I’ve ever heard.  They all walked out and picked up their instruments like they had done so many times before, and like everyone thought they may never do again.

As the crowd continued their wild cheers driven purely by seeing them on stage again together, the first few notes of the opener started to drift out of the PA…

Fluffhead.

It was already so loud that it took a few seconds for the crowd to realize what they were hearing—for the shock to set in. All at once, this crowd that you would have sworn couldn’t get any louder turned the dial that stopped at ten up to twelve.

I honestly can’t think of a stronger musical statement.

We’re back and we’re not fucking around.

This one moment—this one choice—didn’t just set the tone for that show, or that tour, but for the rest of the band’s career.  And to be honest, it set the tone for how I would feel about them moving forward.  This was the real deal. So this is how it’s gonna be huh? They were clearly serious and I would take them seriously.

Of all the shows, in all the years, this one song—these few seconds as the waves of excitement expanded through the crowd—stand above anything else I’ve ever experienced. If you could bottle the feeling in that room at that moment you could solve a lot of problems. Pure, pure bundles of joy.

—Killington, VT  6 March 2010

Every now and then I get a song so stuck in my head that there’s nothing I can do, so I just run with it. Lately that song is Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy In New York.”

I grew up listening to a lot of Simon and Garfunkel. Their music always brings me back to a very specific time in my life. When I was old enough to appreciate music, but too young to drive. There were certain albums that my family always had in the car—The Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Simon and Garfunkel. I played a lot of soccer with a couple of close friends, and my parents would drive us all everywhere. Hours and hours at a time. Listening to all this music. I’m lucky that my Mom has great taste in music because a lot of this really formed that foundation of music that I would listen to for the rest of my life. I haven’t listened to much Simon and Garfunkel in a lot of years. It was always there, and I of course heard it here and there and it would always bring me right back.

A few months ago I was in New York for a couple of days, visiting with friends and seeing Phish at Madison Square Garden. Phish at the Garden is always an event. It’s amazing how you fall right back into familiar patterns as if they were yesterday, and not ten years ago. After the last show I saw, as we were shuffling out, “The Only Living Boy In New York” was playing over the PA. After four or so hours of the lights being down, and the music playing, walking out with the house lights on can be a melancholy feeling. A return to reality. These days, losing yourself in a Phish show for a few hours can really feel like an escape to a past life. I close my eyes, and there I am in the same city, in the same venue, sitting next to my same friends, listening to the same band play the same song. (And if that sounds like a bad thing, it’s really not—it’s something I’m grateful for.)

As we made our way out, I stopped and listened to “The Only Living Boy In New York.” It had probably been years since I’d heard the song, but standing there is Madison Square Garden it seemed just exactly right. Having a song tied closely to an event or memory—whether it’s a movie, something I experienced, or just something I imagined—is one of my favorite things going. Those little scenes are everywhere all the time, and I love that sometimes a song can bring you right back there.

Since that day, I haven’t really been able to go too long without thinking of that song, and that little moment. It’s only in the past week or so that I’ve actually been playing it over and over, for whatever reason. And what a fucking song huh?

You start poking around and reading about it and it takes on even more weight. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, friends since they were kids, and now on the brink of a breakup. Art heading to Mexico to try do some acting in a movie. Paul left alone in New York to work on the album.

Tom, get your plane right on time.
I know you’ve been eager to fly now.
Hey let your honesty shine, shine, shine

Of course, Simon and Garfunkel used to perform under the name “Tom and Jerry” when they were coming up. I’ll let you guess who Tom was. That’s just some poignant, heavy, beautiful history right there. I have to tell you, it reminds me of one of my all-time favorite musical images: Paul McCartney stopping by to visit Brian Wilson—deep in the dark throes of his paranoia and drugs and sandboxes—putting his arm around him as they sat at Brian’s piano, and saying “Thank you for Pet Sounds.” That image gives me the chills. And the fact that “The Only Living Boy In New York” kinda-sorta-maybe-dare-I-say-it reminds me of “God Only Knows”—in that when both songs come up on the album they really demand that you stop whatever you’re doing and listen—doesn’t hurt either.

And to top this all off, as I start reading more about the song, guess who happened to drop by the studio right after they finished recording the vocals on that day back in 1969?

