Blog: A Social Media Fracture

After I smashed that “save & publish” button on last week’s blog & went about the internet to the various socials to post links so you all would know that it’s up & exists for you to dig your stunning little eyes into, I took a week long social media hiatus.

First off, let me acknowledge just how special, important, heroic, self sacrificing, & outright paramount I am for making that decision & going against the cultural & societal norms that inform our need to consume phone related snippets of content constantly. I know I am a monolith of courage & strength in these trying times. Secondly, if you don’t understand sarcasm, that was it, but I feel like that’s how we all behave when we “announce” our departure from our socials. We act as though we’re giving up a limb & as if our decision was the most refreshing, innovative thought to ever grace the idea space. It’s really not & I don’t think we should treat these breaks as novel things, they should be ingrained in us, because they are healthy. Anyway, here’s what I learned, what I felt in just the week I took off.

The rules were simple. No social media for a week with the singular exception of the daily allotted minute in which I could go into my messages & DMs to see if there was anything pressing that I needed to address. Outside of that there was to be no scrolling, no posting, no sharing, no engagement with the apps outside of answering the few things that needed to be answered & taken care of. The fast began at the time that I finished promoting my blog & ended this morning. Simple enough.

The first thing that I noticed was just how clear my mind felt. My thoughts didn't feel foggy or convoluted, in Scuba terms, my visibility went from a minimal amount of feet to 50-100 feet. Optimal dive conditions. I was able to process information, to make decisions, to form thoughts like I haven’t been able to do for years, probably since 2020 when we all got trapped inside & the only real thing to do was doom scroll into eternity until we all became massively addicted to the light boxes in our pockets. I felt more grounded & at home in my mind in a way that was refreshing.

The first & a half thing that I noticed, which coattails a little off of the previous point, was that I felt a lot more creative. I felt a lot more inspired, I was coming up with new melodies & songs randomly throughout my day instead of having to sit & try & force creativity to work in my favor. While I didn’t get the chance to full on sit & work on something creative during this time off, I am certain that it would have been an easy & enjoyable practice just based on the frequency & freedom in which ideas were flowing to me.

The second thing that I noticed was that I didn’t have the “doom scroll crave” that I normally do. By completely eliminating socials as an option my brain didn’t feel that pull to open up instagram, Tik Tok, or twitter & just scroll. This opened up a lot more time & space for me to do other things & in term made me a lot more productive & economical with my time. That being said, I found that not having the ability to scroll made time pass a lot slower, often to the point where I was often ready to be done with my day far before it was actually time to call it.

The third thing that I noticed was that my attention span was much improved. As someone with ADHD who is struggling to stay focused on this blog as I’m writing it because I know my phone is just a few feet away with the option of scrolling now that I can, I was actually wildly impressed with how much better I was able to maintain my attention span. I actually ended up getting pretty far along in a book that I’ve been reading for a while now & made my way through a few shows entirely focused on the plot & the goings on, without that constant tug to scroll.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I have fallen back into the grips of social media having ended the fast this morning, especially Tik Tok. There's just something about it that feeds the dopamine meter in my brain in just the right way & I think I’ll need to put deeper limits on myself with it going forward. This morning I set my social media timer to one hour total for the day, of which I have already exceeded that because I often use social media in passing, splitting my attention while doing other things, in addition to using it as a messaging system.

All in all I think it’s incredibly healthy to step away from our socials from time to time. It allows us to reprioritize, to clear our minds, to put aside comparison, & rediscover our focus. I took my daily phone screen time from 6-7 hours down to 3-4 without it & I honestly thing I should have extended the break another half a week or more just to fully purge the need of it from my system. All things in moderation, right?

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: Copious Content Creation

Hiya!

Over the past week I’ve had a ripple of commonality come through multiple times between multiple conversations with several different friends of mine, the issue of content creation. All parties involved, in each individual dialogue, are singer-songwriters, none of whom are signed or have any sort of team behind us pumping out content on our behalf. The complaint that we each had was just how long it takes to make scrollable content & how taxing it can be to constantly be in that mode of creation that has to be, by nature, a tad frivolous.

If you're not someone whose job depends on how many eyes are on you at a given time this whole blog may come as a surprise to you, but content, in any form takes a long time to put together. I’m going to show you a few examples along the way to help illustrate this point but just know, that’s what you’re in for on this blog.

