Lightbulbs lore: seabreeze

In 2008 or so while in college, I started writing music I thought would be a cool fit for video games, thinking I could pitch a portfolio of my work and land some gigs doing this after college. I wrote this small ditty based on meandering piano chord progression called “seabreeze”, meant as background music for some kind of seaside town in a role-playing game. Submitted it to a few places, never went anywhere.

When I ended up taking a tech internship and that internship turned into full time work, I scrapped this plan and reworked “seabreeze” for an album I started work on — slowed it down, added a shuffle, loaded with reverb, sort of a an homage to Massive Attack’s “exchange”.

That album was sort of a dark take on trip hop with industrial influences, and came to be called KID LIGHTBULB based on a line from a different song (I’ll write about that another time.)

I released that album quietly, and separately started writing another song called “trendsetters” which had the line “I never know when to say it” as a key part of the refrain. This line stuck with me and I ended up noodling on a different song with the same lyric.

That different song was yet another reworking of the same meandering chord progression from “seabreeze”, which I started to simply call “I never know.”

As I was planning an album in 2013 called BEDTIME RITUALS, “I never know” and “trendsetters” were ideas I had under serious consideration - they were related, and the former ended up forming a good pair with a different song called “ritual”, which at the time was much more upbeat than the icier, slower version I ended up releasing a decade later. I ended up reworking “ritual” into the song you may know now, and scrapped “I never know.”

When I started the Kid Lightbulbs project, I revisited “I never know”, rerecorded a sparser version of it, and almost included it in the final sequence of THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY. I originally envisioned it in sequence after the track “bubble”, with a smash cut transition. But then I wrote the belong reprise and scrapped “I never know” yet again. It’s now a b-side you can hear as a Bandcamp subscriber. The “seabreeze” piano chord progression has still not seen a release to this point.

Earlier this year, once Kid Lightbulbs started getting some early interest, I began revisiting the BEDTIME RITUALS sessions more holistically from back in 2013-2014. “Trendsetters” was the first song I revisited, and became my first proper single in February. The “I never know” lyric got stuck in my head again and I wanted to figure out some other way to incorporate it into the themes of STEP INTO THE OCEAN.

I had this other old audio session from back in my aspiring-game-composer days, meant as more of an action sequence bit. It happened to be the same bpm as “trendsetters” and I thought they’d pair together nicely. I ended up picking the “I never know” lyrics back up and reworking them into something more jaded and angsty, which then became “digression”.

“digression” also includes lyrical references to a different track back from the KID LIGHTBULB days called “left in ignorance”.

I don’t yet know if the “seabreeze” cut will see the light of day again, but maybe it will? Anyway, the creative process is weird and wild and sometimes happens over decades.

This was fun to write.

Easy, impromptu live performance videos

Easy, impromptu live performance videos

This might not be that novel, but I figured out a way to record nice-looking videos with my iPhone while getting the audio fidelity from my laptop & audio interface.

Using Blackhole (free with optional donation), you can route audio thru your interface into a DAW (like Logic Pro), then into the Photo Booth app on macOS. You can then tether your iPhone camera to a MacBook to use it as a camera in Photo Booth. The result is a video I’m comfortable throwing on YouTube with almost no editing time.

⚠ You need a Mac laptop with Apple silicon, a DAW and an audio interface.

Here’s how I did it:

Part 1: Audio setup

1. Download & install Blackhole
   
2. Open System Settings -> Sound
   
3. Set your laptop’s audio settings as follows:
   • Input: Blackhole 2ch
     
   • Output: your audio interface (I use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2)
     
4. Open up your DAW of choice (I use Logic Pro)
   
5. Open up Logic Settings -> Audio
   
6. Set Logic’s audio settings as follows:
   • Input: your audio interface
     
   • Output: Blackhole 2ch
     
7. Add however many audio or midi channels needed to perform. I used:
   • 1 audio in (ch1) for guitar
     
   • 1 audio in (ch2) for a vocal mic (MXL 990)
     
   • 1 midi for piano
     
8. Enable input monitoring on all channels, so you can hear yourself

Part 2: Camera setup

1. Make sure your iPhone is on the latest version of iOS
   
2. Make sure your Mac is on at least macOS Venture
   
3. (Optional but recommended) Connect your iPhone to Mac with a USB-C cable
   
4. Mount your iPhone as a camera in some way, pointed at you
   
5. Open up Photo Booth
   
6. Find the “Camera” menu and select your iPhone
   
7. Note that the video feed should now be coming from your phone’s camera
   
8. Click record
   
9. Start playing

The result:

Bandcamp subscription updates

I set up a li’l paid subscription thing on Bandcamp for anyone interested in directly supporting my creative work. $25/year to get all my past releases, some bonus releases (aiming for 1 a month), and a discount on merch. Maybe more to come.

I’ve been noodling on what to do for this, and I thought it might be fun to re-release some of my older material, including old versions of what has or will become Kid Lightbulbs tracks.

I’m going to start with 2 fun things:

First: The original album where my music project name came from — KID LIGHTBULB. This is ostensibly a very dark trip hop album that I made in 2009-2010. It’s sprawling, atmospheric, slow, and clearly inspired by NIN’s The Downward Spiral. I commissioned some very cool hand-drawn artwork from my friend Tony Hollums back in the day, and I’m happy it’s seeing the light of day.

I may revisit the material at some point — for now, the original version already up and available for supporters of mine.

Second: The original album that eventually became STEP INTO THE OCEAN — my 2016 attempt at an album called BEDTIME RITUALS. It’s basically a truncated version of the 2024 album, with two different songs in the sequence. Also a different (imo worse) mix. But it makes for fun lore. I’ll be uploading this today for subscribers.

Hope you enjoy, and please consider subscribing!
https://kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com/subscribe

Musical déjà vu in STEP INTO THE OCEAN

One of the ideas I explore on my second album, STEP INTO THE OCEAN, is deja vu - things coming back to haunt you in various ways, and using music to convey or heighten that feeling. Since I don’t expect anyone to analyze the music of a lowly indie artist like me, I thought I’d write a thing describing & analyzing the recurring ideas throughout the album.

(Note: I posted some of this on Threads already, so apologies if it’s a bit of review.)

