I met Aaron in film school nearly a decade ago (wow!). He quickly made an impression on me as an already sharp, confident filmmaker who knew how to get s**t made. It wasn’t until I had a class with him where we honed our story pitching skills that we became better friends and seemed to gravitate toward eachother’s sensibilities.

Fast-forward to now and of the four feature films Aaron has made, I’ve been a small part of 3 of them: providing music for his found-footage horror thesis For Roger, penning the end credits song for The Yardley Boys, and most recently co-writing the yet-to-be released Philly hangout epic These Are My Friends!

Aaron’s an amazing energy with an endless passion for movies and it’s been a joy to collaborate with him. Lucky for students at Aaron’s old high school, he’s now teaching film there and can pass along that infectious energy to the next generation of filmmakers. I wanted to catch Aaron hot off the release of The Yardley Boys to get retrospective.

Watch above or read a condensed version below!

Topics discussed:

* Treating your creative work like homework

* Teaching Lady Bird in a Catholic School

* That just because you show a movie, it doesn’t mean you agree with what it’s saying

* Aaron’s new movie: The Yardley Boys

* How having students inspires you to make better work

* What baseball and micro-budget filmmaking have in common

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WD: Did you have sch— work today?

AB: Yeah. You almost said, “did you have school today?” A lot of people do that, which is fine. I do it too.

WD: And why do they do it? Because you’re a—

AB: — school teacher. High school educator of juniors and seniors. But it’s always funny when people do that. But yeah, I had school/work today. Went well, came home, took my little nap that I need to survive, and now I’m talking to you.

WD: I was going to say, because you teach film, how do the other teachers consider you? Do you feel like there’s any difference in treatment? Or is it a similar mutual respect subject-wise?

AB: A lot of other teachers have curriculum's built, a lot of other people in their department that they literally need to feed into. So there there are certain subjects, like my buddy Sean teaches teaches bio, and bio comes after a certain class and then leads right into another class, that could be the next semester, right? And so if he hasn't gotten through a certain amount of material, he's kind of not only screwing the kid over, but also screwing over the next teacher, kind of setting them up to have to do a little more work than they initially would have had to do. Or a different starting point than they would rather be at.

With me, I don't have a lead-in. I don't have a follow-up. Even if I do, it's me getting the kid again, right? This year we did add two more film courses taught by another female teacher that have been going well, but aside from that, like the past two years that I've been doing it, it's just me.

And I can get the kids to really... wherever they want to get.

WD: There’s not an AP Film.

AB: Exactly. There is an advanced film that I’m trying to get running, but it hasn’t run in a while. Not enough people people have signed up or not enough know it’s available as an option. I think for next year I have six full sections of film and so then there's just no room for the advanced course, but in terms of the other teachers… there's the jabs. There's like, oh, can't you just put on a movie today? and I’m like yeah, kind of, but that's never just what I'm doing, right?

I teach film production and film studies. I'm not a big “clip show guy,” so I do like to show the movies in whole and we just preface it with information, some historical context and maybe some info about what I want them to look out for here in this specific film, and then we follow it up with a with a 40-minute discussion. It could be a whole day of class where it's just watching, you know, the middle chunk of The Godfather.

WD: Right.

AB: So not much required for me there, but I do need to make sure I'm on point for those discussions.

Then in film production, it's sending the kids out to film or they're sitting in the room and editing and once I've given them all of the groundwork, and it's a very jack of all trades, master of none sort of course. I can't get too deep into anything, but it does function as a workshop as at a certain point.

So literally if I was teaching any other subject, I don't know if I'd be able to do it. I do feel very fortunate about that. I don't think it's any less work. But it is a different kind of work and it's using a different part of the brain in the way that the class is for the kids. It’s using a different skillset for me to teach and it’s using a different skillset for them to absorb.

WD: Right. And it’s not even the ideal timeframe for a course like this? I’m guessing it’s like 40 minutes ish?

AB: It’s 80 minutes.

WD: Oh, so it’s two periods?

AB: School’s broken into 40 minute blocks, but the film classes are two periods technically.

WD: Well that’s great in some ways. [But] maybe if you’re doing a more discussion-led one, then I’m sure that 80 minutes could drag for some students. But to be able to watch a full, or close to it, film in there, that’s good.

AB: Well, and it has been interesting too, because I know the film side of it, but learning the teaching side of it has been the challenge. There are little tricks. If you have kids for 80 minutes, you don't want to be doing the same thing for more than 20 minutes. You kind of want to break it up into 20 minute chunks.

For example, I show Get Out, and the first half of it is 70 minutes, and I can show that in an 80-minute block, right? And then I'm left with just 30 minutes to 40 minutes for the next class. So I start off with those 30, 40 minutes of the film, and then we have a 20 minute discussion about— I use it to teach social commentary and also horror tropes and stuff like that. So we have a little bit of a conversation about like, what was going on in the world when this came out? How is this effectively made? How is Jordan Peele playing the beats of the audience?

