Successes, Failures, and What's Ahead in 2018

Hello Blog Readers,

I wanted to take a look back at 2017 to see what went wrong and what went right for us before planning out 2018. This would have been a great post two months ago.

As you may recall, we set out a list of goals at the beginning of last year. The list included live streaming, playing solo shows, launching a subscription service, recording and releasing singles, and sync licensing.

Without going into too much detail, it is safe to say my live streaming and sync licensing efforts were a bust. I streamed a hand-full of times on Busker, a now defunct app, but lacked the consistency to gain any following. It would probably be best to start streaming on a platform with a built-in following, such as Facebook Live or Twitter-owned Periscope. As for sync licensing, all of the songs I submitted were rejected. That said, I didn't submit many, and could have done more research into various companies and opportunities.

To be honest, both of those failures were based mostly on effort, or lack thereof. Too many irons in the fire, my friends.

Despite falling short on those two items, we actually had a pretty great year. We recorded and released our single A Coffee Song (Redux), collaborated with Morning Bell Coffee Roasters on a custom coffee blend, played a few shows, launched a subscription service through Bandcamp, and printed some sexy t-shirts.

We're super proud of the song, the coffee blend is exquisite, the shows were a blast, the subscription service currently has 5 exclusive albums, and the t-shirts instantly make the wearer more beautiful.

While Ethan and I were getting ready to record and rehearsing for shows, we realized that we have quite a bit of mostly-finished material that we'd really like to record. That is going to be our main focus for 2018.

I will be gifting myself a new computer in the very near future, and the demo-ing will start ASAP. We have roughly 20 songs, some near completion and some that need a bit of fleshing out. I plan on adding demos as exclusive tracks for our Bandcamp subscribers so that ya'll can follow along with the creative process and let us know what's working for your ears.

Until then, enjoy these photos from our acoustic gig at Morning Bell Coffee Roaster in Ames, Iowa last November. Scroll to the bottom for a ridiculous acoustic-guitar-solo GIF.

- Curtis