STEP INTO THE OCEAN isn’t a proper rock opera like my first album, but it certainly explores some central concepts: tension in a relationship, growing older, suffering, anxiety, things like that. The overarching idea is this: life is messy as one grows. Things repeat, sometimes for better, other times for worse, always leading us (and our most important relationships) to grow and in sometimes very complicated ways.

I attempted to convey that a bit through the music of this album, especially through the opening track and final third of the album (though other songs share musical and lyrical ideas as well). Here is a rundown of some examples throughout the album:

“She’s too good for me”

“She’s too good for me,” the album opener, might be the most personal song I’ve written to date. I won’t speak to the details that inspired, but it’s largely about watching someone you love suffer. (Note: while my music is rooted in real life, what’s described below is not necessarily autobiographical.)

It’s a bleak way to start things off. It’s also not a conventional song format, with 3 major parts that build from each other until a final comedown. This is where we are exposed to some core musical themes that serve as a basis for growth from this dark beginning.

The song is also the first part of a suite of sorts, with parts 2 through 6 making up the last third of the album. The songs that follow are meant to be a slow ascent from that darkness - until ideas return later in the journey. Because things are messier than we usually expect.

“Head on my heart” + “curiosity”

These two songs are intrinsically connected in the writing process, since “curiosity” came out of me noodling on possible endings for “head on my heart.” (You can actually hear a polished version of that noodling in track 3, the “curious prelude.”)

Thematically these songs are connected as well; where “head on my heart” is about the unease of communicating one’s love for another, “curiosity” expresses an unease about one’s broader life and what you could be doing if not for the things you’re doing now. The second half of “curiosity” sees the narrator finally finding a voice to genuinely communicate their love to another (“I love you I need you more than everything under the sun”), but only after several songs’ worth of growth. The aforementioned prelude almost serves as a bit of a digression (the first of 3) after “head on my heart” in which the narrator is trying to work through those feelings after a romantic episode, but can’t quite get there until the full song plays out.

“belly”

The growth and optimism seen through tracks 2-6 of the album, before returning to the suite, is most acutely seen in “belly”. I didn’t write the lyrics to it (my friend Tess did), but it serves well as an uplifting empowerment anthem that sees the narrator work through their struggles (such as not wanting to be “idle festering lifeless procrastinating”). However, that uplift does not come without struggle (“can’t feel my legs can’t feel my lungs can’t hear my thoughts can’t stop the push”) and perseverance (“I do believe I can change it”). These are two lyrical ideas that return in altered forms.

“trendsetters” + “digression”

“Trendsetters” is what starts to turn upside down the growth and optimism witnessed through the album’s first half. It’s a song about the anxiety of growing older; that anxiety festers and grows slowly in the extended second half and is probably most acutely evoked in the song’s hook (“I never know when to say it”).

“Digression” takes that hook and runs with it in a completely different direction. Once our narrator is anxious again, they spiral outward, lashing out at the systems and authority figures frustrating them. The empowering lyrical refrain from “belly” is twisted in that frustration (“they’ll die before I can change it”) before a smash cut–

And exhale.

she’s too good to me / st. alphonsus

Now we return to the suite introduced by “she’s too good for me.” Part 2 is “she’s too good to me” (obviously a play on the opening song title). It’s a chill lo fi thing that reuses the bass line from the B section of “she’s too good for me”, and serves as sort of a palate cleanser after the tense “trendsetters” and “digression”. I introduce a new vocal melody here, as if to misremember the darkness from earlier, or perhaps as a reprieve from the prior nine minutes of tension.

Part 3, “st. alphonsus”, transitions right in & introduces a new riff that pivots in a darker direction. This song is bleak; it’s a musing on self-pity and self-destruction. I reuse this naive sounding vocal melody from the very beginning of “she’s too good for me”, which serves up a new instance of the narrator realizing “this isn’t what [they] wanted” when their partner isn’t there for a moment.

The song ends with a build from nothing, twisting and tensing up that melody up until a smash cut—

ritual / confession

“Ritual” is part of the suite, but also references other ideas. After the self destructive episode of “st. alphonsus”, we find ourselves pulled back in by simple love, but temptation outside that love keeps looming. The ritual of sorts begins after the line “and you & I collapse into the surreal” - triggered by a key change and a build of looped vocals. This time, the melody from the B section of “she’s too good for me” returns, but wordless and cathartic, as if we’re processing and growing.

“Ritual” also calls back to “we don’t belong,” a song from my first album. A fun fact: These two songs were written around the same time, and an early version of “we don’t belong” was originally under consideration for the album that became STEP INTO THE OCEAN; I scrapped it because it felt too optimistic compared to the rest of the material, and revisited it on THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY instead. That all said: “Ritual” was partly intended as a reflection on the narrator’s struggle to belong in society, and thus reverting back to their relationship with the one they love for comfort. That feeling still exists across the two songs, but I feel like the extended narrative across both albums (unintentionally) adds to the weight of this feeling.

Back to the suite: Part 5 is “confession”, sort of a coda to “ritual” and a poem set to the vocal harmonies of “she’s too good for me”. After the previous catharsis, the narrator is able to confess a few last “sins” (itself a callback to “the worst days of our lives”) suggesting they haven’t fully worked thru the sources of their shame & anxiety, but can at least name them. But at the last minute they question whether it’s easier to keep working or forget.

Forget everything (throw your thoughts into the river)

“Forget everything” concludes the album and the suite, and explores the darker “what if” of forgetting. Bailing. It’s something I’d never do, but I can’t help the rare dark intrusive thought. This song expands upon the bassline introduced in “st. alphonsus” and takes it in an ironically optimistic direction. The song also calls back to the refrain of an earlier track “belly”, largely an empowerment anthem, to signify the difficulty of moving on.

“The worst days of our lives” as a narrative summary

The only song without an obvious reference to another song on the album is “The worst days of our lives.” It stands on its own stylistically in a way (I don’t use nearly as much sidechain compression anywhere else in Kid Lightbulbs’ oeuvre), but I realized it sort of functions as an abstract or summary of the complicated growth that occurs over the course of the album.

Oddly enough, the final section of “the worst days of our lives” (signaled by the only major chord change in the song) contains a callback to different song of mine not on this album, “Off the rocker.” This is a song I made back in 2012 under the name Sophomores, and it got a little bit of attention online and a few remixes. I never made a song like it again, and I’m not sure it still holds up. But “the worst days of our lives” was originally written as a sort of reprise/evolution of that idea meant to signal my development as a songwriter and producer. In a way that could be a weird (and likely overblown) allusion to this whole album concept I’m writing about now. I’ve been sitting with many of these songs for a long time, and somehow they have both continued to reflect feelings I still feel up to a decade after their conception, and have grown with me and taken on new meaning over time.

