Friday, July 13 – 2012
10:00 PM
Playing as a full band featuring some new songs and old ones like you’ve never heard them before. Loud. Rock. Music. Rock.
Tickets are $10 at the door but only $5 if you buy them online here.
Be sure to RSVP to the Facebook Event.
PARKSIDE LOUNGE
317 East Houston Street
New York, NY 10002
Presented by TurnStyle Music Group
Here you go, fellow artists and creative types – read this post by Molly Crabapple.
Read it? Good. It’s to-the-point. More important, it’s brilliant.
This part in particular should ring loud and clear:
But most of all: if you want to be an artist for a living, you can’t half-ass it. You have to want it more than anything, and be willing to sacrifice sleep, social life, crappy high-school boyfriends, after-work drinks, and pretty much every other trapping of a fun, chill, early twenties experiance.
If you don’t want to do this, being a full time artist isn’t for you. There’s no shame in this. Drawing for fun, because you love it, is a beautiful thing. But if you know that there’s nothing else that you can do but make art all day, that it’s what you were born for, you’re going to need to make sacrifices.
Re-read that. And don’t get it twisted. This is not permission for a moaning complaint fest about how much you have to sacrifice and how no one gets it and/or you or your art. I see a lot of peers in the creative arts whine nonstop about shit that- for the most part- is totally out of the realm of creation. “No one is at my show” “I can’t make money because people download music for free” “No one will invest in me” “I just need a lucky break” “I need to network” “My breath stank”
None of these have to do with creation (well, yeah brush your teeth maybe so you don’t melt your art inadvertently). They have to do with ego and a sense of affirmation. They are all solvable problems and many resources await to help you solve them, you just have to do the research.
My fellow musicians and creative types, admit this: we tend to whine a lot about how other people should like us and our art and pay attention to it. How ‘if only more people knew about me, everything would be great’. Then we tend to tear down the success stories because we’re not them and we should be and they’re just lucky and untalented and no one gets us and they don’t know what they’re missing and let me just go network with people and post on twitter and facebook because really talking about art is more important than making it.
I learned very early on to stick to this truth in my life: Generally, if you’re doing something important with your life, not a single fuck will be given about it by anyone. Some people will pay you the appropriate social lip service, some people will deride you, some people may even support you. This is all completely ok and expected.
My background and my upbringing lent no support system for being a musician. I do this because it’s a calling. I do this because it’s what I do and I feel ‘right’ when I do it. These are not explanations you can expect anyone to truly understand, so don’t expect people to understand them (trust me, you’ll be happier without expectations on this) and just go and do your thing.
So go home, to your studio, to your mind – wherever the fuck it is you create (your true home) – and resolve to stay there more than anywhere else you can possibly be in your life. Ignore everybody who infringes upon you doing so whether they’re questioning, doubting or complaining- they’re average. Prove to your self you’re not and others will start to take notice. I know a lot of well networked people. These are good people to know, not necessarily good people to be. The people who truly support you will stay by you. The ones who don’t will go away. Let them decide.
If you pursue creation with passion and diligence, you do so because it’s the right thing for you to do. There’s no other reason.
I can keep typing (and will at another date), but honestly – nothing says it much better than Waylon Jennings does in this song:
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve dropped the price of my music on my website store significantly. Crows Into Swine is $4.99 for a download that gives you the option to grab the entire album in whatever format you wish. (Side note: Please for the love of scented towels, choose a lossless format. You can always down-convert but you can’t up-convert an mp3 to lossless. Don’t be lame.)
Most people who come to see me play know that I pretty much give out my CD’s for free at my shows, so why don’t I just post my music for free or under the Radiohead-pioneered ‘pay what you want’ plan on my website? There are a few reasons, but here’s the primary one: value.
Let’s skip to a related sidetrack here: I use Google Alerts to help me keep a pulse on whether anyone is linking to, berating, or pondering my music (or hairstyle) on the internet. Around late December I started getting flooded with links to torrent sites where people had posted my music for free. I checked them all out and there were comments and people thanking the poster for posting it. And no it wasn’t me.
Which is awesome. It made me very happy to see the sheer number of torrents that my music was reaching. I didn’t even have to do anything.
Seriously I fucking love this.
For the past decade we’ve heard the record industry state that torrents are killing music. Killing MUSIC?
Hell no. Torrents are exposing the over bloated completely artist-unfriendly infested belly pustule that the record industry has become, yes.
But music? No. You can’t kill music. How do you kill art practically? You can kill someone’s drive to make art – but if you did I would argue that maybe they weren’t really making ‘art’ to begin with or that they should toughen the fuck up. You can’t pursue this seriously with any degree of happiness unless you have a do or die attitude. (But I digress into a tangent of a tangent aka another topic for another time.)