I’m going to start with a few examples of my own. Let’s talk about blogs. These ones, these one off, ten to fifteen paragraph numbers that I do almost every week take me on average an hour & a half to two hours. If that seems like an odd number to you then let me break it down. If I’m being honest, the days leading up to Friday are spent brainstorming, coming up with ideas for what this week’s topic should be & typically going with the one that feels the most natural or that I feel the most passionate about. We aren’t counting that time in our final number here simply because my ADHD’d brain allows me to do that while I’m doing other things. It’s not dedicated time, but it is still taking up mental space. Then I set aside time to sit down & do what I’m doing right….now! right…..NOW! which is typing out the blog. If there are specific points that I want to hit along the way I’ll type them down below in the order I want to present them in so that I know which way to steer this whole stream of consciousness train, otherwise I derail. Oh look, Squirrel!

Next, after my ten to fifteen plus paragraphs are done, which usually takes over an hour, I go in & edit. After I’m satisfied with my post, or at least deem it passable, it gets uploaded to square space with tags & categories, & all that good stuff. Then I’m still not done. I have to share this mother so that you all will see it. I post it to Facebook, swapping back & forth between my personal & artist page, I make an Instagram story post, & I post it to Twitter (& now I guess Threads too). All of that amounts to the total time of an hour & a half to two-ish minimum. That’s a completely different story for travel blogs.

Travel blogs take me days. I honestly don’t know if I can calculate just how much time goes into them but I have written about this in the past as well. For a travel blog I first have to travel which, yes is fun, but the way I do it, to be able to share an experience that others will want to immolate, I do a lot of research first. I find restaurants, activities, cool locations & dives, & put together a loose itinerary for my trip, broken down (again, loosely) by day. There are certain elements that are higher priority than others on said itinerary that get shifted around as needed.

While on the trip I have to be sure I’m making content; taking videos, taking pictures, writing down where I went, what I ate, etc. I keep a running tab over my whole stay that I refer to throughout my time writing these once I’ve returned. If I’m diving I have to go through & edit the video I took, as well as take screen shots from said videos so that there’s underwater photo content to attach here. That’s usually a several hour endeavor. Then I have to repeat the above blog process all while linking the places mentioned within said blog. Then after the written portion is complete I go in with the photos, upload them, & position them so that they look all nice & pretty. Truly travel blogs take me daaaaaaays to do & that’s even after I split them up into two to three day parts.

Then there’s music. The average songwriting session lasts around three to four hours & often you don’t get to finish the song in its entirety. After that you have to go in & do rewrites for lyrics or melodies that don’t quite work. As far as production goes, there’s tens more hours thrown in. Tracking all takes place in real time but you need to do multiple takes & then also go in & edit said takes. Equalizing, adding effects, mixing, mastering, etc, etc, I would guesstimate that most songs have a minimum of twenty hours thrown into them even before you start promoting, doing photoshoots for promotional content, reaching out to different publications, playlists, etc.

Going back to what each of us were specifically talking about with content creation is video. The first conversation I had was with Leena Regan who put together little highlight videos from the writing camp that Songbird Society put together. Each thirty second video took her around five hours to complete. You have to go in, edit the clips, color correct the clips, pick a song to have them synced to, sync the cuts in the video to the beats of the song, write a personal, catchy caption, share it everywhere you can.

Kate Cosentino was talking about the same thing, about how exhausting it is to make content for scrollable sites like TikTok or Instagram that you pour hours into just to have it be seen by a handful of people. Throwing your efforts into the void, hoping to catch someone’s attention enough to engage with them, failing & having to do it all over again.

For my Tarpons video I had to find a karaoke track of Feed The Birds from Mary Poppins to sing over, rewrite the lyrics to be about tarpons, record & edit vocals, then sync my dive footage up to the beat changes of the song. Probably a good four to five hours of work & the video went nowhere.

All of this is not meant as a poor poor me type of thing. I write all of this to make you all aware, to show you what it looks like to be a modern artist trying to promote yourself in hopes that one day you’ll have a team behind you who pays someone else to put hours of their time into these posts instead of cutting into your already limited time. I also write all of this so that maybe you’ll be a little more loving to the content people put out, especially your friends! These videos that make you laugh or smile or cry take time & work. These songs that you put onto your shuffle & never listen to with intention again take time & love & effort & are snippets of people’s lives! These blogs, especially the travel ones, take a lot & we do it because it’s what we love, but when you’re constantly throwing yourself out there into the oblivion & finding yourself fallen short each time it gets incredibly disheartening. That’s what causes creators to stop, that’s what causes musicians & artists to sell their gear, causes creatives to get a desk job, because they have tested their metal against the void & the void has swallowed them up.