Bob Fucking Dylan.

In this world of Pitchfork-style music criticism, I increasingly don’t care for much that’s written about music, but damn, there’s nothing like finding out a great story about a piece of music that means something to you. Couple that with a scene in your head that plays when you hear the song, and you’re ready to listen to one song non-stop for days on end.

As I’ve been doing.

Everyone’s making lists. It’s the end of the year; it’s the end of the decade; it’s time for a good list. I used to love making year-end album lists. I’d spend time pouring through my iTunes library, finding all the albums that I loved from that year. The obvious, the less obvious. I’d keep a running list of candidates during the year. And ten? How could I narrow it down to just ten albums. There would need to be a bunch of runners up. Ones that just barely missed the cut.

No more.

Somewhere along the way I stopped wanting to force everything into this form. Sure, a list of my Top 10 albums of 2006 may be a good historical checkpoint for what I was listening to at the time, but not for much else. Do I even listen to half of them anymore? Lately I’ve been more drawn to fewer works that I really love. Ones that five or ten years from now I’ll still be excited to hear. I’d rather look back at 2009 and remember a handful of music that stuck with me, than see a list of albums that I haven’t listened to in ages.¹

This all became crystalized for me when I starting thinking about it in the same way that I’ve been thinking about photography lately. I take a lot of photos over the course of a year. Not nearly as many as some, but more than the average. Whenever I’m taking photos—whether it’s a concert, or a trip, or a walk through the woods—I may take hundreds at a time. I spend a lot of time reviewing them, and editing them, and thinking about them. And you know what? If I take a few hundred photos wandering around the streets of New York and I’m left with one that I’m really happy with, I’m good with that. Shit, if I really like the photo I’m thrilled.

I store all of my photos sorted by month, with individual project folders for each event during that month. When I’m in the middle of July and running around and filling up project after project with images it’s hard to have perspective on anything outside of what’s in front of me. But when I go back in December and flip though those same photos, I don’t care about the fifty photos of the bird on the beach. Hopefully there’s one or two that stand out. I’ll walk away with those.

I always hope that (almost) any photo I post online evokes some sort of response. Not necessarily words or feelings, but something. I want it to grab me first in some way, and if it does for someone else, great. If not, it probably means something to me anyways. If I can look back at the end of the year and see a few things that say something, that carries me. That lasts.

That’s where I’m at with music these days. I listen to a lot of music. It’s all around me all the time, and a lot of it’s very good. But at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of the decade, if I’m left with a handful of music that really means something to me—that really grabs me—that’s what I’m going to take away.

It’s easy to take a lot of photos and it’s easy to listen to a lot of good music, but it’s hard to find something that really grabs you. But I keep listening, and I keep shooting.

¹ All of this is no knock on anyone else. I read, and get a lot of enjoyment out of, a lot of other people’s wrap-ups. It’s more a reflection on a shift that I’m personally going through than anything else.

Earlier this month the famed Boston radio station WBCN went off the air.  WBCN was one of those things that was just always there, and I never stopped to think too much about it.  Over the last few days that they were broadcasting, people started to pay more attention in a “I can’t believe this is really happening way.”

I think the first time I really became aware of WBCN was when I was in high school, and living in Connecticut.  I had started to become intrigued by this band from Burlington, VT that I was hearing a lot about—Phish.  Back then, in order to get news updates and tour dates, you had to call into an telephone hotline, which was basically just an answering machine where they would read off the latest info.  I found out that Phish would soon be playing a radio show for the “Rock Of Boston, WBCN.”  I talked my parents into driving me and a friend up for the night and we saw the show.  I remember thinking that if Phish was playing a show for them, they must be pretty cool.  WBCN was now on my radar.

Within a few years I was living in Boston and going to school.  WBCN became an immediate pre-set on my car radio.  You just knew they were a big deal.  You’d pass Fenway Park and see the old, black building out on the far side with the huge, white WBCN logo scrawled across the front.  It was part of the fabric of the area.

When I was in college, I started taking a bunch of classes on writing, and American literature; The Beats and the Vietnam War—your basic liberal arts education.  One of my favorite professors was a life-long Boston resident.  She’d tell us tales of what Boston was like in the heady times of the late Sixties and Seventies.  She talked about how WBCN was always on—an ever-present soundtrack to that bygone era that was so easy for me to romanticize.  And I could still go home, tune the radio to 104.1 and, in a way, tie into that history.

