Welcome back to this KRB blog. This is a welcome back for me as well as I have not revisited this blog since our debut release in February. Since it has been one month since Two Twenty Two hit the world, I thought I would take a few paragraphs and recap the lessons learned and preview the immediate future.
00:01:00 (thats 12:01 AM for my non-24 hour clock people) on Feb 22, 2022, I picked up my phone and tapped the iTunes store app. An all too familiar home screen appeared and with slight hesitation, I typed my name into the search window. Seeing our band name come up on iTunes was a very proud moment. Then hearing each preview of 11 songs we had been playing for years was even more surreal. So like placing your own first dollar in your own tip jar, I bought my own album less than 2 minutes after it was released. As I was at work on release day, a friend sent me a text that read "So are you rich yet?" A very standard "haha" was sent back but then I began to wonder how many downloads and purchases were actually happening. I wondered if I was the only person who had purchased it or if Ryan Seacrest would be calling my agent (me) at any moment. The evening of 2/22, we played our release party and sold dozens of physical cd's and had multiple people tell each of us that they listened online and really enjoyed our music. To all of you who have listened and told others, we cannot thank you enough for that support.
And then I woke up on 2/23/22 and went to work like normal without ever hearing from Ryan Seacrest. In the days after the release, life resumed its routines. Just as surreal as hearing 15 years of the same 11 original songs is the feeling of getting to the next band practice and not playing any of them or running errands in the car and not critiquing the mix in the car while driving. But the amount of lessons learned through this debut recording process were immense. Usual knowledge gained such as better ways to record or alter how we engineered the tracking process but also found we gained a massive amount of knowledge with the aspect of mastering a production and the graphic design of how to represent audio as a picture. Then the need for multiple graphics for single releases as opposed to an image that depicts the whole of an album. I also realized the immortal Tom Petty lyric and that truly "the waiting is the hardest part". That with everything submitted, suddenly there is nothing left but to wait for the release.
Or was there. . . we needed to organize tractor trailers for the stage and lighting, hire trusted roadies for our prized equipment, make sure the local unions were on board with our stage setup. Luckily, none of that needed to happen but we did have to organize the release and advertise it, book shows, find venues, change our strings. Like any profession when you finish a big project, there is usually never a big deal made of the accomplishment. A single meeting for debrief and lessons learned and then on to the next project. So that is what we did. Now that we have all of our lessons learned and knowledge of what needs to be done differently (or the same), we are starting work on our next album. 9 songs completed and more on the way. Stay tuned to this blog and join our mailing list for all the latest information about shows, merch, and releases. Thanks for all of your support.
https://keithroundsband.hearnow.com
KRB