Shipe is no April Fool

After the promo barrage of my last album, Yellow House, my web presence increased, and I found myself getting contacted out of the blue. This should be a good thing, right?

Not always.

If you’re a devoted songwriter/recording artist, doing your sacred work somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd tiers of the Music Industry, here are a couple of guidelines:

1) If you gotta pay for an opportunity, it ain’t an opportunity.

2) The Biz is densely populated with working talent; no one “gets discovered” any more.

This second one is vague, so I’ll elaborate: Scouting agents are not scouring the vast regions of MySpace, Sonic Bids, and ReverbNation just to find you. Anything good that might happen for you, such as a recording contract, radio airplay, song placement, or a publishing deal, is happening for artists who are already within geographical or virtual proximity of the Biz entities that make those things happen. They do it better than you, and literally closer to the industry than you.

So when I get contacted by someone I’ve never heard of, telling me how excited they are about me, I recall what Groucho Marx said: “Never belong to a club that would accept you as a member.”

Oh, that sounds discouraging. But it only means what it means for everybody else in every other line of work. You have to show up and apply for the job. And you have to show up over and over and over again. It takes time, persistence, and patience.

If somebody e-mails you from Hollywood with a movie project that needs background music exactly like your latest masterpiece, and for a one time registration fee, they will add you to their select roster of song-placement clients, remind yourself of the two axioms above.

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Shipe Year in Review

The start of 2009 found me in North San Diego County. In the middle of my Yellow House run, it seemed a mistake to up-and-leave headquarters just to get out of Northwest rain. Sure, we lived on the beach, and the sunny weather was awesome, but they don’t have much of an original singer/songwriter scene in that surfer strip between L. A. & S. D.

What they do have, however, is a great Irish scene. Irish bands and Irish pubs. (Gentlemen from Flogging Molly reside there.) I was lucky to fall in with these folks. Ned Giblin, of Brehon Law, invited me to play Wednesdays at his pubs, J.J. Landers and R. O’Sullivan’s. So, I had regular gigs and a close look at a timeless style of music. (The influence of Ned and his cohort David Lally is bound to show on my next album.)

In Oceanside, I befriended Doug Whorly and several of his showcases at McCabe’s, where I met the lovely and talented road warrioress Jacqui Foreman. She honored me by covering my “Faith in the Man.”

It was at a Whorly showcase where my wife, Amy Wray, filmed the video of me covering The Pretender’s “Brass in Pocket.”

I didn’t bother working the L.A. scene. Too big, and like different country. But at the urging of my publicist Leona, I played a couple times at The Gypsy Den in Orange County. (Once with Trevor Davis.)

We lived down the beach from football star Junior Seau, who has a beautiful blue Pit Bull named Rocky. I mention the dog, because it was about this time that my connection to the international Pit Bull community really deepened. I was getting daily e-mails from dog lovers about my song “Pit Bull Blues,” which I gave out freely to anyone engaged in canine care and rescue. Soon, videographer Jeff Fleiss contacted me with the idea of making a video. By spring, he had hauled me up to L.A., filming me in front of the Coliseum amidst 25 Pit Bulls and their trainer, Dogman. He put it together with some excellent footage taken by Amy, and boom… there was a sweet video… still getting legs on the web.

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