Hello hello. Just a little update on everything because we’ve been busy.
First off, thank you so much to everyone who has been streaming and sharing the new tunes we’ve been releasing off Album #7 (Nightmares in Technicolor).
This rollout has been a lot different from the last two albums (Mechanical Clouds and Valkyrie). And I’m gonna talk about the strategy pretty bluntly because I hope any other musician who might read this would maybe take something away from this. At the same time, I will say things plainly for anyone not in the music world.
I’ll preface all this by saying that I’m the Creative Director for Shark Attack Records… a label services company that focuses on Digital Marketing and Social Media content creation. We’ve worked with hundreds of artists, including many legacy acts and major labels. I only say this because I’ve found the experience of working with so many artists at such different stages of their careers to be illuminating for me as a musician in my own right.
Perhaps my main takeaway is that music is not what it once was. It has lost its societal value. Starting with Napster and the creation of the internet… music lost its value in that way. But it also lost its value when the tools for making music became so ubiquitous in our society. Everyone with a laptop can make music. I have directly benefited from this. As a kid I grew up recording on ADAT machines… but now that I can record digitally, just like everyone else. If I had been born 5 or 10 years earlier, I would never have been able to do this. I would be spending thousands of dollars to track at a studio… and chances are (because of lack of experience) it would sound just awful. But now I can make a relatively professional sounding record for next to nothing. And so can everyone else. There are something like 60,000 uploads to Spotify per day (IDK the actual number but it illustrates the point). Music is everywhere and is not the culture bastion it once was. It’s more like a painting someone might sell at a yard sale.
Now, I’ve benefitted from this as well. Because - while the tools to make music have become more widespread - the means to reach an audience and grow it have become exceptionally more difficult. I suppose it has always been difficult to grow an audience. But now the tools are different. Instead of handing out your demo tape at shows, you are utilizing the various social media platforms and running digital ads all intended on triggering whatever algorithmic movement you can.
My wife (Maddie) and I live by the motto ‘invest in yourself’. It has never led us astray. It has meant a longer road for us to travel… but has resulted in Shark Attack, which we are immensely proud of.
Now back to Johnny Stranger stuff…
When I decided it was the right time to reboot the band, it was around 2018. I already had the planned series of albums, so I knew I wanted to start with Valkyrie. What really allowed that record to do as well as it did was Maddie’s support. Without that, I likely would have recorded it and probably played a couple shows in a few dive bars. But Maddie really believed in that record and helped me to craft a marketing strategy that really took it to a whole new level. In addition to that, we took it to radio and a publicist. She helped me get in with the good folks at KMG Distribution, who have been a big part of this whole journey. And if any of you out there has done a campaign like this before, it is not cheap.
P is for Pompeii and Follow in my Footsteps both did super well, thanks largely to all the algorithmic support we were getting from Spotify. While the releases were pouring out, we were putting together a live act to celebrate the album. And with the Johnny tunes, they’re just complicated enough that the usual LA thing (two rehearsals and then a show) isn’t really reasonable.
Luckily, we met Brad Dickert (drums), who has been nothing but a blessing. An incredible player and a wonderful friend, Brad has really been a champion for Johnny Stranger, even when it’s been a slog to get moving (in life, it always takes more time to get that crazy train running and up to speed). We started rehearsing at his lockout in LA and started playing shows. There was some shuffling of personnel along the way, but things clicked when we met Alan Sosa (lead guitar) and when my old buddy Adal Wiley (keys/samples) joined us. Maddie joined on bass and vocals and our lineup was complete.
We rehearsed a ton for the album release party of Valkyrie, which went great. Awesome turnout and the band sounded great. Skrillex was in the back of the room and I could see him the entire set (I think he was just at the venue and stepped in… he wasn’t there for us or anything). But the show was great and we were all excited to keep rocking out in LA every few months… But the show was January 28th, 2020. And you know what happened a couple months later.
So Covid hit. And - while we weren’t sure how long the lockdown would last - I decided to go ahead and get started on Mechanical Clouds. It was a record I had in my back pocket for essentially a decade and it has always meant a lot to me. So - while Maddie watched Grey’s Anatomy on the screen to my left - I tracked Mechanical Clouds.
To be completely transparent, Maddie wasn’t totally pumped on the album. She had known the songs since I had written them and loved them (Ten Thousand Arrows is one of her favorite songs I’ve written, she says) but she always felt like the album was a little too progressive. So I wrote a few new songs to add to the record… January Knives was one such song that was meant to be a single (and boy did it work!)… but I also stumbled across All The Same, which is not a single by any means but it’s probably my favorite song on the album. Still, Maddie wasn’t stoked on the general vibe of the record. She thought it needed more slamming rock singles, like P is for Pompeii.
Anyway, the album campaign started. It did well. The streams were coming in and the fans were really supportive, which is my favorite thing. We hired PurpleBite to help with some PR and he did a great job. KMG helped to get some of our singles some editorial playlisting on Spotify. January Knives in particular did well. I could definitely see that the songs weren’t quite as well received as the stuff from Valkyrie… but I’m not bothered by it. That’s the whole point really. Each JS record is a different theme and is a different take on what I deem ‘our sound’ to be. So I get it if a record doesn’t click immediately. In fact, that’s what I’m looking for.
Anyway, I digress. We didn’t spend as much money on promoting Mechanical Clouds, but it wasn’t nothing. You have to spend money to cut through the noise and I was very happy with the results that Mechanical Clouds achieved.