We’re just shifting the dynamics of power here. The music industry has essentially been under an ‘Occupy’ movement for the better part of the past decade. The power and the choice is shifting back to the artist and more importantly the PEOPLE.
When I was signed and touring in the early part of the 2000′s I had to protect the CD’s and music we made like a farmer constantly under threat of weevil attack- I wanted to give it out for free, but in order to sell MY OWN CD’s at shows I had to buy them from the label at $7 a pop and then sell them back to you at a price that would enable my band to keep touring. Plus, the entire band made just about $1 per CD sold in quarterly royalties. One. Fucking. Dollar. How the hell is this scenario fair to the fans or the artist? The labels are the only ones making money here. The realization: Maybe my band had made that music, but the label now owned both it and the physical means to hear it.
Nowadays the only people who have control of my music are my self and my audience. That’s some shift in the dynamic alright.
Take the music you want. It’s not stealing. If anyone tells you it is, they’re out of touch and clinging to a dinosaur’s breaking back. EMBRACE the music and art you want. Who cares if people think it makes music ‘disposable’? Great songs stay in your soul and mind – a great song will reverberate in your skull even when you’re not listening to it. Disposable music will remain disposable no matter how it’s obtained (remember the used CD stores of the 90′s?) and GREAT music will stay with you like a cuddly Bush Baby; adorably bug-eyed, smiley and sinking its fangs into you when you least expect it.
So out of touch- don't be him
You’re getting music. Not a product. An experience.
The bottom line is that there are places you can get my music for free. And I encourage you to do so whether listening through a service like Spotify or grabbing it on a torrent site.
But why am I charging 5 bucks for my new album on my own site if I think this way? Well again, value. I personally like paying for my music. When I go see a band play and I like their stuff, I will buy their music and/or merch- simply because I want to show some direct support. I appreciate the value of what they’re giving me and I want to give something back in return.
So I keep a price up on my site because I respect that there are people out there who would like to know the value of what they’re getting. And $5 is reasonable to me. Again, you can grab it for free in many many places out there – so please do so if you’d rather do that. Just make sure you get the music if you want it.
Here’s another fact:
Truth is, if you contact me directly for a link to download my album for free, I’ll probably send you one. I value the fact that you want it enough to reach out to me for it. That’s fucking cool of you to do, so I’d like to reward it if I can; just like I give out my CD’s at shows because I love the fact that you decided to spend the evening listening to my music. I’m on Twitter, Facebook and my email is right up in the header of my site.
So buy, take, or reach out – you have the power of choice and, no matter what the record execs or fear mongers say these days, they’re all good ones! Just play that shit. 
MetalSucks.net is offering a giveaway of my new album, Crows Into Swine, on their Completely Unreadable Band Logo of the Week competition. If, for some hatefully despondent reason, you haven’t gotten your own copy yet why not take a stab at guessing the unintelligible mess of a logo displayed on the competition page. This week’s logo reminds me of the terrible ground ‘beef’ tacos they used to serve in high school – both going in and out.
For the record, this is my favorite competition out there as it requires a bit of sleuthing, prescription glasses, trucker pills and a small army of voodoo dolls to do right!
There are 3 CD copies of Crows Into Swine up for grabs! Click here to get to it!
I love recording in general – but I have more fun than a basketful of monchichis recording guitars. The guitar, along with my voice, is my primary song writing tool and Crows Into Swine is definitely a guitar heavy album.
We spent about a week of 6-10 hour days tracking all the guitars on the album. Each guitar take we recorded had 4 separate tracks assigned to it – 3 mics in different positions and a direct track. Overkill? Hell yeah, but it worked out great! Check out the pic of my mic’d rig to see how it looked (3rd mic is out of frame). 
The only amp I used was my Orange Rockerverb 100 going through my closed back Orange 2×12 cabinet. I love this fucking amp and I only wish I could lug it to every show I play in NYC, but then I remember that it weighs as much as 1990 era Roseanne Barr and opt to take a small combo amp with me instead.
Miking the amp with the 3 mics allowed us a plethora of tone variation when it came time to mix just by blending the different mics in the mix. The direct track was in case we wanted a totally different sound for the take, but we never actually used those tracks; got everything we needed from the Orange itself.
To crank the RV100 to sweet tone levels, without leveling the building the studio was in, we used a hot plate- this basically allows you to crank the amp gain and volume to get the tube saturation you need but at quieter levels than normal. It was still fucking loud though.