Art is wild like that.

Internet DIY: My own music selling mechanism

Three weeks ago I laid out some background on why I care about staying independent as an online-first musician, and the principles I’ll try to stick to in doing so. Now I’ll go a bit deeper on one of my DIY explorations: selling my music directly to people who want to buy it.

I have set this up on kidlightbulbs.com, such that viewers can buy any of my music from me directly – not on Bandcamp or the iTunes Store or at a record shop, but via a payment link that I control and from which I receive all the buyer’s money (less processing fees, which are basically unavoidable if you want to accept credit cards). I don’t need to hand 15% of it to a third party. At my tiny scale, this is insignificant, but at a certain scale it means a lot of money the artist does not get for their work.

Background

Back in my late teens, I was in a weird instrumental prog rock band. We built a decent following in southern Connecticut as a niche act. We formed in 2004 - CD burning technology (and piracy generally) was already pretty widespread, but streaming hadn’t come around yet. We also had no idea what other bands were doing to make, promote, distribute their music, so we just tried a bunch of stuff — like burning our poor-quality demos to a CD, slapping together some ridiculous artwork in my mom’s copy of Microsoft Publisher, printing them on my inkjet printer at home, assembling a few CD packages, and selling them for $5 at shows. And we sold some! Between that and simply playing shows and talking with folks before and after said shows, we build this small following that allowed us to open for some national touring (albeit obscure) acts like Fish (from the band Marillion), Starship (fka Jefferson Starship), and The Machine (a noteworthy Pink Floyd tribute band). We also got some press and were offered a management contract at one point– not because we had our stuff played on radio or had a certain number of followers on MySpace and Facebook at the time, but because people were talking about our stuff IRL.

IRL stuff obviously happens still, but overwhelming what matters is online social proof. Yes, you can get press, radio play, and so on, but most artists gain a meaningful following through painstaking, neverending content marketing to push Spotify plays, getting lucky with a viral TikTok video, or being born into money or a recording industry family. Even if you do, unless you are Taylor Swift (and basically only that), you don’t make a sustainable living doing so. We weren’t making meaningful cash as a local New Haven band, but we did make a tiny bit of money on these burned CD sales, t-shirts, and so on – and if the industry hadn’t changed, and we kept at it, it’s possible we could have. Now it simply seems impossible… unless there’s another way.

I like to tinker with websites, always have. I never formally learned how to code but would mess around with services like WordPress and Drupal just to see what I could do with them. Working with software engineers for the last 15 years, I’ve gradually picked up concepts and know-how that has gotten me slightly better at this (or at least awareness of what is possible on the Internet with very little effort).

In the last year, a lot of things happened that ultimately led to me caring about the value of my music:

• I lost a job during a brutal tech job market, which had me exploring myriad other ways of making money while I looked for my next job
  
• I met a bunch of great musicians (many of which I’d call friends now!) all challenging & lifting each other up to elevate our art and the attention it’s getting
  
• Bandcamp, arguably the last holdout music platform working in support of independent musicians, got sold again, and then gutted half its staff
  
• Spotify cut its royalty payouts for all artists generating less than 1,000 streams per song per year, funneling those funds instead to (mostly) major-label artists

On that last one: from a business strategy standpoint, I understand why Spotify changed its royalty mechanics. I’d make pennies for the few hundred streams some of my songs are getting; it was never a viable source of income other than for the extremely successful 0.001% of musicians. But the gesture makes clear the painful reality of streaming: It is for consumers first, suppliers (artists) second, and unless you are in the extreme upper minority of the supplier base, you basically cannot make money in this model. Therefore, I no longer think of Spotify as a source of royalty revenue, but rather a sometimes-predictable marketing channel for my music and the Kid Lightbulbs brand.

Somewhere in the middle of this (in early April ’24), Pharrell decided to release his new album Virginia: Black Yacht Rock Vol. 1 on a random website with no press or gimmicks – you can go there right now and stream or download the whole album for free, with an option to provide your email address.

This is ballsy, but Pharrell can afford to do it. It’s also not the first instance of this – Radiohead did this in 2007 with In Rainbows (introducing the “name your price” model for music sales), and plenty of artists have gradually offered other ways of supporting their craft since then thanks to platforms like Bandcamp and Patreon.

Each of those platforms takes a fee. Again, this makes sense: Bandcamp offers infrastructure that many musicians can’t fathom managing themselves. But in 2024, it’s increasingly easy to set up much of this infrastructure on one’s own, using platforms that everyone (including listeners) already uses. So I did. Turns out it’s actually quite possible to sell your (digital) music without any of those big platforms claiming to be the best or only way to do so.

And if you have even a small base of fans willing to invest, they’ll buy from you – I’ve made nearly $500 on pre-orders alone for my second album (STEP INTO THE OCEAN), about 10% of which came through direct sales on my website. The rest came through Bandcamp, which is fine for now and I promoted heavily, but the fact that I generated more than $0 in money from a website I fully control is interesting.

A quick warning

Before I actually get into any of this, I want to lay out a few disclaimers because there is a fair amount of risk involved with the approach I took. I don’t think I recommend the specific approach I took to anyone unwilling to experiment or understanding the flaws, which I will document throughout this writeup. In a lot of ways, the approach I took does resemble the rough process of burning a CD, printing an inkjet album cover, and slapping it together oneself - but early fans are willing to work with that. I also personally believe that a good fan puts value in the art they’re buying, far more than the distribution method. A set of MP3s is a set of MP3s, no matter how they arrive in your inbox.

How I did it

Here is a list of every tool and service I used to set this all up:

• Stripe, the online payments platform - 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction
  
• Dropbox as the file storage and distribution mechanism - $9/month (or free if you don’t need a lot of storage space). You can also use Mega.nz, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, or basically any cloud storage provider to do this.
  
• Song.link to dynamically offer links to stream my music anywhere the listener wants - free
  
• Buttondown, an “headless” email newsletter service - free for up to 100 subscribers, otherwise $9/mo starting price

I could also count Blot, the service I’m using to power this site, but it’s technically not necessary unless you are also writing a blog online. You can spin up a site on a number of services for free or cheaply, buy a domain for $10, and point the domain to that site. I recommend Carrd for this, or a free link-in-bio service like Buffer’s Start Page¹.