If I've done my job right, I will have that last 20 minutes set up for a breakout activity or a discussion board online that they can work on. If I'm talking at them for more than 20 minutes, then I'll lose them. No matter how engaging I think I am, I will lose them. Same thing for if I just let them do an activity for 20 minutes, half the kids are done in 10 and then they go on their phones…

WD: Well, we've had a couple conversations about how you'd think that teaching movies in particular would be something that is a joy for kids to be able get away from these other subjects, and that they would be able to pay attention to watching movies. Watching a movie— it's entertainment. But still you've had some troubles, depending on the class, with attention spans.

AB: Well the fact of the matter is if they're being sat in a room and someone older than them is telling them to do something— it's work. No matter how fun or relatable I try to make it, there's always the kids that are going to be into it from the get, but for the other kids who are just filling an elective slot in their schedule, or they had minimal interest but they literally thought we were just binge watching movies, where they could choose the movies… I don't know what they think.

WD: This might be more work for you, but have you ever done anything where you give them the illusion of choice by just saying like, oh, we have these three movies that we could use to talk about social commentary. Then they can vote so that they have a little more agency or something.

AB: I've done things like that, like a lot of times I like to do a holiday movie, if it coincides. We'll watch a horror movie for Halloween, watch a Christmas movie for Christmas. We watch a rom-com for Valentine's Day. Usually, I'll give them an option for that. And then I can figure out how to frame it in whatever we're doing.

That's a great thing if you're showing a good movie, usually you can use it to talk about almost anything that you need to.

But yeah with certain things there is just a built-in curriculum, like for the shot-for-shot project where they literally have to remake a scene from a movie. We always do The Social Network because it’s locked down shots, fast talking in rooms and it’s easy for them to emulate. Although this year I’m adding Lady Bird to that and it’s very interesting because it’s a Catholic school too.

WD: Yes. I was going to ask about how that has been with what you can show. I know you have them sign things.

AB: Yeah, I have them sign a permission slip. Typically, I'm getting juniors and seniors, so most of them are 17 anyway, but just to [save] my own ass I have him sign a permission slip and it's in the weirdest movies [that] will get flagged. Since before I went there, the school's been showing Pulp Fiction and that's fine. There's literally drug use and profanity and a gimp scene, right?

WD: Yes of course!

AB: I had to fight to get Lady Bird because it's a Catholic school and they have those set morals and there is also a whole side of it where it's a protected environment from certain things going on in the world, right? Lady Bird has things like there's a scene that mentions abortion in a not so glamorous light and that got flagged and I had to fight for that to be included.

And even still, I showed it today and I had to in class say, look, we talk about this all the time, just because we're watching something doesn't mean that you need to agree with it. We're trying to get the greater point of the story where we can relate to things. Some of the best movies of all time are about characters who we don't morally agree with. Again, kind of just to cover my behind if any parent wants to come after me. I shouldn't have to be giving a content warning to Lady Bird, but it's Lawrenceville, New Jersey, man. It's a bit of a bubble.

WD: I think that's a good thing, that you're having to teach that just because we're showing something doesn't mean that we are agreeing with everything that's going on in the storyline. Or even if we think the movie's good, you know?

AB: If a movie's preachy about things that I agree with, it's still not a successful movie if it's beating me over the head with something. It also does help them have autonomy too in the production class when they're creating their characters. These kids should be able to tell stories about a drug deal gone wrong. They don't even know what that means yet, necessarily, but it's the way they've seen it and they are emulating it. They're practicing it and they're getting something out of that. Half of the guys in my class's favorite movie is The Wolf of Wall Street and they don't even know what the message of that movie actually is yet, right? They just think Jordan Belford's cool and I'm like, just watch it again in your early 20’s man.

WD: That's interesting, too, because, back to that thing of, just because a movie is showing something doesn't mean it's saying that this thing is good. You could say that, and then the person, whoever's watching it, is going to take it in however they're going to take it in. You hear it with Wolf of Wall Street, you hear it with, American Psycho, that people will watch these movies and then look up to these lead characters and in kind of a strange way when it seems obvious that they're not to be looked up to.

AB: I started film studies this semester off with Goodfellas and that is a movie that spends its first hour making a lifestyle look like the coolest thing ever. And then spends its second hour tearing that down.

A lot of the kids had either heard their parents talk about Goodfellas or they had watched Goodfellas and they were like, oh yeah, Goodfellas makes being in the mafia look bad-ass. Then we talk about it and it's like, no, not really. Just Scorsese is pulling you into this lifestyle to show you how intoxicating it can be and also then to show you how much greater the fallout can be and I tied Goodfellas into faith which the admin board loved. Because it's easy to, Scorsese was almost a priest, right? He's a very faithful guy. This guy made Last Temptation of Christ. He made Silence. He has obviously grappled with faith throughout his life, or his relationship to it. I think that's in Goodfellas too. How you can you can frame it in a way— alright, the life of sin is intoxicating, but even still at the end of the day it's not all it's chalked up to be.

So yeah, some of the hoops I have to jump through are are unique to the setting, but it's nothing that I'm not game for, and I'm never being disingenuous, right? If I'm not drawn to talk to the kids about their faith, I'm not going to do it just because I teach at a Catholic school. The best thing I can do is be open and honest with them as much as I can about [what] my life was like where they are and what it's like now and why movies matter, why expressing yourself matters. Those fundamental things don't change just because our background's different or our political affiliations. Or I don't agree with their parents, essentially.