If you’re here, reading this blog I’m so grateful for you. If you listen to my music, share my posts, anything that supports me in even the tiniest bit as a creator & an artist, I thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you. You never know how far a simple comment, a like, a repost, a whatever else that takes five seconds to do means to someone in our field. Please be appreciative of the content creators in your life, without them this life would be so damn boring.

Much love as always,

-C

Blog: Time Is Once Again Ticking For Tik Tok

If you’re not a frequent user of the clock app, also known as Tik Tok, you may have missed the news that the federal government is once again attempting to ban Tik Tok in The US. If you were already aware of this news then you’ve probably also heard that the reason behind the potential ban apparently relates to “national security” but that reasoning is demonstrably false & we’re going to go over why.

I’m not sure at what point I became a political pundit blog but it seems to be the field of writing I’ve found myself most frequently in of late. Maybe it’s because I, myself am often invested in the world of politics & am a very active advocate against a lot of the BS laws that have been coming out over the last few months. I feel like I’m in the middle of the Trump years again, sharing all the horrible things that I don’t feel are receiving enough attention from the general public, but that’s not why we’re here today. We’re here to talk about the threat that has once again presented against Tik Tok.

As I mentioned above, Tik Tok is on the line in a new bipartisan bill that would force the Chinese based company to sell the United States portion of the app to a US company or face shut down. Sound familiar? Well, it should, because the same thing happened back in 2019. As also aforementioned, the federal government’s reasoning falls under the mustachioed guise of “data mining.” The humorous part about that being that Tik Tok doesn’t collect any more or different data than groups like Meta or Twitter have done for years. We’ll get back to Meta in a minute. The real problem that the feds have with Tik Tok falls into two categories, neither of which should be reasons for the outright ban of the app.

The first of these problems arises from Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s monstrous baby, rigging public opinion one Russian funded post at a time. Zuckerberg is upset that Tik Tok is out performing his two platforms; Instagram & Facebook, the latter of which has seen a fairly consistent decline in users, especially amongst those who embrace Tik Tok, Get Z & Millennials. In an attempt to compete Meta added “Reels” to their platforms which are essentially just Tik Tok rip offs, most times, quite literally. Zuckerberg, in the spirit of free market capitalism, hired GOP targeted PR firm, Targeted Victory, to run a smear campaign against the clock app amongst primarily conservative voters, a base to which has struggled to find a foothold on unfiltered, unregulated Tik Tok. Zuckerberg’s tactics clearly worked as here we are again, looking down the barrel of the same legal gun that we did when Trump found he couldn’t regulate the content of the Tok.

The second part of this is what brings in the bipartisan support for the ban. You see Tik Tok has around one hundred million users. These users, on average, spend about 90 minutes a day using the app. The networks don’t like this. In their minds 90 minutes spent on Tik Tok is 90 minutes you spent not watching CNN, HBO, Fox News, MSNBC, you name a network, I’ll give you a corresponding corporate donor. Additionally these networks are no longer in control of the message being delivered directly to the people, they no longer get to filter or modify their stories to fit the narrative that they want to push. Two recent prime examples of this are the TN’s anti-LGBTQ policies, whose law makers were exposed using Tik Tok for their hypocritical ways (Gov Bill Lee dressed in drag & LT Gov Randy McNally commenting on suggestive photos of twinks) & the train derailment that happened in East Palestine, OH which was barely, if at all covered, by new sites & networks. Tik Tok has repeatedly drawn attention to problems being swept under the rug or misdealing of politicians & the people in charge have grown tired of the wool being removed from the general publics’ eyes.

I know some of you just read those two paragraphs & are immediately discounting what I’ve just told you as conspiracy but I’m reporting exactly what has been said & what is being done. Don’t believe me? Here’s an article about the meta things & here’s a clip of the quiet parts being said out loud at a press briefing regarding the bill (skip to 5:55).

This should be frightening. It should be frightening to all of us because the logic isn’t logicing. The reasons we’re being given for the ban don’t add up. The truth of the matter is that the powers that be don’t like that we can speak to each other unfiltered, they don’t like that we can see each other’s lives, have dialogues, share news that isn’t being covered openly without passing it through the muzzle of the already foreign owned media. I don’t see people, especially younger people, standing by & taking this. I know to a lot of you Tik Tok is just an app but in reality Tik Tok has become the new ultimate exchange of ideas & information. It is digging up parts of the narrative that others would rather have silenced & they don’t like that & the fact that they’re moving so quickly to silence this platform should be alarming to all of you.