Chances are, if you use Patreon, Ko-fi or even Bandcamp, you’re familiar with Stripe (or PayPal in the case of Bandcamp album purchases). These platforms also use Stripe to power their payment processing. When someone buys your music or merch on Bandcamp, you lose both Bandcamp’s cut (10-15%) and a payment processing fee to Stripe or PayPal.

Here’s a fun thing about Stripe: They actually have a number of no-code, incredibly consumer friendly services that allow you to take payments online in a great, trustworthy user experience, both for you and the patron.

The piece that’s missing from Stripe is distribution. Distribution is hard; I would absolutely not want to take on distribution of physical merch in some DIY fashion. (I know I could, but I also don’t want stacks of Kid Lightbulbs t-shirts sitting in my basement or the burden of having to package and ship them out.)

Digital distribution, while hard, is a lot easier in 2024. Secure file hosting solutions abound, and some have great solutions for securely sharing large sets of files, like an album of songs in multiple formats with artwork and liner notes. I chose Dropbox because it (mostly) aligns with my values, is super reliable, and even has file access monitoring and password protection on files if I wanted to really lock down this process.

How it works in practice

I need a way to easily share the finished album with people who bought it from me – so, here’s the process as it stands today:

1. Someone goes to kidlightbulbs.com and wants to buy an album of mine
   
2. They click on the “Buy direct link” and are taken to a checkout page hosted by Stripe
   
3. They pay however they like
   
4. They get an email confirmation, and so do I
   
5. As soon as I get that confirmation of payment, I simply send the buyer a templated email with a Dropbox link to download the album

Simple as that. It’s like I burned you a CD and emailed it to you.

What if someone emails you in the middle of the night? Currently, they’ll need to wait until I see their email the following morning. This isn’t ideal, but I am pretty sure I can embed the Dropbox link into the payment confirmation email itself, so the buyer can download it immediately after paying.

Does the email look sketchy/unprofessional? I don’t personally think so, because I wrote a concise, grammatically correct and somewhat personalized emial that thanks the user again for buying my music. I’ve had a few people buy direct from me, and they’ve said it’s been great!

Setup process

1) Compress your album/song/whatever, along with its cover art, into a .zip file. On macOS, you can easily do this by selecting all the files, control-clicking, and choosing “Compress.” You can also do this on Windows.

I’d recommend including your music in multiple formats — at least WAV and MP3 — so the buyer has the best quality audio you can send them.

2) Build yourself a simple artist site. I recommend Carrd, Blot, Wordpress or Ghost for this.

This is key. The social networks, Linktrees, and a lot of “artist profiles” block stuff like taking your own payments, or heavily limit what you can do, and many of them have policies allowing them to take down your site or profile without warning, are likely to raise prices due to their incentives to grow or profit massively, or just go away as the tech landscape continues to change. The services I recommend are simple, reliable, powerful and don’t (seem to) have those problems.

Even if you want to stop here because your music is just fine on Bandcamp and Spotify and whatnot, you should have a website that you control. If you are an independent artist and are struggling to figure this out, email me and I will help you.

3) Create a Stripe account & verify yourself. Once you do, you’ll have access to a big dashboard. It looks intimidating and like it was built for software developers — which it originally was! — but there are some quite easy-to-use and (dare I say) fun features in here we’ll dive into.

4) Create your “products” in Stripe (ie. any album, single, or other thing you’d want to sell) and set their prices.

• Click on “Product catalog” on the left side.
  
• Click on “Add product”.
  
• Fill out some basic information on the album, single, etc. you’re looking to sell. You can set a fixed price, or click on “More pricing options” to enable name-your-own pricing if you like!

5) For each product, create something called a Payment Link. This is basically the thing you embed on your website to allow visitors to buy from you. You can create one for any price point that you want to sell your products for.

• Find and click on the “Create payment link” button.
  
• Click the “Buy button” option. (There is also an option to get a simple link, but it’s more work to get it looking nice.)
  
• Customize to your liking. There are two different designs (I prefer the simple button), and you can customize the text and color of it.
  
• Click “Save changes and copy code.” This gives you an embed code to place on your site.

6) Put the Payment Link embed code onto your website. Knowing where to paste it depends on your site builder you chose and how exactly you want it to look. Here are a few tips:

• If you went with Carrd, they have an “Embed” block, which allows you to put code into a special block that looks nice and contained around the other elements on your site.
  
• On Ghost or **Wordpress, you can include an “Embed” block on a specific page of your site in that page’s editor.
  
• Blot allows you to write whole pages of your site in Markdown, and you can paste the embed code directly into a page’s markdown file. (This is what I did for kidlightbulbs.com.)

In the end, it could look something like this:

And now you can sell your music directly to fans, on a site you fully control without having to pay out a platform fee.

Other future enhancements or fun ideas to try

Add purchasers to your email list automatically
Got an email newsletter? Your email newsletter service probably has an integration with a service called Zapier, which is a cool automation service with a free option. You can build an automation that grabs the email from someone who’s purchased, and add them to your mailing list. (Make sure either (1) you ask the user in the Stripe settings if they want to opt into emails from you, or (2) your newsletter service sends that person an opt-in confirmation, otherwise you just subscribed someone to an email list without their consent 😬)

Broadcast to your social channels every time (or every day) someone buys
You can set this up with the aforementioned Zapier workflow that triggers upon a purchase, and have it also publish a social post through a service like Buffer.

Discounts / coupons
Stripe makes it somewhat easy to spin up discounted pricing if you want to run a sale for a limited time. You can do this by going to your product listing(s) in Stripe, hitting Edit Product, then adding a new price you can set as the Default.

You can also set up Coupons if you’d rather run a sale that way, or offer something exclusively to your fans/patrons at a discount.

I’m not sure if this is worth the effort it took to figure it out. But it’s very nice to know that there is technology to DIY my online selling of music.

Announcing album 2: STEP INTO THE OCEAN

I can’t believe I’m now at a point where I can share this: my second album is called STEP INTO THE OCEAN and preorders are now open for it.

It’s 13 tracks and 54 minutes long. A decade in the making. Somehow it’s both an exercise in restraint and an unapologetic alternative rock sprawl. The five singles I’ve released in 2024 are on it, and 8 more tracks to complete the journey.

