Introducing: BROADSIDES, a Single Series
For a while now I’ve been kicking around a lot of new music with no cohesive plan to compile or release it. Not only that, but a traditional album release (or three) is a lot of work and little reward while balancing the rest of my life.
When I restarted the newsletter/blog over the summer I wrote about embracing the ephemeral. While these songs won’t be true ephemera—they’ll be posted here forever, and sometimes on Bandcamp, and sometimes elsewhere—I like the idea of having them float in the ether of the internet on their own for a while.
I’m very much an album person; but I also know that singles are good for marketing in an attention economy, so in whatever capacity I’m marketing these songs (I don’t really know how to market a song), there’s that angle as well.
The name “Broadsides” came to me as a catch-all for these otherwise unconnected songs after working on some ideas for another project (which may end up folded into this, who knows). When I finished writing music for Thomas Gray’s 1751 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, I thought about stylizing the release after an 18th century “broadside”, complete with woodcut-style illustrations (which were the style at the time) and sheet music.
Broadsides were pamphlets, single sheets, booklets, and other short-form written formats. These were a popular way to disseminate ideas in the 18th and 19th centuries as literacy rose rapidly in the Western hemisphere. More than ever, you could be assured that your ideas would find an audience, as any random person in the street was more likely to be a competent reader. (I’m not sure how accessible a printing press would have been, though I imagine there must have been some equivalent to a FedEx store where you could pay to print by the page.) Broadsides could be sheet music, essays, poems, political cartoons, propaganda, or anything else—but all of them were designed to reach a concentrated, local audience for a short period of time. They were basically zines.
Gray’s “Elegy” would have been too long for this format (and first-edition prints I’ve found online were in fact hard-bound books). Nevertheless, I yoinked the name and decided to do something with it. Going through with the original release plan sounds exhausting at this stage, though I hope to make that happen someday. For now “BROADSIDES” is just a regular old single series.
I’m counting “Run for Help” among this single series—I originally posted it here in August but it’s now on Bandcamp too—so the next I’ll call the second installment. Expect it November 2!
And speaking of November 2, we’ll be playing a show that evening, so make sure to mark your calendars. See you there!