Towards the end of college I started interning for the local radio rep at the Boston Virgin Records office (a position that, incidentally, lead to the job I have today, in a roundabout way).  I have tons of great memories of this time, but I’ll never forget the feeling of excitement when my old boss Howard would stick his head out the door of his office and announce something like “‘BCN added Lenny!”  The whole office would cheer.  It was a big deal.  A big fish in a pretty big pond.

Years later, back in the music business after a few detours, I stood in the BCN studio near Fenway and had one of my all-time musical idols hand me a glass of champagne that had just been poured from a bottle presented to him as a gift from Oedipus, a local legend in his own right.  In hindsight, it made some sort of cosmic sense that that was where we were.  I still have the cork from that bottle.

Over the past few years WBCN changed a lot.  Like a lot of stations, they constantly tweaked the format of music they played.  They seemed to lose a bit of identity, and along the way my listening faded.  Still, I work in the music industry, and even with all the ups and downs, ‘BCN was still ‘BCN.  Having a single added there was still a big deal.

So a few weeks ago, on the night that they were to sign off for good, I knew I had to listen for one last time.  I sat at my computer and listened to them play one last set of great music, and share stories.  Something else cool happened as well.  I started looking on Facebook (a site that I’ve had more negative feelings towards than positive of late), and it seemed like everyone I knew that had any connection whatsoever to Boston was talking about ‘BCN going off of the air.  It was a nice moment, and it reminded me that I’m happy to have a central place to share those thoughts.  The internet may have diluted the community effect that radio has these days, but it also brought a diverse group of people together to share their thoughts on it.

I sat there with my headphones on, listening to them play Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” one last time.  As the song ended, they played a montage of highlights from the long and wild life of the station.  As it ended, the call letters of the new station were spoken, and then it cut to static.  I listened to that static for a long time without even realizing it.  WBCN going off the air was never a “my life will never be the same” moment.  It wasn’t something I thought about on a regular basis.  But sitting there, listening to that static, gave a me a chance to reflect on that thread that has been woven through all my years living in Boston.  It’s strange to think that it’s gone.

Take a listen for yourself:

There’s no shortage of ways to find new music.  There’s the old traditional standbys of TV and radio and banners ads on the internet.  Then there’s services like Pandora and the like—things that diagnose the elements of various music that you select, and give you recommendations based on similar sound patterns, etc.  While something like this is fun, new music by algorithm has never sat quite right with me.  I hate math.

I’m more inclined to give something a good listen based on the recommendation of someone I trust or respect.

One of my favorite albums I’ve bought recently is When I Pretend To Fall by The Long Winters.  I don’t really like to play music critic, so I won’t.  I’ll just say it’s good, smart, melodic Indie pop.  Every time I listen to the album I think two things: 1) how damn good it is straight through, and 2) I remember how I found it.

I’m a fan of The Decemberists, and I’ve followed lead singer Colin Meloy on Twitter for a while.  One of the things I like most about Twitter is that you can easily find new and interesting people, especially when paying attention to other people you “follow.”  One night Colin Meloy made a reference to John Roderick.  I clicked through saw he was the guy from The Long Winters.  Now look, The Long Winters were part of that big group of Indie bands that somewhere in the back of my head I had heard good things about, but had never listened to (if I should have recognized Roderick’s name immediately, or have a copy of his albums somewhere on my hard drive already, I didn’t).

So I make my way to The Long Winter’s site and start poking around.  Soon I discovered that they have a whole zip file of songs that you could download for free.  An instant sampler pack.  Not a “fill out this big form and when you’re done you’ll get one track” type of deal.  No, this was one click, and you had a folder of MP3s on your desktop—easy.  It was late at night, and I started listening to them.  I really liked what I heard.  I must have listened to those MP3s three or four times in a row sitting there messing around.  I was a fan.  The mp3 worked.  Next thing I knew, I was on iTunes at 2am buying When I Pretend To Fall.