It’ll be released on Friday May 17. The evening prior, I’ll be hosting a little listening party on Bandcamp – RSVP here.

If you want to listen to it, you have options:

• Preorder on Bandcamp right now for $15.

• Alternatively, preorder it from me directly for $12 (no platform fees ftw).

• If you don’t want to spend 💵, no worries! It will be on streaming services in early June.

Getting unstuck in time

Much of this album took form in 2013-2014, during a period where my now-wife and I decided to move in together, then relocate to New York City, only to “come home” after 10 months due to a job change and a visceral feeling of isolation. It was during this period where our relationship was tested for the first time, and I produced a lot of music as a result. This period had me revisiting ideas from years prior to that, even – “trendsetters” has elements dating back to 2009, “curiosity” lifts from a solo piano piece I wrote in 2008 for a school project, “belly” was originally intended for a collaborative project with my friend Tess back in 2011. I intended to put out this material as an album called Bedtime Rituals (with “ritual” sort of functioning as a title track and centerpiece). I spent months getting this album to sound the way I wanted, never quite getting there.

Then life got in the way and this album basically sat on a hard drive. I got deeply involved with the job I took “back home” in Boston and music took a major back seat. I would occasionally have and record an idea, compile those into albums and quietly “release” them on the internet with no promotion whatsoever, and basically nobody heard them as a result. These songs were occasional reflections on my relationships, impostor syndrome, capitalism, the like. In early 2019 I had put together an album called Sleepwalker under the alias Sophomores (which contained an early version of “forget everything” - another song dating back several years), which I intended to use to revitalize an experimental pop act, only to find out that the young girl from Little Miss Sunshine (who was now an adult woman) had announced her debut single “Sleepwalking” from her new project Sophomore. I saw this as a sign to step away from music for a bit.

In 2019, after abandoning Sophomores and with life fully in the way, I changed jobs and needed to go to San Francisco for a new-job-onboarding thing. My wife & I made it into a little trip, rented a car & drove down the Pacific Coast Highway. We’d never been to places like Big Sur and it was wonderful. One of the beaches there had these weird wood structures all over that looked like small tents that one might rest in before taking a dive into the ocean. Somehow decrepit & meticulous & harrowing & exciting at once. She took a picture of one.

In late 2023, I kicked off the Kid Lightbulbs project with my first album Throw myself into the bay. Some people on the internet seemed to really like it, which honestly caught me by total surprise and boosted my confidence immensely. I started revisiting my older audio sessions and realized that I have at least 3 full albums of material just sitting here, much of which is pretty good!

I dusted off the old Bedtime Rituals sessions, starting with “trendsetters”, only to immediately realize that these songs had taken on new meaning in the decade since originally recording. Originally “trendsetters” was about losing my edge against younger hipsters making differently interesting music – now it’s simply about getting older. “ritual” was about the comfort of my relationship during a hard time – now it’s about the fact that my wife and I always return to each other no matter what chaos life is throwing at us. ”She’s too good for me” (a song I have yet to release) is as relevant as ever.

STEP INTO THE OCEAN is about the uncomfortable acceptance of a life with complexity. It’s about getting older and still having love but being okay with its warts. It bizarrely emerged as a sequel to my more urgent and abrasive first album (both in themes and title); where Throw myself into the bay needed to get out of my system, I feel I can handle and thrive in the feelings of this second album for a while.

I hope folks enjoy this thing as much as I do.

Playlists are the currency of digital middlemen

I’m not sure playlist curators are the boon to indie artists folks think they are.

For the last 4-5 months building up Kid Lightbulbs, I’ve tried various ways of getting my music placed in playlists (mostly on Spotify), based on the assumption that having my music on playlists that are followed by or listened to by lots of users will increase my reach. Given that broader reach, a small percentage of users within my reach may like it, add it to their own playlists or library, and keep listening ultimately growing into fans. This has been constantly nudged as the main way to promote oneself in the modern streaming music business (ie. Spotify, thanks to its 65+% market share).

I have found that this hypothesis is (mostly) incorrect. Most playlist opportunities seem to be for the benefit of the playlister’s brand rather than the artists. Many are outright pay-for-plays scams. Artists are nudged constantly to share and promote the playlists, and I’ve only seen one-off listeners from those playlists. Virtually zero repeat listeners. I question whether they’re worth my time.

I don’t think this is entirely the fault of all playlisters (outside the scammers).

There are folks who are interested in the artist making the music they enjoy, and others who have it on in the background. Spotify has made music incredibly convenient and affordable for the latter group, and that’s most of their users. Most folks simply don’t care about the artist; instead, the vibe.

But playlisters, like all creators, often seem to want their own personal brand. So the artists on their playlists are in competition for attention with the playlister themselves. When you are promoting a playlist you’re on, you’re promoting Spotify and the creator; you’ll get a tiny fraction of the attention a listener might give.

What’s working for me instead: consistent releases, honesty & vulnerability & fun, actively engaging with communities online to find the folks who’d seek my music out.

This is not to say stop submitting to playlists! Some are great! I love several of the playlists I’m on from folks in this community, many of whom are also artists (which I think helps defeat the whole creator brand thing I argue above).

This is barely advice, just an observation, and it’s highly contingent on what the bar for success is for an independent musician. Do you want to inflate a number, or find legitimate supporters of your work?

Some guiding principles for creative independence

Over the past few months I’ve been quite energized by the ideas of online independence and transparency, both as a tech person and a musician. This has been inspired by a few recent developments:

• My working for Buffer, a company who continues to double-down on remaining independent, transparent, small and sustainably profitable
  
• My budding interest in the fediverse, decentralized Internet protocols, and related concepts
  
• The news that Bandcamp, a platform championing independent musicians, was acquired by Epic Games (the Fortnite company), then sold to Songtradr, then gutted of half its staff
  
• My discovery of Faircamp, a self-hosted alternative to Bandcamp built by Simon Repp
  
• The recent increase of Spotify’s investment into in algorithmic, rather than editorial, playlists
  
• My increased attention toward Threads, the new Meta social platform, on which I’ve successfully started building an audience

These are just a few of many related ideas converging on two facts:

1. The Internet is rapidly becoming a chaotic mess run by a small set of very large companies optimizing for shareholder value and thus uninterested in investments to tame said chaos for the good of humanity;
   
2. Opportunities still exist for thoughtful organic connection online, amidst (or away from) this chaos, and there is growing demand for and willingness to search for it

Oddly enough, Meta (of all companies) is straddling a very fine line between those two mindsets thanks to the introduction of Threads and long-term support for concepts like open-sourcing and the Fediverse.