WD: Well, the main reason why I wanted to have you onto the newsletter is because you just released The Yardley Boys via Split Tooth Media. I think it seems like it’s been getting a great response. I loved the movie since I saw a rough cut of it and I’m really excited that it’s getting into a little bit of a wider audience in this way. How are feeling about that?

AB: Yeah, I'm feeling good about it. You know I was sitting on it for a while. The creation of The Yardley Boys wasn't even a choice. It was something I had to do to, just to remind myself why I liked making things and [to] see if I even still liked making things, right?

Shot that movie August of 2023, so after my first year of teaching. And it was kind of just a way for me to see if I could practice what I preached, right? I’d be sitting in the classroom telling the kids, go shoot something this weekend. And I hadn’t been doing that. I wanted to get out and do that. So we shot this movie in five days, edited it within the month after. It was done for over a year before it got put out and then I reached out to Brett Wright at Split Tooth, he's the editor-in-chief, and asked him if he would give it a watch because I knew he had similar interests. He liked some of the films that I was inspired by. So I sent it to him and he liked it, but importantly he got me in touch with some other people he thought would like it more. Through those people I built some connections and relationships and [it] ended up working out that one of those filmmakers, Jordan Lissy, made a film and he sent it to me to watch. I wrote a Letterboxd review about it. And then Brett saw it and was like, hey, do you want to do the actual review of this for Split Tooth?

So all this stuff is happening where Brett sees the film, other people are seeing the film, I get asked to start writing for Split Tooth, do a couple articles for them and then I think around January I was venting to Brett and his brother Craig about not being able to find a home for this thing, or what it was even, where would it live? Went 0 for 30 with festivals.

WD: I think for those who haven’t seen it yet, it has an interesting runtime too, which I think is an annoying thing about these— I mean sometimes a 50-minute film will get in somewhere— but it definitely makes it so that it lives in this weird in-between space and doesn’t have much of a place, even when there’s already the hump to jump through of a lot of competition as well.

AB: I think I should rebrand it as a pilot episode. I think that would have been the smarter call.

WD: Right, that’s true. Submitting it to like Sundance-pilot-whatever.

AB: Yeah, or release it as a miniseries. Break it up into like six chunks.

But yeah, 55 minutes long, so not really super marketable. It’s kind of in that no man’s land of 40 to 70. But Split Tooth was super game to release it. Brett and Craig ended up re-watching it and Brett liked it much more than he did the first time, which is something I’ve heard, that people like it more on their second viewing, maybe because they just know what to expect more. They said, we’ll roll out our modest red carpet and give it an online release and got one of their best writers to write about it, Bennett Glace, because he’s a former Yardley resident. And he was like, what? Someone shot a movie in my hometown? What is this? And he ended up liking it too.

So yeah, they put a lot of heart and a lot of effort into that release [and] rollout. And it’s had a nice reception. It isn’t out there getting a ton of attention, but it got almost 70+ reviews on Letterboxd. It’s got a couple thousand on YouTube. Some people have been reaching out to me with some nice comments and it’s been a really nice experience. Obviously, you always want more and more people to be able to see it, but the quantity of people seeing it has been far exceeded by the quality of the feedback and the thoughts on it. Everyone who’s been watching has been really nice about it, and even if it’s not exactly their cup of tea, they have been vocal about just what it means to them. Even people who haven’t liked it are like, I think it’s inspiring that it exists.

WD: It’s interesting, in comparison to For Roger, which is a film that we worked on together, where it had a little festival run as well— I guess more people probably got to see it, than this one? Or not necessarily?

AB: Well, I think more people got to see it on a screen. I think more people got to see it without the prerequisite of knowing who I was, right? That's the different thing too is a lot of people, in order to see The Yardley Boys, most people know who I am and a lot of people went into For Roger with horror festivals.

Horror— they like to spearhead little indie projects. There's really no huge genre community behind something like The Yardley Boys, but For Roger had that extra bump of: this is a horror film, it's niche and so that got in front of more unsuspecting viewers.

WD: But I guess what I was thinking about is just that it does feel like For Roger was a bit more polarizing or that people were more vocal if they didn’t like it and if they did like it.

Whereas it seems with Yardley Boys, at least everyone who I’ve been poking around at the Letterboxd reviews and everyone who’s seen it, like you said, even if it’s not their cup of tea, they’re still very complimentary of it. It has a charm for sure, which I felt watching it too.

AB: Yeah. Thank you. I think that was it. It was just the perfect synergy of all of us getting together for five days and just making something honest. I really didn’t try— well I guess I shouldn’t beat around the bush— you and I shot a feature a year before this that is still yet to be released that I’m working on, Will, I promise. June 13th. Not like a public release or anything. But that film was a ton of moving parts. We pretty much stuck to our script.

WD: We shot ourselves in the foot by writing something, that was the goal, but was writing an ensemble film. But we had a huge cast, such a huge cast.

AB: I think all in all, 150 to 200 people were involved in the making of that. And it was shot over five weekends over a summer. I was working an office job in Jersey City. This was right before I got the teaching gig. Or I think I knew about the teaching gig, but hadn’t started it yet.

