Now that the recording part of the demo is finished, Soul Plane will looking be to focus on other promotional aspects for the band to get our game up to par before the tour starts. Obviously, we’ll be concentrating on the musical aspect, but aside from lyrics, I don’t have worry about any of that. That’s why I have time to write blogs all day. Soul Plane’s instrumental section has their work cut out for them, however, but I can’t complain about the level of productivity I’ve been getting from these guys lately: at said time, we’re aiming to have 13-14 songs in rotation by our first tour date, and right now we’ve wrapped up about ten. It’s only January… we’ll start giving a damn about the summertime (which is likely when the tour is going to happen) when spring gets here and we can go outside our domiciles without our bowels freezing over.
Dave, head engineer and owner of Machinehead Studio (where the tap water tastes like ice cream), told us before we departed from our final session with him to give him a call at the end of January for the final product of our work. I have nothing but absolute faith in this guy… he knows exactly what he’s doing, and I have no doubt that he’ll put his all into these five tracks. I know this because he enjoys and believes in our music – so much so that he didn’t care to charge us for the extra time we took to finish the project. We ended up paying only for the mixing and mastering, and considering how good Dave is at what he does, it’s definitely not money wasted. Money wasted is university tuition. Money wasted is getting Soul Plane boxers and panties made to put on the merchandise stand on tour. Money wasted is the time I lost $400 in 45 minutes at Casino Niagara. Money wasted is the time I’m taking off work to write this stupid article.
Kozy, tour organizer and promoter, has been keeping me posted personally on the behind-the-scenes work. So far, nothing has changed in terms of where we’ll be playing; the venues are still written in stone for Chatam,
The perks of this tour are what kick everybody in the balls: we’ll be going wherever we go in coach buses. None of this, “rent your own U-Haul, hire your own roadies, and provide your own accommodations, we’ll meet you there and take money out of your pockets for giving you a stage to play on” bullshit. Kozy has personally informed me that we can pack that bus with as many friends (and groupies) as there are seats. I will remove friends (and maybe some band members) from the bus to make room for groupies. They’ll understand. And by “they,” I really mean just me. On top of all this, our accommodations (should we have to stay in any remote part of the province overnight) are all paid for. Kozy is my best friend.
Now that the demo is done, we’ll be getting to work on the real website. A good friend of mine’s father, Terry McGuire is a freelance graphic artist/designer by trade. If anyone has doubts as to how good this website will look, just remember that Future Shop is one of his clients and he fed three children doing exactly this. Fuckin’ A.
Speaking of highly-qualified people doing their jobs well, Dominic (Soul Plane’s resident graphic designer for album art) made several prints of clothing with our logo on them in an effort to help us fill up our merchandise stand on tour. If Conor’s negotiations go well with the people providing the merchandise, our stand will consist of: Soul Plane t-shirts, hoodies, baseball caps, patches, pins, tuques, and, if we have money to waste for shits and giggles, Soul Plane panties and boxers. At this point, I hate to rain on this parade of a fashion show, but let’s not forget that we’re also here to make music. There will be three CDs available for sale at the stand: one will be Black Box, our demo, another will be Your Money’s Worth, my own demo, and the last (if it’s ever finished) will be Deuce’s Jay-Z/Michael Jackson remix entitled American Thriller (see “Deuce Springsteen On MySpace” under Associates & Affiliations section for details).
On a side note, Stephanie (charity head) and I are still waiting for the government to answer my letter regarding starting a charity in Soul Plane’s name. Ideally, I’d like for this to kick off in the next couple months so that we can have that going by the time it gets real busy in the summer. It’s nice to have things to promote, especially if it’s a cause like this one. See? Narcissism and philanthropy can go together sometimes. Actually, they do all the time: music artists, professional athletes, and Donald Trump.
Finally, Conor is excited as shit for this upcoming summer, tour or no tour. Once the demo drops, he’ll be knocking at doors like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He has been to several of the recording sessions for Black Box and he was very impressed, and said that he could definitely have us hooked up not too long after we put it in his hands. He’ll be in contact with show promoters and labels in an effort to get us a little more direction in getting somewhere in this music business. I don’t mean we’ll get signed the minute we show people our dicks. I mean we’ll be opening up opportunities that can turn into something better (for us) than a signing if we play our cards right. And we will. And then we'll show people our dicks.
2008 is our year. Let’s make this happen, boys and girl.