As always I hope you all have a great weekend, much love to you all!

-C

Blog: Song Scammers

I was reminded this week of an occurrence that happened to me as well as a few other writers I know a couple of months ago. Someone, it seems, has been targeting the songwriting community, a community notorious for having sooooooo much money……, & scamming us.

I received a message a few months ago over Instagram DM. It was a “father” requesting that I, a songwriter, write his son, Solomon, a song for his birthday. I asked for details; what was he looking for, what level of production, what artists he liked, what things he wanted included in the song, etc. Here are the details I was given:

-It was Solomon’s 6th birthday

-Solomon loves Spider-man & Cat-Boy

-Solomon’s best friend’s name is Jena

-Solomon’s dog is named Maxxy

-Solomon’s father likes to “swing him around the room” so he can pretend to be Spider-Man

-He has Cat-Boy pajamas that he runs around the house in

-Solomon’s favorite artists are Jack Harlow, Justin Bieber, & Ed Sheeran

These were all the details I was given to include in this “birthday song” & it was to be in the style of one of the listed artists above. His “father” had also stated that an acoustic demo of the song would be fine, just vocal & acoustic guitar or piano. He was also apparently offering $500 dollars for this song.

I recruited Evan to help me with the song, offering to split the fee with him & we sat down & wrote the damned thing. I had been communicating with the client back & forth regarding the pay & how it would be sent. We’d agreed to PayPal I believe instead of a direct deposit & we were going to do $200 upon completion of the lyrics & the remaining $300 for the finished song & file.

After completing the song I messaged him & told him I was sending over lyrics for his approval & once he signed off on them I’d & got paid I’d send the song over. He then tried to pull some story about how one of his assistants had over extended his account on PayPal so it’d be a week or two before he could send money that way so instead he wanted to send the money direct deposit. I told him I wasn’t comfortable sending my account info over text but would request a direct pay if he could send me his phone number attached to the account. This is when he stopped responding.

I waited a few days before I reached out again, asking if he still wanted the song. No response. I tried again a few days later. No response. I waited a week, again, nothing.

I eventually let it go until we were having game night one night via zoom with our friends, Leena & Max, who live in Australia. I brought up this strange occurrence & they both immediately went white.

Apparently this account, or several other accounts of the like, had been going around targeting songwriters, asking them to write a song with the exact above listed details, & then stealing money from them. How were they doing that? Well, instead of $500 they’d send you several thousand, over extending your account which they’d ask you to refund. They’d then claim somewhere, whether it was their bank or wherever that they never got the funds returned & it would pull an additional several thousand from your account. Apparently this occurrence was happening all over the songwriting worlds of Nashville & LA specifically amongst up & coming or unsigned writers who aren’t exactly rolling in dough.

The reason I bring this up & chose this as my blog topic this week was because I was once again reached out to by a “father” asking me to write a birthday song for his “son, Solomon.”

If you are a writer reading this I want you to heed my warning & report these people. We have a hard enough time getting paid by the avenues that are supposed to pay us, looking at you streaming services, & many of us jump at an opportunity to make easy money like this but it’s a trap.

I’m going to post the lyrics to “Solomon’s Song” below so it doesn’t feel completely wasted, keep in mind we wrote it with the intent of modifications which, naturally, it never received. Enjoy I guess haha.

SOLOMON’S SONG

V1:

Solly, I see it slipping by

How you grow up every night

Something’s older in your eyes

And I’m blessed to get to be there by your side

So take me catboy to the fray

Grab your mask & Maxxy & let’s play

On our grand adventure tell me how you’ll save the day

C:

So I’ll keep swinging you around like Spider-Man

Just as long as these two arms of mine can stand.

I’ll place you high upon my shoulders

Through the endless world before you.

I promise I’ll do all I can

Solomon

V2:

Solly, I can’t believe that

The last six years have come & passed,

I’ve tried my best to make them last

But time’s a gift that we don’t get back

C:

So I’ll keep swinging you around like Spider-Man

Just as long as these two arms of mine can stand.

I’ll place you high upon my shoulders

Through the endless world before you.

I promise I’ll do all I can

Solomon

B:

So take me catboy to the fray

Grab your jams & Jena & let’s play

What grand adventure will you take us on today?

C:

So I’ll keep swinging you around like Spider-Man

Just as long as these two arms of mine can stand.

I’ll place you high upon my shoulders

Through the endless world before you.

I promise I’ll do all I can

Solomon