I tried to book a show for the LP release of Mechanical Clouds but ran into the fact that the Los Angeles music scene had changed and the connections I once had were no longer around. That and people were still not going out as they once had, still reacting to Covid. So - after a series of setbacks - I let go of the show idea and vowed to make it happen the following year. That was 2022. Now it’s 2024 and we still haven’t played a show lol.
Now, at this point, I was already well into recording Nightmares in Technicolor (the album we are currently releasing songs for). Again, Maddie was not psyched on it. Again, too progressive and strange… not enough slamming rock hits. To make matters worst, she knew the album that would follow Nightmares in Technicolor… and that one was too jazzy too. But the album AFTER that… she wanted me to work on that album instead. It was the slamming rock album of her dreams. And the kind of album that my listeners would probably prefer.
It was one of those decisions that means nothing to anyone else but me but that I spent entirely too much time agonizing over. But I reorganized the albums to bump up the slamming rock record in front of the jazzier rock record. Maddie thought I should hold off on releasing Nightmares in Technicolor too. Just go straight for the slamming rock… which is sort of more similar to Valkyrie but even more heavy.
I made the choice to release Nightmares but to do it in a more low-key fashion. The record is immensely important to me because it deals with my dad’s passing and it was the music I wrote during a really dark time (which I’ve talked about at length in other places). But basically I made the call to release it because of my sense of self-expression. Business-wise, it would have been wiser to follow Maddie’s advice I think.
This brings me to a couple points… first, I chose the self-expression angle partially out of nihilism. Back to my earlier conversation, with music meaning so little to society and so much of it coming out, I sort of just said ‘fuck it’. It doesn’t matter anyway. And my listeners will either like it or they won’t. The idea of holding it back (a technique I’ve done before but which I honestly hate) to better increase my chances of ‘being a bigger band’ just seemed silly. I’m not a 20-something year old kid with a chance here lol. So my rationale was ‘none of this matters, it’s just art, release it and feel good that it’s out in the world’. So I am.
There’s a problem with this attitude which I want to flag for any other musician out there. When it comes to Spotify, it’s all about their algorithm. Shark Attack is focused on this. We run digital ads to drive the correct traffic to your music, to associate you with the right genre, and to (hopefully) get the Spotify algorithmic playlists (Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Radio, etc) to push you out. This has happened to me on a few tracks. With my decision to ‘soft release’ Nightmares in Technicolor, I knew I would be putting a lot of tracks up on Spotify that were not going to get the kind of strong results that I need to really keep that algorithm kicking. So I knew it was causing some self-harm. It’s why the original 4 JS records are not on Spotify. That algorithm is everything. All this is to say, if you’re in a band actively seeking to ‘make it’ as a band, focus on powerful singles that really hit. Don’t release your weird sci-fi rock record just because you were a sad boy when you recorded it. lol.
One final point… just in an artistic sense, I see Nightmares in Technicolor as the third part of a trilogy. Coming back to JS after so long, it really functioned musically as more of a solo project… with the exception of Kiel Feher who played drums on all three records. So I see my discography (my little garden) as three distinct chunks… the OG era (with Chad on drums), the solo era (with Kiel on drums), and now the forthcoming era which is Brad on drums and Alan on guitar… which I hope will finish our the planned 12 albums.
Anyway… back to that slamming rock record (which will now be album #8). I started working on album 8 earlier than I originally intended to. I knew I was going to do sort of a ‘soft release’ with Nightmares in Technicolor. Album #8 was theoretically going to be a more aggressive effort. So I demoed all the tunes (13 of them), tracked drums with Brad over the summer of 2023, and since then it’s been additional guitars with Alan, sounds and textures with Adal, and I’ve been tracking vocals with my good friend and mentor Yan Perchuk. The record is sounding really good, I think. And it does sort of reminds me of Valkyrie. Sometimes I think it’s kind of a pop metal record… but then I think it’s a progressive hard rock record. Who knows lol. Spotify thinks I’m nu metal anyway haha.
My original point with all of this was to talk about the releases of Nightmares in Technicolor… which I haven’t done at all, haha. I’ll have to write another blog about it. There’s a lot of pain in that record. Which is why I felt it was so important for me to share. But I suppose this blog has become a bit more about release strategy and sharing a peek behind the curtain of how these decisions get made.
So while I’ve been releasing songs off Nightmares in Technicolor, I’ve been allowing it to be less of a focus. I’m just posting some art that I splice up in Photoshop. I do have one major music video in the works (it’s taken me nearly a year) and I intend to release that alongside the album in October 2024. But my attention is REALLY on creating assets for the upcoming album #8… which I hope to start releasing singles for in January 2025. And - similarly to Nightmares in Technicolor - I’ll be releasing a new song every 5 weeks. But this time we’ll have some real social media content to go along with it.
This summer we start tracking drums for album #9, which is an album I added into the planned series. It’s by far our most heavy and chaotic record. Excited to hear Brad’s drumming on it! Then - as we’re releasing songs off album #8 - I’ll be tracking guitars with Alan and vocals with Yan. I’ve got a calendar of all our activities up through 2032, when we should be finishing. I know there will be hiccups along the way, and delays, but I’m a planner.
I love recording music and I love sharing it. It’s just important for me as a person… to have that self-expression. The times in my life when I stopped myself from releasing music have been tough. When you need to express yourself, it’s just what you have to do. Nothing else really matters.
Anyway, thank you for reading and following along! I’ve been having a great time hearing from everyone about the songs coming out off of Nightmares in Technicolor. I believe that this is the kind of record that grows on you… and is maybe a bit too esoteric for folks looking for a sense of immediacy. But for those of you who stick with it - especially when the final album is released - I think there’s a whole lot there to sink your teeth into. Hopefully haha.