motorcycles, technology, music, business

On the car ride (boring) in to work this morning I was listening to the “Indie Holiday” Pandora radio station that I just yesterday began to cultivate after copying it to my personal account.

To the point: When I reached my office, as I was driving up the driveway a song by Mindy Smith came on. I have never heard of this artist but was immediately pulled in by her voice and the arrangement of the song. I guess I am a sucker for a female bluegrassy singer (think Alison Krauss). To follow that tangent for a second, bluegrass is a wonderful genre because it is mostly upbeat and in a major key but allows for some harmonic exploration. It also offers the benefits of country-like songwriting without the twang that causes my ears to bleed.

Now back to the lyric: The song is titled “Follow the Shepherd Home” from the album My Holiday. The first lyric of the song is as follows:

When my paper heart’s in a frantic wind

Before this morning the phrase “paper heart” never had any meaning or impact on me but when you put a paper heart in a frantic wind it completely makes sense to me and transports me to that dark windy landscape with a weathered waxy tissue paper heart fluttering about in the gusts.

The real point: A great lyric can transcend the words on the paper and implant tremendous visuals into the listener’s head as to transport them from their current physical location.

Thanks for reading and keep writing great song lyrics. One line at a time is all it takes.

They won’t hold me like you do – by Jeremy Blanchard
Written: May 5 – 7, 2012
Dedicated to: My awesome wife

This is the first song I’ve written in over four years. I am well aware of it’s faults, so be kind.
As my lyric teacher once said, “S**t makes the best fertilizer.”

It is a rather simple song, much simpler than most of my songs of old.

My favorite line is in the chorus:
“they won’t smile when the lights are off”

Here’s to more to come.
Thanks for listening.

For those interested, here are the lyrics:
——–
I could grab the stars from the sky
I could run them around the world
I could fly to the moon with my cosmonaut crew
But they won’t hold me like you do

If the storm clouds come and rip us apart
If the night dragons burn us up
If the gates of hell come take me from you
they won’t hold me like you do

[CHORUS]
They won’t hold me like you hold me
they won’t smile when the lights are off
they won’t sacrifice against love’s advice
They won’t hold me like you do

If the police come and take me to jail
If the magistrate keeps me without bail
You will still have my heart until it turns blue
cause they won’t hold me like you do

[CHORUS]

When the lions come and ravage my bones
When the floodwaters come and sweep away our home
if you say you love me there’s nothing more to do
cause they won’t hold me like you do

[CHORUS]

On Saturday we watch some of Saturday Night Live, which was a rerun, with John Bon Jovi hosting and Foo Fighters as additional musical guests. This got me to thinking, the Foo Fighters have been around for a while now and I seem to like of their stuff. Since Rachel and I subscribe to Rhapsody and use it every single day I am listening to the entire Foo Fighters catalog. I do this when I get into a band late. I did this with Radiohead last year.

Foo Fighters Discography
* Foo Fighters (1995)
* The Colour and the Shape (1997)
* There Is Nothing Left to Lose (1999)
* One by One (2002)
* In Your Honor (2005)
* Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace (2007)

This post is really a recap of my twitter updates.
I found the album Foo Fighters to be rather juvenile in both lyrics and harmonic progression.
The Colour and the Shape album was rather blase and uninspired. The Foo Fighters seemed to have gone through quite a few personnel changes in the early years and perhaps it shows in this album.
There is Nothing Left to Lose was a great step forward in maturity of lyrics and musicianship. I would say this album is where the Foo Fighters really fell into their own. The album started out very strong but eventually petered out towards the end leaving after tastes of the previous album.
One by One was on par with the previous album with evidence of a further developed song writer in Dave Grohl and a further cohesive band unit.
In Your Honor was overproduced and somebody turned up the compression way too far which resulted in a wash of sound, which is much different then Pink Floyd’s Wall of Sound. For more information on compression and the effect thereof see my previous post. This album seemed lost in the sea of mediocre alt. rock from the early part of this century. This album falls into many cliche patterns of song forming and lyric writing.
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is by far the most intricate and complex album. This album is definitely the high point in the Foo Fighter’s song writing and musicianship. There may be some recentcy effect with this album but I am trying to remain objective and analytical. The Pretender, which is one of the singles from this album, is the most interesting and powerful song. The lyrics, while not telling a complete story do portray a mature sense of defiance to the man. I like the lyrics except for the last phrase “who are you”. I don’t think it fits and detracts from the emotional peak of the chorus. This album flattened out in the middle. But came back nicely with a song highly influenced by John Lennon, Statues.

This past weekend I participated in a technology case competition hosted by MOAEC at Boston University.
It was an interesting experience for me. It was basically a 36 hour competition where the case was given at 8:00am on Saturday and the first round of presentations were at 8:00am on Sunday. My team made it to the finals and therefore presented again at 2:00pm and the final results were given at 4:30pm on Sunday. My team placed third, but that is not what I intend to write about this post. I intend to write a short opinion on MOAEC as a software offering.

MOAEC stands for media organizer and entertainment center. While that makes logical sense to call the software that, it may have been a better marketing move to come with with a more catchy product name. Moving on….

The software offers several cool features, the most impressive of which is the quick generation of dynamic playlists in as few as two clicks. Founder and CEO, Brian Looney, was a Disc Jockey in his former life and he saw a niche for an easy to use media management software. This prompted him to create MOAEC. It looks very similar to the inventory management software my step-dad produces but MOAEC is meant for music.

MOAEC also offers Voice Command control and the ability to reformat to any size screen. These two features have allowed MOAEC to be installed in cars, mostly of celebrities like Ty Law and Marriah Carrie, for mobile entertainment.
That’s all well and good but what about the everyday consumer? The consumer that is not a former or current DJ and is not a celeb who can afford to have a custom dashboard computer installed into their 2002 honda civic. That’s what this case competition was all about and just like in the competition I am going to start off with my conclusion…..It won’t sell. The everyday consumer is not going to see value in this product. That is unless MOAEC offers something substantially better and more convenient than other music players do (iTunes, winamp…..), at a price that is affordable and creates a low barrier to entry.

MOAEC currently allows the user to access their home library on the go, if the user has what MOAEC is calling Master Mo. This has some value to it. The voice commands are cool but not essential. And besides there are other softwares that do both of these things relatively well already.
What my team suggested, at my urging, is that MOAEC partner with Rhapsody in order to bring access to Rhapsody to the mobile community. This would do several things:
1)Allow MOAEC to tap into Rhapsody’s existing subscription paying user base.
2)Dramatically enhance the MOAEC user’s experience by offering a huge library.
3)Drive up Rhapsody subscriptions due to convenience and added MOAEC functionality.

If MOAEC were to charge $5 a month for their software as a service MOAEC also stands to gain tremendous profits. I bet MOAEC could even charge $10-$20 for the mobile application if they gave the PC version away for free.

Now to get to the point of the title of the post. MOAEC is stuck in the middle of two worlds, the everyday consumer who uses iTunes or the equivalent and the professional DJ who uses whatever professionals use. If MOAEC wishes to enter the consumer market, they will need to do something similar to what I have suggested and also update their image. Consumers want stuff that is fun and trendy, not muted and boring.
My team also suggested a facebook app and other such guerrilla marketing techniques.

I wish MOAEC all the luck in the world because it will not be easy to penetrate the iTunes market. I intend to check in on them in a year or so to see how they are doing and if they have taken any of the ideas from the competition to heart.