Some context

As a musician, for years I struggled with having the confidence of promoting my work — partly due to impostor syndrome — but also because it’s felt like somehow both a Sisyphean and Kafkaesque task to market oneself online. There are the conventional routes of music promotion: play shows, submit to press outlets for coverage, hire publicist/agent/manager/etc., which is full of scammers and bias and dead ends. Then there’s the Internet platforms, which theoretically level the playing field between bedroom novice musicians and major-label acts, but in practice are a relentless game of constant attention-seeking and algorithm-pleasing. Not to mention that the “conventional” industry is also playing those same Internet games, often with money to influence the outcome of the games. And scammers. And now AI-generated garbage.

Not to mention that the music I make - highly personal, a bit sprawling and unconventional rock music and stuff that I’d consider “art” - is not what’s in demand in the general public.

But in the past 4 months I’ve found a niche: fellow musicians or independent music appreciators on Threads. It’s a small niche, but my presence within it is growing, and I have (small) data showing that. People in that niche have paid me real money for my creative output.

This means a lot. Not just to me personally - I am extremely grateful, flattered, and a bit bewildered that people would pay me for my music!!! - but in terms of what it opens up for potential methods of building my musical work (or any musical work) into a small sustainable project on its own. My goal is not to turn this into a full time job, but I would love to be able to gain a small but supportive audience of folks who value my creative output and be willing to financially support it in some way, because I believe that good art deserves market value.

This is not a new idea. Fan support platforms like Patreon and Bandcamp have existed for over a decade. But they are platforms funded by venture capitalists or large corporations, and even so are very much outliers in a music industry dominated by Spotify – a large and highly unprofitable business — and the major record labels, who partly bankroll Spotify for their own gain. Most people who listen to music have never even heard of these other platforms, let alone support an artist on them.

Moreover, as Spotify leans more and more into shuffled algorithmic playlists, the music that most people will listen to are (1) massive viral hits or (2) music specifically produced to optimize placement in the algorithm. And if I think about the listening habits of most non-musicians I know, they likely don’t care. Most of them don’t care or even realize who made the songs Spotify feeds them. This is definitely not good for artists, and I’m not sure it’s good for the world.

So I feel compelled to look elsewhere, and in a way that does not further entrench platforms incentivized to relentlessly grow at the expense of art & artists. I want to be unapologetically independent and thrive in doing so.

What’s my goal here?

It’s not to tear down the platforms. I’m not on some war against Bandcamp since it got acquired then sold then gutted.

It’s much more about three things:

• A strong conviction that there is some demand for my art, and I can leverage my knowledge of tech and business to turn that into some kind of sustainable side income
  
• A deep-rooted interest in wanting to own my brand & presence on the internet and the relationship with my supporters, driven likely by a passion for DIY & punk ethos
  
• Having redundancy in case the music distribution platforms do collapse or decline in importance

Guiding principles

1. The primary goal is creative freedom above all else, across all aspects of my creative work (including branding)
   
2. Minimize money given to services/platforms misaligned with my values
   
3. Minimize service lock-in
   
4. Must be low cost/time to maintain
   
5. Wide upper funnel (distribution) to maximize reach, narrow lower funnel (purchase) to maximize profit & fan connection
   
6. Strength in numbers: support & collaborate with similarly-minded artists & service providers

That last one is tricky. There are two big hairy problems: payment processing and file distribution. If you want to make money on your music, you need to accept payment methods your potential customers have, and then deliver the music (sometimes in multiple formats) to them in some way. What services like Bandcamp and Spotify do is complex.

But there are alternatives if you begin to think about it differently. Why not just email a paying customer a .zip file with my album in it? Or a Dropbox link? Or a link to a file that I host on a server managed by a business I trust?

I’ve always been fascinated by local markets and the DIY ethos. The idea that, to keep costs low and ownership high, you keep things simple, organic, and in your control. These principles help my process feel truer to DIY but online.

Applying this to my web presence

I’ve already begun applying these principles to how I maintain my presence on the Internet and how I conduct myself.

My website (kidlightbulbs.com) is built with Blot, a simple $5/month service run by one guy named David that turns a Dropbox folder (or Git repository for the nerds) into a functioning blog. I write text, throw it in a folder, and it shows up. That might even be how you’re reading this right now. David runs the whole thing himself with seemingly no funding or support, shares a public record of features he’s considering, and openly invites his users to provide feedback.

My newsletter is hosted on Buttondown, a free (or inexpensive) newsletter service run by a guy named Justin. It’s completely independently and sustainably run, and Justin shares exactly what he’s doing and using to run the service. He (or his 1 support person) respond to my questions in under 3 hours every time. It’s wild.

I get analytics for my site via Counter, a free (donation-based) and open-source service run by a guy named Irae in Berlin. It’s awesome and all you really need for “website analytics.”

Music distribution is hard to do in alignment with these values, and something for which I am actively exploring options. Distribution to the streaming services is particularly tricky – however, I’ve begun to think of this less as an essential service and more as a marketing expense, and therefore I’m willing to eschew my values a bit to make this happen.

I currently host and distribute my music via 3 services:

• Bandcamp, where I host my full albums and my current patron subscription offering
  
• LANDR, which takes my releases and distributes them to the various streaming services like Spotify (I’m currently phasing out my subscription with Distrokid, a more well-known but increasingly sketchy service that is also partly bankrolled by Spotify, which as a reminder is partly bankrolled by the major record labels)
  
• Dropbox, my cloud storage solution of choice

Yes, Dropbox is publicly traded and therefore incentivized to prioritize shareholders of users; however, I strongly align with several of their values including great user experience design and remote/flexible work. Basically, far less evil than Google and far more reliable than other offerings I’ve tried.

LANDR has raised 9 rounds of venture funding, and likely is incentivized to grow rapidly. However, their interface design is by far the best of all distribution services I’ve tried (Distrokid, Tunecore, Symphonic, and Unchained Music are the others). It’s probably silly, but good simple design matters a lot to me. I don’t have a lot of time to fight against what’s essentially a form to fill out anytime I want to release music (every 2-4 weeks). That plus (from what I hear) great customer service is worth the little extra they charge.