It felt like a “prove yourself” kind of moment. A last ditch effort to make something of this scale while everyone who wanted to work with was still local to Philly. So that added its own pressure, but in a lot of ways too— I know I’ve said this to you— it was kind of like running a summer camp where we were filming in someone else’s house. We knew we had to get things done. There wasn’t a lot of room for, and I think these are self-inflicted wounds, but there wasn’t a lot of room for improv, because we just needed to get this done because we have X crew member or X cast member.

It was a very intense experience for me and obviously still isn’t out so it’s a longer post process on this. I’m very proud of that movie and I’m excited for people to see it. I think it’s a great movie. Very different. It’s totally different than The Yardley Boys and totally different from For Roger too, so I think that’s fun too, that there’s just three completely separate things.

But the goal with The Yardley Boys was to distill the filmmaking experience down to, okay, I don’t need work weeks in between, we don’t need people coming in and out the door at all moments. Let’s get together with some friends over five days— I think it was 7 or 8 people total— and just shoot something. There was not a lot pre-pro. It was very of the moment in a way that I feel, just by design, [our film] These Are My Friends! wasn’t able to be.

I’m very grateful for the experience of having directed both of these, because in a way Yardley Boys was not made under realistic circumstances. I can’t think of a time going forward where I will be able to give up five days to just make something with my friends again, where no one’s getting paid, where we’re just doing that, right?

WD: I was interested how the teaching played a role in the making of Yardley Boys. You were getting into the practicing what you preach kind of thing… I think that’s really interesting and admirable. In teaching, there’s a lot of learning yourself what you have to do and so I’m curious where all that is taking you for the next type of projects that you want to make.

AB: I was very inspired in my first year of teaching in ways I didn’t even realize I would be. One of my students, Heather Jones, she turned in a project that was just her life in Yardley over the course of a day. It was very raw and very honest, in a way that you can only be if you’re not thinking about being a filmmaker, you’re just actually turning the camera on yourself. She cast her own family and friends in it. She acted in it herself and it woke me up. It made me want to be that type of honest with something I made, which was something I don’t think I had done yet.

At first, in college, no one was making things, so I wanted to be the “let’s just go shoot stuff guy.” Everyone was waiting to get permission to use equipment and then spending months on their scripts and I was like, no, let’s just make stuff. We’re here. We have people. Let’s do it, right? That’s kind of what led to the first two features.

After that, I think both of us were caught up in the 9-to-5 monotony of just having a job we had to wake up and go to and that’s what These Are My Friends! was kind of born out of. But I think I had always been making films sort of more practically. It was in practice. It wasn’t really looking into any deeper part of myself. I think those can be pulled from those films in certain respects, but I don’t know if I was ever intentionally doing any introspection with those.

That’s what I wanted The Yardley Boys to be. It was as simple as texting the guys: Bobby, Drew, Jake, Matt, CJ, to be like, hey, I have this idea for a film about a missing cat. I also want it to be about skating. I don’t know anything about skating, but you guys do. And I want you to play the two characters you played in These Are My Friends! Essentially they are exaggerated versions of yourself and we’ll improvise it. We have this seven page outline and we’ll just do it.

I tried to treat it the way I was teaching my students. My students do not have a realistic time slot to make the projects I’m asking them to make. They have to do accelerated pre-pro, accelerated production, accelerated post. They have basically a week for the whole process of one short film. I wanted to hold myself to that too. I was like, okay, I’m not going to spend a lot of time writing this. Two weeks of pre-pro tops. I think I was producing another short film at the time. So I wasn’t even really focused on the pre-production of this. Then we just shot it over five days, had it edited in a month after that. Then I was like, do I submit this for a grade? What do I do? It felt like a school project. Going forward, that’s definitely how I want to do things.

I feel like part of the issue too, that I ran into with For Roger, and now that I’m running into with These Are My Friends! is it’s so hard to stay the lone motivator in your own project for an extended amount of time. It’s very hard to stay interested in something that you had to say three years ago…

What was so freeing about making The Yardley Boys was just, I had this to say. I said it. I got it. It’s done. This represents me. It still took a year to put out there, but I’m still very much in the same scenario. That’s a film about being stuck in your hometown, feeling like you can't grow up. I’m grown up, but I am seeing my parents more than I thought I would at 27. I’m not complaining about that. I’m teaching at my alma mater. The main group of people I talk to are 17 and 18 year olds. It’s a movie about being stunted, not in a negative way, but just in a “this is what my twenties would be” sort of way.

WD: I was going to say that it seems like you’re Soderbergh-ing it a little bit. I always hear he’s got the edit. They shoot and he has the edit somewhere.

AB: That’s the whole Ocean’s 12 thing. Matt Damon comes up to him on the second to last day of production: how do you think this is going to cut together? And he’s like, you want to see it? He pulls out his laptop and he’s already got an assembly cut.