My workhorse guitar was my heavily customized Gibson Les Paul Studio – love this guitar, it feels great and it’s been completely rewired and spruced up to my liking. The Wolfetone pickups I put into it sound fantastic. About 60% of the tracks on this album were done with this guitar. Another 30% were then tackled with my Guild S100 – which lent a really different kind of sound to the proceedings. A lot of times we would use the Guild to double tracks that were laid down with the LP as the Guild has this heavy yet naturally phase-y microphonic sound to it. Some clean tracks were done with my totally unique sounding Carvin Holdsworth model guitar and a few accents (like the slide on Old Sad Laughter) were done with my Gibson Flying V for that in your fat face midrange that V’s excel at.
I used more effects and pedals on this album than anything I’ve done thus far. Primarily a Micro POG and Phaser at various points. Didn’t use any delay on the guitars – if you hear any on certain parts it’s because I actually went back and played the same parts a split second after the original to create my own delayed parts.
We went nuts on the feedback tracks for Conversations With A Knife. Check out the pic of my Carvin set up for this song. 
Yes, that’s a plastic fork in the strings. For one of the tracks we just set it up in front of the amp with the fork in between the strings and I played my effects pedals with my hands like they were a singular instrument. We did this for a lot of the feedback tracks (different guitars, sans fork) to get various ghostly banshee guitar feedback performances.
I primarily improv my solos. I basically create a few points I’d like to hit on a guitar solo and then let the paths to get to those points sporadically fall into place. A style or laziness? BOTH! I do it with my vocals too- always fun. I’m happiest when I have room to improv on performances. Just sucks when you have to double a part and have to figure it out after you’ve played it! The tone for the solo on Anthem is me using my wah pedal as a filter. Same thing with the lead parts in Kingdoms. The solo for Waiting for a Song is a combination of working the wah and rolling off my tone knobs – I switch pickups half way through that song too to match the changes in the music.
I’ve gotten eye-rolls when I say this, but most of a guitar players tone comes from their fingers. I have erratic nervous fingers that like to get intimate with my guitars like an awkward kid undoing a blouse for their first make out session. And that’s the way I like it.
In listening sessions before mixing the album we decided that Crows Into Swine and Caught In The Wheel needed some lead guitar parts – so I laid down the fuzz solo for Crows and the spacey solo for Caught using my pedals going directly into the board. These two solos weren’t scoped originally, there was actually a vocal part in Caught that we removed that the solo replaces.
So that’s it in a cracked nut-butter shell. Never had as much fun recording guitars as I did with Crows Into Swine. I don’t want to bore you with my stream of consciousness typing any longer so if you’d like to know more about the guitars for this album just shoot me a line.
MetalSucks.net has featured the video for Crows Into Swine on their Cinemetal feature. They’ve given it some love as well: “…his new stuff isn’t really metal at all, but it is really, really catchy.” Damn right it is! Check it out here.
The crew at Metal Insider has shown Pheroze some major love! Check out this quote about Crows Into Swine: “Pheroze has outdone himself with his second album Crows Into Swine, which was released on November 1. Pheroze’s sound resembles Soundgarden in their prime with a hint of early Danzig.”
Check out the full spot on MetalInsider.net
Yes people. Crows Into Swine is out and in yo’ fantastic face. Go pick it up at my store or on Amazon or iTunes if that’s your thing.
I’ll be writing a lot about the making of this album – I truly believe there’s nothing quite like this out there in the music world right now. A lot of work and passion went into this – and a lot more is about to come out of it.
When you pick it up, be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments, or on Twitter or Facebook.
And if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the video for Crows Into Swine below.
-Pheroze
Pheroze’s new album, Crows Into Swine, is available now! You can buy the CD or download it in a variety of file formats on the Pheroze.com store.
It’s up on Amazon and iTunes as well as Spotify, Rhapsody, eMusic – pretty much anywhere that sells or plays music.
Friends
These are the times that bring our kind to our knees. Just look at what I’ve had to deal with these past few weeks:
Tough times I tell ya!
To lament about what is best in life, I will be playing an acoustic set at The Bitter End on August 20th. It’s a Saturday night and I’m on at 7PM SHARP.
I’m looking forward to this gig – I haven’t played a ‘jest me n’ ma geetar’ acoustic set in over a decade. This set will be the tits. And I am not going to do your typical skinny-kid-in-torn-jeans-trying-to-sound-emo-and-deep shit either. I have class and respect for your sensibilities.
So I hope you get to to help me class your lives up. I won’t break your nose, promise.
As an aside – my new album is coming along great. I’ll have more news for you on that soon.
With love
-pheroze
