The Blog/News

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A Gig. On My Birthday. And You’re Invited!

Right, here’s something I’ve never done before – a solo gig on my birthday.

That’s December 28th, for those that don’t know.

The gig will be at Tower Of Song, my favourite venue in the Birmingham area.

The ticket price is ‘pay what you can afford’, and if you buy tickets in advance, [ click here to buy tickets ] there’s a lovely new exclusive download track of a thing I recorded living in London a couple of weeks ago, opening for Yolanda Charles. You’ll get that, whatever you pay, but if you pay over £10, you’ll also get a download copy of my NEXT solo album, called ‘What The Mind Thinks, The Heart Transmits’ – it won’t be out til next year, but you can have a copy now. It’s a single 45 minute track, and is very lovely indeed. I promise. So you may want to buy that even if you can’t be there… 🙂

But Wait! There’s MORE!

The gig will also feature the debut of my excellent new duo with drum-legend Andy Edwards. Andy and I recently got together to record some promo stuff for a new Tama drumkit. None of it was what you’d call ‘songs’ – no beginnings/middles/endings, just fun jams to show off the kit, but they’ll give you an idea of where we’re heading 🙂

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Best Of The FingerPainting Sessions Vol 1 and 2 Out Now

FINALLY!

I know, it’s about 4 months late, but we’ve finally finished the double best-of compilation from all the ‘FingerPainting’ shows. Choosing the right sequence of tracks was really hard, and even once I’d chosen it, it took a LONG time for me to believe it was the right order… If it’d been a digital-only release, I’d have put it out and changed it, but when you’re pressing CDs, you really don’t want to screw that up…

So here it is – the digital version is available for streaming/buying/sharing right now, and the CD version will be out next week. So if you buy it now, it’ll get to you within the next 10-15 days.

Continue reading “Best Of The FingerPainting Sessions Vol 1 and 2 Out Now”

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Give The Gift Of Bandcamp!

 

OK how cool is this? A lovely new addition to the Bandcamp UI – the option to send any download as a gift. 

Click on the ‘Send as Gift’ option and you get to put in a friend’s email address, and a note to them before heading off to pay for it in the usual way.

Then it drops into their inbox as a glorious surprise containing delicious hand-picked, valued music. All the adrenaline-fuelled SQUEEE! of a physical present 🙂

want to try it out? Head over to http://music.stevelawson.net, pick a favourite album and send it to a friend. They get music, we get paid, you get karma.

Win/Win/Win

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[POSTPONED] Streaming-only gig with Julie Slick Next Monday!

[SADLY, THIS SHOW IS POSTPONED UNTIL THE NEW YEAR. MORE INFO SOON….]

Right, this is going to be all kinds of fun. Julie Slick is on her way to play a festival in Sweden and is stopping off on the way to hang out with Lo and I for a couple of days. Which means that she and I get the chance to do a show together… but it’ll be a show with a difference. It’ll be streaming-only. No live audience at all.

We’ll do it from my studio, and will no doubt record it all too. It’ll be at 8pm on Monday 18th November 2013, and the particular platform we’re going to use has yet to be decided (nothing like last minute planning, eh?)

But it’ll happen, and it will be lovely. Julie’s one of my favourite bassists on the planet – if you don’t already have her two solo albums, you really need to hear/buy/share them over at http://julieslick.bandcamp.com.

We did a gig together in January 2012, in Hollywood, a really lovely house concert hosted by some wonderful friends of mine. We’re really looking forward to doing it again.

More specific details ASAP 🙂

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UK Tour with Yolanda Charles starts This Sunday!

After the fabulous reception to our show together in Birmingham earlier in the year, I’m SO pleased to be going out on tour next week with Yolanda Charles.

 

Best known for her bass playing with Paul Weller and Robbie Williams – amongst a massive list of session credits! – Yolanda is also arguably the finest funk bassist in the country, and fronts her own funk/soul/jazz band The Deep MO.