Bandcamp is interesting because they are one of the last holdouts in the music industry championing independent music, rather than reverting to the least common denominator of what’s popular. I am cautiously optimistic about their future, though their rough 2023 and the increasingly cutthroat tech landscape leaves me wanting an out if I need it. Fortunately, Bandcamp allows you to easily download all your albums and even your followers’ emails so you can easily move them elsewhere.

In future posts I’ll dig more into the experiments I’m doing around

1. direct financial support,
   
2. offering flexible listening options to my (tiny but growing) audience, and
   
3. promoting on the social networks and the Fediverse

Some unfiltered thoughts on AI and art

Note: There was a lot of chatter today on Threads about AI and art. I had some thoughts that developed over the day and wanted to post them with some slight refinement after reflecting a bit. The following is still pretty scattered and unrefined thinking, but I wanted to put it somewhere.

Art (made by humans, based on new human experience) is vital. But I also think there are two types of people when it comes to perception of art:

1. Those capable of gaining some kind of intangible, spiritual, non-financial value from experiencing art
   
2. Those who cannot, and thus can only perceive its value as functional (primarily as entertainment, marketing or utility)

I think that’s what this whole AI and art situation comes down to. And I suspect those with money/power/influence in 21st-century America, where most of this debate seems to be happening, seem to be in the latter camp. The rest seems to spin off from there: the incentives put on media platforms to scale and optimize for mass consumption in exchange for surprise and discovery of new media, the increased homogeny and decreased uniqueness within “popular” music, the hype within the tech industry about AI as a solution to make commercial art forms massively more efficient, the formation of niches online for folks in the first group (the art kids, I’ll call them) who are willing to pay perhaps more than before to support artists who desperately need it.

The fact that a small group of artists are able to partly fund their vocations with patron subscriptions and the like gives me hope; though I do wonder how much of this is driven by the thrill of voyeurism and intimacy among patrons, rather than a genuine interest in supporting an artist.

I don’t really care if AI ends up making the majority of the volume of what we today consider “art”; there will always be a need for it and value put on it by someone. It will be important to know how to tune the garbage out. That also depends, I guess, on what you’d consider garbage, which is highly subjective and likely personal to the individual consumer.

Even if AI “gets good” at making art and music in particular styles - to what extent would we call it art? What inspired it? What’s the context? What was the process of it coming to be? Is it even art in its purpose once created, or just marketing collateral designed to sell products and/or promote some brand? (That seems to be the majority of use cases for AI art, though I think it’s worth considering these questions for, say, AI-generated art submitted to art shows. Is the purpose to win first prize? Or is it to express some sentiment vulnerably of the individual who coaxed AI into making it?)

Related: is the feel-good hit of the summer any year really art, even if it’s meticulously crafted by a team of humans in a professional studio setting? Or is it marketing collateral for the musician/producer/brand who made it?

I personally think it depends on the creator’s context and listener’s interpretation. If you’re inspired by the creative process to get to that end product, you might think of this - or even just the process part - as art. If you’re listening to the feel-good bit of the summer as you sip cocktails at a hip club on the Vegas strip, I don’t think you’re thinking of the music as art in that moment.

Not trying to throw shade on all pop music – I love a lot of pop music. But it’s pretty open to debate whether all music is intended or perceived as art, regardless of who’s creating it.

Okay now let’s say you’re creating art with AI as a tool in your toolkit. To what extent is the “AI whisperer” an artist, as opposed to a director of machines?

I made cover “art” for my last 3 releases with an AI product called Stable Diffusion. Do I personally consider it art? Yes, because it triggered an emotional response in me when I saw it.

Do I consider myself a graphic artist? Absolutely not. If anything, the software is the artist and I simply commissioned a work from a piece of software.

Am I publicly promoting the cover art as art? Not sure. It is intended as a supplement to the music (which is the primary art for me), but it’s a cool companion so I’ll leave that question open for now.

There will always be people making art for the reasons they make art, regardless of the tools they use to do so. I hope desperately that there continues to be ways to find, be inspired by, and be challenged by new art of different forms.

This is the primary problem to solve. Spotify isn’t really solving it anymore, Google isn’t, the conventional music industry isn’t, AI is simply going to make the problem harder to solve in every format. If the people exclusively “in charge” (ie. Run the dominant platforms, control the government, hold the money, etc.) are incapable of thinking of art beyond its ability to entertain or serve a low-grade function, then this won’t get solved. Those people simply have no reason or capability to perceive this problem; if they do, they will likely try to tackle it with different goals and incentives than those who want to simply find and experience more art.

The second? We need better words to describe this stuff. I’m not sure everything that we throw the label “art” is even art. Maybe it is just marketing material for something else. Someone on Threads made the distinction of “commercial art” which is helpful; we should start using that more.

Listening to Earthside’s “Watching the Earth Sink” half asleep on a morning flight

I found myself listening to the new Earthside album, Let the Truth Speak, for the first time at around 6am at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport while waiting for a 7am flight home. I was coming off a work trip that was overall great, but I cannot overstate how exhausted I was — operating on 3 hours sleep after a week full of intense planning and debating and team-building, lugging a carry-on, juggling overpriced egg sandwich and burnt coffee in hands. I missed my family and my bed. My brain was exhausted from the past week but still swimming with thoughts, and I needed to slow it down. It probably was not wise for me to listen to a 78-minute progressive metal album under these conditions.

“Watching the Earth Sink” (track 5 of 10) began just before my boarding group was called up. For the next twelve minutes, I daydreamed one of the most vivid daydreams I’ve had in my life, which followed me from the airport waiting area, into the Airbus A220, into my seat, into the faces and tiny windows surrounding me. In my half-asleep stupor I thought the world might be tearing itself apart around me, exacting vengeance for our endless societal wrongdoings and forcing me to watch helplessly from my aisle seat.

This song is not for everyone. It’s progressive metal, which is already a much-maligned genre overfilled with tropes. It’s nearly 12 minutes in length. There are reportedly 29 separate guitar performances on this song. Even some diehard metal fans don’t care for it, one reviewer calling it “exhausting” with a “careful build-up, only to unceremoniously wipe it off the floor with a predictable post-metal jaunt whose single trick is to be heavy.”

