I really wanted this site to feel alive, like in a digital kind of way. Imagine sparkling gifs and strange poems. I need to figure out how to do that on the blog landing page.
Sometimes I feel like I have to be ‘nice’ about things like this, even though it has no impact on if I’m writing good music. I look at other bands sometimes and it seems like they don’t need to care as much as I do. Like things outside of the music just fall into place for them because they have a… purer essence - no need for a spreadsheet or zoom call to stop it all from falling apart or be misunderstood.
I know that’s not true.
I just spent all day making sure every photographer handle was tagged correctly in our exclusive press image folder. Yesterday I went over our merch designs and made small changes to the press release to make sure that everything sounded, well, more likeable I guess.
I grew up in a small town called Gympie, and with that came a certain amount of neutral good whimsy. Woodford Folk Festival was an annual event with my family every year as a teenager. Somehow I got involved in this sort of youth program run by one of the many fabulous wild women who make up the festival community.
She gave me a set of cards she called ‘feelings cards’ with one word on each card. Purple colour for ‘challenging feelings’, blue for ‘uplifting feelings’. 165 words in each category. Accompanied by a booklet about all the many and varied games you could play with them.
Something interesting is that ‘nice’ lives with the challenging words. Flicking through the uplifting cards like ‘brave, good, joyful’ you can see the nice card’s truer nature. It’s not uplifting at all.
It would be nice of me to put a photo of the cards up. I have them sitting in my desk. The photo would make this a better blog. I could photograph, edit, save and airdrop the pic to my laptop. Or I could try to not care, in one small way.
I don’t know what to do about feeling nice… I want the photographer’s to be credited thoroughly, I want the Youtube banner to fit right. I laugh at myself when I see band’s Youtube banners with the text cut off, all pixelated from being the wrong size. They just didn’t care, and really they don’t need to. I still listen to their albums.
I’m not sure if I really need to care either, but it’s scary taking the leap to find out.
The way I see it, at some point I won’t feel like I’m being nice about everything… I’m just not sure when.
UPDATE: I found the latest version of ‘feelings cards’ for sale deep on the internet.
I was given mine around 2009 from Amarita Hobbs who I believe was involved in the making of them. Sadly it seems that she passed away in 2014. The cards at some point have been re branded from magical mystery to corporate hippy (recession indicator). Mine came in a purple box with stars and clouds on it. Rest in peace Amarita. <3