WD: I mean I think that’s a cool lesson to take away. It’s not necessarily like you’re rushing, because [The Yardley Boys] doesn’t feel rushed, but it does feel like you’re trying to complete an assignment. You’re giving yourself deadlines. I think a lot of people work better that way. So you think that the next projects you’ll do, maybe not the same five days thing… It will at least be with the same sort of momentum oriented strike while the—

AB: — Iron’s hot. Yes. Well, you know the goal is obviously be a director on bigger projects at some point, but in terms of indie filmmaking, I can’t think of a better way to do it. When you don’t have money, it’s like capturing a moment in time. If I want to go out and take a picture of the sunset. It’s like, I have less than 30 minutes to do that and get a good picture. Or otherwise I have to wait till tomorrow and then it’ll still be sunset, but the sky is going to be different. So I don’t know if I could have made a film about what it felt to be at that moment of my 20’s now. I actually know it for a fact: I couldn’t make that film right now. So it is about like you said, striking when the iron’s hot. I don’t know what it was that was motivating me, because even Bobby, Drew, I love them to death, but it wasn’t like they were like, let’s all give up a week of our lives and do this idea that you’re not even fully articulating to us. They’re supportive. They’re filmmakers too. They’re endlessly supportive. But up until the day before we started shooting, Bobby was like, so what’s the film? And I was like, I don’t know.

So for them to give up that time, and you have to sell people on just you. You just have to be like, yeah, we’re making this thing. Just trust that I have it right, or I might not have it, but we’re going to do it.

WD: I mean, I feel like you've always had that since I've known you in college. The “we're going to get this done attitude.” You're not selling people in a deal making way, but you have it, an energy that's like, yeah, we're going to make this. And so people just come along and it's been great to see.

AB: Thank you. It’s been helpful. It’s helpful when you can say, like for For Roger, that was my senior thesis. I don’t think if I hadn’t made the 70 minute, two character, character-study summer after freshman year of college— which we didn’t even talk about yet, but that’s called Epilogue— which I barely even count as a first feature, but it is an exercise, right?

WD: My girlfriend’s been watching this novelist talking about novels, and he was saying your first novel is the novel you’ve written after you’ve written the first three novels. I think you could say that maybe about filmmaking too.

AB: Well, These Are My Friends! then!

WD: I do feel like you’re hitting a new stride with Yardley Boys in terms of distillation of what you’re good at or an awareness of what you’re good at or something.

AB: Yeah, it came really naturally. I’ve been stressed on every other production I’ve led, but I was never stressed on that. I think yeah, they way to get people interested in making an 88 minute horror film for my senior thesis was hey, I’ve done this. And then the way to get 150 people interested in making a party movie over five weekends in the summer of 2022 when Omicron is at peak was like, hey, I’ve done this. Doing tests, wearing masks. Then The Yardley Boys thing was okay, I don’t even need to say that we’ve done this, you guys know me. And I got you on the next thing.

WD: Total trust.

AB: It's so funny that you brought up the Soderbergh thing, because I was referencing that in real time on set. Because Matt Herzog, who helped co-produce, co-shoot the film. I was like, hey, I'm going to have this edited by the time we're done shooting. And that's not exactly how it ended up happening. We were all sleeping at the same house. I could show them “almost dailies,” but cut together. I was showing them stuff that we shot on Monday, on Wednesday. And they were like, this is working.

WD: I think it’s a good lesson and takeaway for really anyone, and I’m always finding this too, is keeping the momentum up, keeping yourself interested in the thing that you’re making is the challenge. Because these things take so much time, to make films. I’m writing a screenplay. They take so much for various pieces to come together. So you have to find ways to keep the spark alive and I feel like that’s an interesting thing to think about how we shot These Are My Friends! which was we have a whole week of work in between and then we go back to it. Like you said, it was a luxury to have the five days in a row [for Yardley Boys]. If you can work on something a little bit every day and try to inject something new or get some new enthusiasm in there bit by bit, rather than having these chunks where you’re broken off from it, I feel like it goes a long way.

AB: I will say that I am very fortunate to be in the scenario I'm in currently where I have a job that is a constant reminder of what I want to be doing in a way that isn't soul sucking. I also am done at 2:30 every day and have summers off. For anyone who is working a nine to five year round, or even worse, someone like Bobby, who is slaving away on sets as a costume PA every day. I can totally see how your drive or to do anything film related in your free time is just gone. It's easier said than done, just because of the cards I've been dealt at this moment in my life.

And it is interesting, too, thinking about how These Are My Friends! was a necessity because I just needed to get away from that 9-to-5 job. But then Yardley Boys was a necessity because I needed to prove something to myself.

For example, when I was working at the videography gig in Manhattan, that I eventually got fired from, I had no desire to do anything film related when I got home. Not only was it a nine to five, I was being kept late every day. I was working for someone who, now with life experience, I realized was just maybe not a good communicator and I wasn't giving them everything they needed. But at the time I was like, this dick doesn't know what he wants. There was no way in that environment I would have been able to create something good or meaningful.

The majority of film jobs that are out there are like that one where you're making a product and you are doing the shell of the thing that you love doing, but without any real gratifying reward, other than financial.

WD: So I guess the advice is go become a teacher.

AB: Well hey, the world needs more teachers. I was really depressed in 2021/2022, just because I felt like I wasn’t contributing to society in a meaningful way, and now, for all of the s**t I deal with and for all of the day-to-day issues or complaints I might have, at least I know I’m making some sort of difference in some kid’s life. If you’re thinking of becoming a teacher, that should be reason enough. Free time, and it gives you summers [too]. But do not do it if you want to make a livable wage.