I disagree. I’m not sure if “Watching the Earth Sink” is my favorite song of 2023, but I think it’s a song deserving special attention and analysis. It’s meticulous in its construction. It moves the progressive metal genre forward. It’s one that requires multiple listens and (if I’m honest) benefits from some kind of sleep or sensory deprivation to appreciate it fully. Consider listening when you’re alone, driving through empty forest roads in the dark, or perhaps when you’re half asleep and feeling down while stuck at an airport, people watching.

Earthside themselves describe “Watching the Earth Sink” as “an instrumental narrative told from the perspective of an onlooker to the current state of the world—one who feels disconnected from the warring powers that be, left to simply bear witness to calamities they feel helpless to prevent.” You feel all of this over the 12 minutes of the piece. You feel it after sitting with the title alone. It’s perfect in its bleakness. It implies passivity — you’re helpless to do anything but watch as the Earth is sinking around you. Just sinking. Not exploding or imploding, not tearing apart like an earthquake. A sinkhole. Slowly and gradually fading out of view, probably unnoticeable except for the bubbling earthen muck. Perhaps sinking to baser, perfectly human instincts, lashing out at the inhabitants that care too little to take care of it or themselves.

I’re read a few reviews of Let The Truth Speak which rave about this song, some of which specifically call out guitarist Jamie van Dyck’s solo in the introductory section of “Watching” as sweet and calming. Someone likened it to floating down a river.

Nope. Not even close. This song kicks off in utter devastation. Like the mood after a funeral¹, it’s grim, beyond somber. Clean tone and dense reverb may imply “calming vibes,” but Jamie (guitarist, composer and friend) plays as if he’s suffering an existential crisis, stumbling out of tempo and in somber defeat. Jamie oscillates slowly in my earbuds between D minor to B- flat minor, two of the saddest chords in Western music. In my half- asleep stupor at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport, I am there with him as I glance at televisions spouting horrifying news about the Gaza crisis while twenty- and thirty-somethings stare at laptops and smartphones and the more neurotic travelers cut each other in line for a plane not yet ready for boarding. Nothing is good.

Until carefully voiced chords breathe and meander upwards, pivoting to inversions of D major then to a less bleak G minor, suggesting a cautious way forward. The guitar continues its musing as I oscillate between people-watching and my iPhone. It feels pointless to try to understand anymore as the guitar settles into an E minor to lydian E-flat, as if it’s second guessing itself.

My boarding group is called. My cautious optimism is complemented by a meditative ostinato at one minute, fifty-three seconds. Played in unison by Ryan’s bass guitar and an ethereal bell-sounding synth from Frank on keyboards, defeat turns to surrealist wonder in 23/16. I appreciate that this section has no discernible melody or solo; it’s driven by mood and movement. It’s difficult to keep the pulse, but it almost doesn’t matter because things are looking up: I’m finally almost on my plane, it’s not overly crowded, the guitar has found solace in dense Lydian chords and arpeggios if only for a few moments. Even after the arpeggios abruptly cut, the ostinato continues for four bars. We’re still okay. The Earth has yet to sink.

The ostinato is suddenly, but only partially, replaced by militant clicks on the snare drum and driving root notes on the bass. Frank keeps wandering in twenty-three, occasionally embellishing on the core, while the rest of the band shifts to a tense 4/4. But you can’t really tell: the juxtaposition of increased pace with slow root movement in the bass makes it even more difficult than before to find the pulse. I feel uneasy. I’m stopped in the aisle as I wait for passengers ahead of me frantically search for overhead space.

At 4:11: a jump scare.

The bass guitar tone suddenly shifts on an up beat to overdrive and I don’t see it coming. I haven’t had this happen while listening to music in years. We’re now unapologetically in 4/4 and it feels like something is careening toward disaster. I come to my senses and look out the window and I imagine Florida buildings in the distance starting to collapse as a crack in the Earth forms and spreads toward the airport tarmac. The floor of the plan is vibrating under my feet. The ground splitting in the distance, out of which a massive earthen hand rises up, preparing to grab the plane and tear it in two.

Four minutes and forty-five seconds, the tense rhythmic build abruptly explodes into a brutal, direct 3/4. Drop B flat guitars, kicks and cymbals each pummel your listener in unison for exactly 19 repetitions until shifting to C sharp on an upbeat, continuing the feeling of the music shifting below your feet when you least expect. The use of harmonic minor scale here combined with the intentional chord movement on upbeats really exemplifies sinister chaos. The plane is taking off and in my head it’s moving as fast as it can to avoid the earthen behemoth careening into the side of it. Frank’s synthesizer screams faintly in a distant corner of the mix, possibly echoing my own internalized panic. This is quickly overtaken by demonic orchestral hits² that follow the chord movements in synch with the other instruments, as if to suggest it’s now useless to panic. Suffering is inevitable now.

But by minute seven, a reprieve. We’re well in the air as the destruction unfolds below. While the plane flies safely and normally, I feel an uncertainty punctuated by the pivot to the key of A, the dominant chord of the song’s D minor root. It’s rare to hear such a simple chord change in progressive metal, where rhythmic and harmonic complexity abound. Ryan’s bass arpeggiates 7ths and 9th chords as they change from A to G to E flat, finally returning to the root, perfectly simulating my unease. Jamie leads the way with a confident melody, and it almost alleviates the feeling.

At 8:12 I am in a haze as everything fades away but a descending keyboard line. It’s as if there are embers and ash dancing around; the heavy use of major 7ths in this otherwise epically bleak song are equal parts playful and ominous. Eventually all the instrumentalists join the dance, with performances that evoke a desperate last stand. Jamie’s guitar wails with desperation as Ben majestically slams on every tom in his kit. After a few bars the bass and a deeper guitar take over with a sinister riff, mostly playing root notes again – almost an homage to the earlier devastating section, D harmonic minor and all, reminding me there’s more destruction to be had. It’s coming.

Once bass and guitar reach for a deep baritone A, we’re in a nose dive. This is doom metal. There’s no more hope. I’m pulled down into the depths. A once-playful melody has been mangled into something evil by a wicked cabal of guitars. The drum kit reaches escape velocity over sixteen bars.

And then it…just stops. There’s no resolution, no final word. I am left hanging just above the abyss.

It was a pretty normal flight in reality. I landed at Logan Airport in Boston on time, and got home to my wife, kid and dog a little over an hour later. But during the early minutes of said flight I experienced something visceral, gripping, devastating.

It’s quite rare nowadays that music — and music alone – can achieve that.