What’s the big deal about that?  Nothing really. It’s just how it’s supposed to work, or how—I imagine—that you hope it does. John Roderick is on Twitter.  Seems like a funny dude.  He’s the type of musician I enjoy the most in a format like that.  Just there to shoot the shit and interact with people, not to necessarily pimp his own stuff.  I’ll tell you what though, there’s a pretty direct line from me seeing him on Twitter→going to his website→sampling the free mp3s→buying his album.  Sure I’m one guy, one album purchase, etc. etc. but something about the process sits well with me.  It may have started with CNN’s favorite buzzword social media tool of the moment, but the end result was me making a purchase that felt authentic, and memorable.  On some level, it makes me like the album even more.  There’s a story there.

Postscript

Lately I’ve had this phrase running through my mind: “the internet is small place.”  I couldn’t help but laugh when a few weeks after going through this process and listening to the album a bunch, I’m reading a long and excellent essay by Merlin Mann (who fits neatly into my other main area of interest—the Apple/web/tech nerdery world) when three-quarters of the way through the piece I click on one of his links, and see who he’s interviewing.  Small place indeed.

The Beatles are probably my earliest musical memory.  I had a little Fisher Price record player and I remember listening to “Penny Lane” over and over again (I loved the piccolo trumpet, though I didn’t know what it was at the time.)  The Beatles came from my parents, from my Mom—this was her music passed on to me.

I don’t remember where Thriller came from, but it felt like my own.  I know that being a kid in the early eighties you couldn’t miss it.  Biggest album in the world with no exaggeration.  I just remember it being there, everywhere.  And I couldn’t get enough.  I listened to that tape over and over and over.  ”Billie Jean,” “Thriller,” “Beat It,” those were my songs.  Over and over again.  Especially “Beat It.”  I didn’t know what “pop” music was. I was too young to draw any lines between Michael Jackson, or The Beatles, or the Elvis songs my Dad played in the car.  It was all just music. I liked some of it more than others, and for a big chunk of time the only thing I wanted to listen to was Thriller.

My family jokes to this day about some charity party thing we went to, and of course the DJ was playing Thriller songs all night.  Shit, I was probably requesting them non-stop. The details are fuzzy, but he had a fake white MJ glove and I ended up with it.  I begged him for it (in hindsight my father probably slipped him $20 to get it).  Whatever.  I absolutely loved the thing and ran around with it at all times.  What an image image—a little blond six year old kid from Connecticut running around with a Michael Jackson glove.  I wish I had a picture.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years to when I’m in college.  I had just driven all night from a Phish show in New Jersey to another show in upstate New York.  We’re exhausted.  The sun in coming up as we’re pulling into the campgrounds to park for the weekend.  Everyone is asleep and out of it.  Suddenly “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” comes on the radio and we roll down the windows and fucking crank it.  Everyone’s looking at us, but people are into it.  That song has a goddamn groove.  I’m half delirious running on fumes and Mountain Dew and this song was a jolt right through everyone’s spin.  I will never listen to this song again and not think of that exact moment.

So Michael Jackson died today.  Music has been an enormous influence on my life, and Michael Jackson had an enormous influence on how I know music.

Have you ever had an old album pop up out of nowhere and demand that you listen to again?  That’s what happened to me back in the fall.  The album was Elliott Smith’s Figure 8, an album that I’d owned for years, but which felt like I’d never really heard.  It’s funny how that sometimes happens with certain albums; how for some reason the time is right for an album to be re-discovered.

The end of 2008 was a roller coaster ride. On one hand a once-in-a-generation financial meltdown that left everyone feeling like the world as we knew it could crumble with the next ATM withdrawal.  Enormous companies disappearing in the blink of an eye.  Junk Bond Trader indeed.

On the other hand there was a wave of hope and optimism like none I had ever seen in my life.  It was hard to stay level.

With this as the backdrop, I couldn’t stop listening to Figure 8. Even though it was written a decade earlier, it seemed to fit perfectly. It was my soundtrack to an uneven and emotionally turbulent ride that I never bought a ticket for.

Maybe it’s wrong to project my own emotional connections onto someone else’s work, especially someone as haunted as Elliott Smith. But maybe being able to do so is what makes us connect with great music, even if just on a subconscious level. It’s a comforting thought.