WD: Can we talk a little bit about new ideas that you’re working on now? Are you thinking about The Yardley Boys production route? Or are you thinking about a mesh between other ways that you’ve put together productions?

AB: I think there's a way to make something higher scale that still has that mentality behind it. I'm very excited about the thing that you and I are co-writing— I guess we'll just call it a mumble core biopic. But aside from that, and that would be another thing where there would be more moving pieces, but I would want to treat it as something with room to breathe, rather than over scheduling ourselves and then having having to deal with that.

I really want to make a baseball movie. Aside from people, family, real world issues right now, the two most important things to me currently are movies and baseball. I also think they are very similarly, I don't want to say emotionally manipulative, but they kind of have the same effect on me, where they're the only two things that can make me cry right now is a good movie or a good baseball game. And there's something there.

I wrote a review of Eephus after I saw it where I was like, I’ve seen my Dad cry three times— at his Mom’s funeral, his Dad’s funeral, and after Field of Dreams. There’s just something there. And there’s something untapped, I think, in male vulnerability.

I don't know if we were trying to get at this, but it came through anyway in the Yardley Boys of just like two guys’ inability to convey their feelings for each other to each other, even if those feelings are just like I love you bro. I think that is also a huge part of baseball, it's sports in general, sure, but baseball there's something uniquely American, in that idealistic version of America. Just like building something and getting together. Anyway, I want to write a baseball movie.

WD: There’s a specific element of communicating in baseball that’s different.

AB: Yeah. And there’s so much time to think. You’re alone with your thoughts.

So those two are the next two things I’m thinking of writing. I also do want to get back into horror. I mean, I’m going to put this out there into the universe to hopefully manifest it a little bit, but in an ideal world I’ll have made three more features below $5000 by the time I hit 30. It’ll be that mumble core one, the baseball one, and then a horror one.

WD: Maybe you should kick up the budgets a little bit so some money can come to you. *laughs*

AB: Ok yeah, five million dollars!

WD: Be careful what you wish for… But I like that a lot, that’s great.

AB: I’m reading a book, I’m writing an article on it. It’s a filmmaker, Jake Mahaffey, and he’s been working in the industry for 30 years. Or on the outskirts of the industry, just making micro-budget films and things like that. He wrote a textbook on micro-budget filmmaking. A lot of that has given me some great lasting lessons too. If it hasn’t been teaching me things then it’s been reaffirming things that I already felt and just needed validation on, which is it’s okay to not have money. That can actually make your film better and more creative. If you’re in a scenario on set and something isn’t working, that should be your dream opportunity. That’s an opportunity to talk with the actor and figure out a new, better way to make it work. And if you’re not doing that, then you’re only holding yourself back.

WD: It’s an opening. Talking about baseball… Someone’s open that you didn’t see. *laughs*

AB: *laughs* Absolutely. It’s getting me excited to shoot something else, reading that book.

WD: It’s very optimistic sounding.

AB: Yeah, it’s reinvigorating that drive for independent films, from someone who’s been through it and who isn’t talking down to you. So I’ll have an article out about that on Split Tooth in the coming weeks if anyone is interested in checking that out. Micro-budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling. Great tool.

And it’s not in a Save The Cat sort of way. It’s not telling you how things need to be. If anything, it’s just opening up doors. It’s a book that’s on the shelf looking at you saying, hey, I’m open!

Who “Composed” The Best Original Score?

The first thing I was thinking about was the best original score, which went to Daniel Blumberg who did The Brutalist score, which was great. I do think it was the most deserving and the best of all of them. I'm just going to talk about the score, I'm not really going to talk about the movie, but something that was super interesting to me about the score is, and I highly recommend listening to this podcast about it where they interviewed Daniel called Score: The Podcast.

Daniel talked a lot about the process of making it and how it was extremely collaborative. Most Hollywood scores are collaborative, because a lot of the ones where you have a big orchestra involved, you have all those players. But his was collaborative in a different way, where he kind of came up in this London experimental scene around this venue called Cafe OTO. There's a lot of great musicians playing avant-garde music that he met around there, and that he looked up to as well.

I think what it seemed like is a lot of the score was basically him writing these these main themes, but then for a lot of the cues thinking about how those themes could be interpreted, and who that he knew might best interpret them, which is really interesting in terms of thinking about who's “composing” the score.

When an orchestra is playing someone's music that they composed, you have all sorts of interpretations. But for the most part, things are pretty set in stone in the way they're written. And this is like a whole other level of writing because a lot of these players were doing improv. based on literally a couple notes. I mean that seems to be why the score was as impactful as it was. It's just that main melody is so repetitive and so simple. And it worked great.

He won the award, but, like he said in his speech, he received it for all the rest of the players and people that contributed to it. It did seem like definitely on a greater level than usual, maybe a greater level than ever before, this kind of collaborative improvisational score was done.

Now, there might be some jazz scores, maybe some that I am not privy to, I have to look into, but I just think it's interesting,

You have someone who's considered the composer and they're writing the music, but if you're really having improvisational players that are extrapolating from what you give them in an even bigger way than just like reading notes on the page and providing your expression of that… it's just another thing to think about.