For this tour, she’s teaming up in a duo with one of my favourite drummers, Nicolas Viccaro, from Paris, and we’ll be playing a series of shows together, that will no doubt also feature some bass/bass/drums fun too! The dates are:

November 2013:

  • Sunday 10th, 7.30pm - Birmingham – Tower Of Song [tickets - map - Facebook]
  • Monday 11th, 7pm - Stourbridge – Moochers [tickets - map - Facebook]
  • Thurs 14th, 6.30pm - Axminster – Axe Valley College [map - tix (£5/£3 under 18s) from 01297 32146]

(Friday 15th Yo and Nico are in Bristol, and I’ve got a gig with Alvin Stardust in Kent!!)

  • Saturday 16th, 7pm - London – The Islington [tickets - map - Facebook]

the London show will be a FULL Deep MO band set.

If you buy advance tickets for the Birmingham or Stourbridge shows, you’ll get a freecopy of Yolanda’s Deep MO EP on CD, on the night. More info here.

I’m so looking forward to this tour. I’m hoping it’ll be the first of many opportunities to get out and play in line-ups like this. I hope Yo and I can do lots more together. So please do come out and hear some lovely music, tell your friends. Your help spreading the word(especially at this late notice!) Is SO important. Text some friends, get a car-load together and come out for a night of bassy magic.

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Being a Good Citizen Of The Internet: What Would The Internet Be Like If Everyone Behaved Like Me?

This was another one of the blog themes I gave my social media students last week. They tackled it in various ways, but I’d like to expand on where the question comes from.

The root of it is the conversation about ‘marketing’ and ‘promotion’. Ever since MySpace, musicians have been looking for ingenious ways to increase their audience without actually doing any of the tried and tested pre-web stuff (actually making amazing music, doing gigs, contacting media outlets in the hope that they’ll recognise the brilliance of your work and write about you or play you on the radio, Encouraging your existing fans to talk about what you do).

photo by timag on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

As ever, the ‘race to the bottom’ led to a whole new kind of musician spam – blanket messages sent to every Myspace (now Facebook) friend, multiple postings on other people’s pages, imploring friends and strangers to ‘check out my amazing new video on YouTube’ and perhaps the most insidious of all, networks of musicians making a pact to promote each others work, regardless of quality or the degree to which the sharer is actually interested in the shared work. (I’ve written a lot about the nonsense of this kind of reciprocity). Continue reading “Being a Good Citizen Of The Internet: What Would The Internet Be Like If Everyone Behaved Like Me?”

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Guilty Pleasures – Why Do We Listen to the Things We Listen To?

Here’s another of the blog topics I set for my College students – we got onto the topic of ‘guilty pleasures’ in class, so I asked them to write about it.

What do we mean by guilty pleasures? Guilty of what? enjoying it? of not acquiescing to the groupthink of our particular subculture? Of not knowing what ‘serious’ music fans ought to listen to? Are we guilty because we know its wrong, or because we’re concerned about getting caught?

All of those – admittedly trivial – concerns miss a much bigger question, about WHY we listen to music. Much as we’d love to see ourselves as objective connoisseurs of musical worth, there are way to many factors at play to make any sense of ‘transgressive listening’ remotely meaningful in relation to the music as opposed to the sub-culture. Continue reading “Guilty Pleasures – Why Do We Listen to the Things We Listen To?”

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Reconsidering Charts – Listening vs Shopping

One of the first social networks I ever joined was Last.fm – back in the pre-corporate buy-out days, it was an amazing way to connect with music listeners, to find people with similar taste, and through them discover some amazing music.

What was most revolutionary about it at the time, at least for me, was that it was a website that created ‘charts’ based on listening, not on shopping. So you had a record of the music that was soundtracking your life, rather than just the latest things to tempt you to part with cash. Continue reading “Reconsidering Charts – Listening vs Shopping”

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Who Is Your Audience?

As some of you know, I’ve recently started teaching in the music department at Kidderminster College. It’s a fabulous opportunity, as I get to spend every tuesday working with bassists (and a violinist!) in the mornings and on social media with a load of mainly singer/songwriters in the afternoon. Yeah, two of my favourite things, in one day. Lucky me!

So last week, I set the afternoon students the task of thinking – and blogging – about who their social media audience is:

  • Who do you know reads what you write?
  • Who do you imagine is reading it when you write it (who are writing to)
  • Who else may end up reading it?
  • Who would you most like to have reading it?
  • How do these considerations affect how and what you post (be it original words/pictures/video/music or shared stuff from around the web)

Continue reading “Who Is Your Audience?”

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