Last week I was in Los Angeles for the first time in a few years. I made sure I headed over to Silverlake and spent a few minutes at 4334 Sunset.  I thought about the past year, the ups and downs; the good and the bad.  There were messages written out all over the wall, and I shied my eyes away from reading them.  They weren’t for me, but I understood the connection.  I was glad my wife was there with me.  I still can’t stop listening to the album.  It’s fused to that period of time in my brain, but it still makes me think about the future.  For me, for us.  I’m glad the time was right.

Love it or hate it, everyone seems to have an opinion about Twitter right now.  One of the results of this Twitter boom is seeing well known people jump on board, and watching how they use it.  For some it’s a one way window into the little details of their lives, and for others it’s a way to actually connect with people on their own terms.

Coming from the music industry, I’ve been especially fascinated with a lot of the musicians, and how they are using it to change the way that they interact with fans.  If you can’t go two feet without hearing about Twitter these days, then you can’t go ten feet without hearing about the changes that the music business—really the entire entertainment industry—is painfully going through.  There’s an enormous paradigm shift happening in the music industry.  Some artists are jumping on this opportunity to bypass a lot of BS and connect directly with their audience.  They’re takin’ it to the streets—metaphorically speaking—in 140 characters or less.

Enter Bob Lefsetz, the curmudgeonly old-school critic of all things music.  Say what you want about him, but people at all levels of the music industry are aware of what he has to say.  And for as much as Lefsetz makes me cringe sometimes, he’s also dead fucking spot on pretty often.

Not many weeks go by where Lefsetz won’t post an email from a big name musician or producer or label head.  He recently shared an email from Amanda Palmer that I haven’t been able to get out of my head.  Palmer has been going through a very public feud with her record label, going so far as to ask them to drop her.  She’s also very active on Twitter.  These things as, as you may have guessed, are related.

Palmer tells stories of fans lining up to meet her and buy her album.  They follow her on Twitter and ask her questions.  And she answers them.  She shares little bits of random info and photos and thoughts. A lot of fans would love to receive this stuff from their favorite artists, but this unrestricted avenue through which info could flow didn’t exist in quite the same way until recently.  Sure it could be posted on a website, but how many major artists are actually editing their own site?  Now anyone that can text message can send a TwitPic photo ten seconds after it happens.

As Palmer explained to Lefsetz, when she was in Australia recently, she did an impromptu gathering with fans in a park, announced only via Twitter.  150 kids showed up to have their records signed.

“LIFE IS BECOMING AWESOME.”

“no manager knew! i didn’t even warn or tell her! no agents! no security! no venue! we were in a fucking public park!
life is becoming awesome.”

I haven’t been able to get that line out of my head.  I work for a record company, and I’ll tell you, the chances of getting something like that to happen from my end are pretty slim.  It’s not to say that people wouldn’t like the idea, or that we couldn’t try to make it happen.  It’s just that there are too many people involved.  Too many people to say no. If we set up a promotion or event with an artist, it’s essentially on our terms.  If Amanda Palmer wants to choose a time and a place to meet people, and only tell them via Twitter, those are her terms.  And that’s pretty awesome.

And it’s not just Amanda Palmer.  Look at Lily Allen, and her scavenger hunts for tickets before every show—all via Twitter (or excuse me, “Twitta”).  I get a good laugh when I think of pitching an idea like that.

Or Dave Matthews, with his oddball humor—a perfect fit for this type of communication.  A lot of the responses he gives to people feel like a more authentic connection than physically standing in front of him for five seconds and getting a record signed.

So what does this all mean?  Does it mean that all you need to be a successful musician is a solid list of Twitter followers, an iPhone and a good sense of humor?  No, of course not.

There’s a reason that people are passionate about Amanda Palmer, and her music comes first.  She’s built the foundation.  Could she be successful from here on out with no label?  By just touring and putting out releases on her own that her fans buy to support her?  Yeah, I think she probably could.  Could she start over today with none of that history and achieve the same results with only those tools?  I tend to doubt it, but I’m not so sure.  Someone’s going to do it.

So as frustrating as it can be to see a respected member of the old-guard media make a fool out of themselves when talking about something “new” like Twitter, it makes it that much more exciting to see more and more well known artists grab hold and use this new technology to connect with their audience in a way that didn’t exist a few years ago.  In that sense,  I completely agree with Amanda Palmer, life is becoming awesome.