Filmmaking is such a collaborative process and just even on this level it's collaborative because of how many people are involved just for the score alone. I think it should be celebrated, too. It reminds me of a producer kind of role, too, where you have a record, you bring out a bunch of players in on the record. Steely Dan, the band that I talk about a lot on here, they're bringing in all these sorts of players and they'll be credited on the album sleeves, but the writing goes to the band, even if a solo part was not really written and someone had come up with it on the fly in the studio.

Is a Low Budget, Indie Film Winning Best Best Picture A Good Thing?

I just think it's fun and interesting to think about and this kind of leads me into the next thing, which is that, I think it is a great aspect of independent film and film in general when people are able to bring in their friends on other projects.

I know the budgets were relatively low for these projects. I don't know how much these individual musicians got paid, or when budgets are bigger, it's definitely worth bringing on other people, which I think is a funny thing, because I was also thinking about, Anora, which won Best Picture, was the face of independent film. That movie was representing the independent film scene.

It's funny because I think on one end there's an argument to be had: You know, it's an independent film. You don't have as much budget. You can't afford to pay people. The fact that Sean Baker wrote it, edited it, directed it, produced it, and I think he casted, he puts himself as casting, it makes sense for when you have such small budgets.

But it's something I was thinking about in connecting it with The Brutalist, which ironically, The Brutalist used AI in making it, which is a whole other thing…

But I was just going to say something that's scary about bringing the mentality of independent film into the accepted capitalist machine is just that if they know that great movies can be made for less money, how little money are they going to give people?

I've heard this with some of the streamers that make content in TV that they see these independent filmmakers that are making great movies and then they give those people money to make something. But it's really not all that much money because they know, oh, you can still make something that's decent quality with a pretty low budget.

And so I guess what I was bringing up is that the Daniel Bloomberg situation where he brought on a lot of his friends and peers and people who he looked up to musician-wise is a kind of way to push back against AI, even though that movie used AI [in other ways], but it's just the more humans that you can involve on a project and bring their skills and talents to the to the project, I think the more unique it's going to be. I think it's probably more fulfilling, at least from a process perspective.

I think one could say doing something alone could be fulfilling in the “destination” aspect of how you end up, and you're proud of yourself for doing something all by yourself, but I think from a process perspective it can be more rewarding to work with other people.

So I know those are a lot of ramblings, but I hope people are connecting some of the ideas that I'm saying.

Recap

Just to sort of recap, I think Daniel Bloomberg winning for The Brutalist is amazing. And frankly, it's inspiring me in the fact of working with musicians you like and bringing them on and going to people's houses and basically making a score like you would make a record in a more scrappy kind of way. Sort of how I'm used to making records anyway, which is why I connected to it. I think that's really cool.

And then I think that bringing your friends on is also cool because it pushes back against trying to do everything yourself. I think sometimes you end up trying to automate certain things or making certain things easier for yourself, if you build something by yourself. People go, Oh, they can't hire someone to master the record. Usually it's a money thing. But they can't do that, so they get AI. I understand that trade-off, but I also think, if everyone's doing that, then that's not so good for the art form and for art in general.

And then the third thing is considering Anora is just, I love that independent film is being celebrated, but I just wonder if the embrace by studios and the Oscars in general might be potentially a negative thing. Just because they might give lower budgets and expect people can make things for lower budgets.

Obviously it’s super exciting to have low budget films be so visible, and I’d rather have "10 $10 million dollar movies rather than 1 $100 million dollar movie,” but I also hope that people can get adequately paid on those smaller productions too.

Those are kind of some things I've been thinking about. And I'm really curious if anyone else has any thoughts on this too.

It's 2025. Today, the day that I'm recording this, the Oscar nominations have come out and so I wanted use them as a jumping off point to talk about something that I've been thinking about since I watched this movie that was nominated, A Complete Unknown, about Bob Dylan.

I was never really a Dylan-head. I never had a Bob Dylan phase because I listened to some of his most ubiquitous songs, the early folk ones, and honestly, they are just too triggering. I find them pretty emotional and nostalgic and his voice is particularly tear-inducing, I feel. And so I never really got into him.

But I definitely have, since the movie, come to dive in a bit more.

I've heard from some people that they didn't love the movie that much because they came away not really knowing who Dylan is. I have been thinking about what I “got” from the movie and what the movie was trying to say.

At first, in watching it, there's an early line where they quote Woody Guthrie, a folk artist that inspired Bob Dylan greatly. Someone quotes him and says, something to the effect of, “a great song can change the world.”

It's a movie [that] feels very much like a concert. Like a “best of” in terms of early material, because you're really hearing full songs. Timothee Chalamet is singing most of the song of these several picks of songs.

If I was looking at it on the script, I would think this is kind of corny, this idea of just him coming up with the songs or performing the songs and everyone's in awe of him coming up with them. But when I watched the movie, I did feel that that is probably what would have happened, because the songs are great songs. They would elicit that kind of reaction. So it felt completely true to me.

When I originally watched the movie, I kind of walked away the first week of thinking about it. I thought about that line (“a great song can change the world”) as a thesis of what the movie was, just the power of songs. And to really sit in their power and showcase how powerful these early songs were.

But then I was thinking about how the movie ended. And if you're a fan of Dylan, or you've seen it, you know that he made the decision to go electric and started having a rockband energy to his music.

At least in the movie, it is presented as though it was a shock and a disappointment to many people. Now that I’ve dove into Dylan a bit more, I kind of understand that that is sort of his thing in the sense of: he makes artistic choices and doesn't care who follows him with those choices.

I was actually having a conversation with a friend of mine about songwriting and we were talking about: For some artists, and I would say Bob Dylan is included in this, and this is what the ending of the movie was about— I should say the whole movie was really about this, but you didn't really get that until quite the end— but for some artists, songwriting is like breathing.

I would say Prince is another example of this, these artists that have just insane amounts of output. Some of it good, some of it bad. They have just such a wide output that some people gravitate towards certain releases more than others.

In thinking about the movie, what is interesting about the story is that, and I don't know if this was intended or I'm being generous about my understanding of the movie, but my takeaway is that for Bob Dylan, songwriting is like breathing.

What ended up happening is when he first started writing songs, they connected to people in a way that felt like they were protest songs and they were necessary in that time period with all that was happening in the environment.

But artists are always reacting to their environments, and especially these ones that live and breathe songs. He's just pumping them out. It doesn't really matter what the reactions are. So I think people thought that he was being intentional about having protest songs from the get-go. I think people, at least at the ending of the movie, were expecting him to be that intentional, folk artist that's writing protest songs. But deep down, he's really just an artist and a songwriter, and he's going to continue doing whatever he's going to do, whatever the ether tells him to do. It was just that he was caught in a certain timeframe, with the certain songs, at a certain time.

And it's interesting because I think some artists are like that and some artists are different than that. I think of another artist, like one of my favorite bands that I've written about on the Substack before, Steely Dan, I feel that they're quite the opposite of the living and breathing song thing.

I think, yes, they're great musicians and yes, they're great songwriters, but I think it's coming from a different place. It's coming from a place of attempting to make something great and make something that they have in their mind's eye, or they have that's out there for them in the ether. They have certain ideas that they want to incorporate, they want to hear in a type of song.

Whereas I'm sure that that probably happened to Dylan at some point. But if you really listen through a lot of his discography, as I've been kind of doing in the past several weeks, it feels like it's mostly about the songs and getting the songs out of his soul.

Whereas with guys like Steely Dan who spent sometimes years and went through ridiculous amounts of money and players to get the right take, to get the right recording, to eventually put out the song, to work tirelessly on the mixes and that kind of stuff, I think you see a different type of artist that is striving for a particular type of song, rather than just a song and the way that the song is presented is not nearly as important.

I'm kind of connecting it to David Lynch here, because I've been thinking a lot about him since his passing. But for David Lynch, it was always about “the idea.”

He was really into... The ideas are like fish. You catch it. You don't know where it comes from. And you're trying to do everything in service of that idea that's in your imagination.

It's interesting to think about how far certain songwriters are taking that. With someone like Bob Dylan, I think it's a little bit quicker to try to get to that place of the idea’s finished. His writing is really more like poems, whereas with Steely Dan bringing the song to the finish line is quite a bit more particular in all of the different elements that need to be there. I don't think of their artistry as much as breathing as I do someone like Dylan.

I don't think one is better than the other. I just think that it's interesting to think about those different things and those different ways of approaching “the idea.”

I think it's a matter of, for a Bob Dylan type artist, it's about just getting the idea out and then moving on to the next thing. It's much more visceral in terms of acting it out and I think for those that are like Steely Dan, it's about perfecting that idea and I think there's more comparison or more trying to outdo yourself or outdo others, combine things from other people. It's more taste oriented.

Though, of course, there's taste throughout Dylan's discography because of the different directions he went with his music. But I don't know. It's just something I've been contemplating.

The Oscars

And as for the Oscars stuff, I mean, the only thing I'll say is that it's quite strange that Challengers did not even pick up a nomination.

I think it's probably just a matter of it coming out too early in the year and just not being considered an “Oscar-type” movie because it was a summer release.

Though I think Barbie was a summer release and still was winning for music and many other things last year. So I don't really know what was up with that, because I think it also should have won Best Screenplay.

If The Brutalist score takes home the best score, I'm not going to be upset, because that was a really, really wonderful score too. The ones that I had heard were great scores. It just seems strange, especially because Wicked was in there too, which is a lot of not “original” music. Some of it is original, but most of it is not original.

So it's strange to see Challengers be left out of there. Considering how bold and memorable, and more than any other score this year was in the zeitgeist of music. Not to say that that should make something win. I think it also was inventive and bold and still matched completely with the [film]. I think that type of work is what should be rewarded.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts for this article today. Thanks for listening or reading. And let me know if you have any thoughts in these kind of realms. Feel free to comment or just hit me up personally!

Jesse is a Producer, Marketing Strategist & Mixer/Mastering Engineer. I’ve been following him for a while now, because he’s got tons of great resources for musicians to understand how they might want to promote their own music. I’d point you in the direction of his newsletter Music Marketing Trends and YouTube channel Musformation which I highly recommend. His company Musformation Growth also produces a ton of podcasts and more recently is branching out into video work.

I sat down to have a conversation at a coffee shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to pick his brain. For an intimate experience, you can listen to that audio unedited, above. Below is a streamlined, readable version.

Topics discussed:

* why album covers are dying

* how contradiction is the “conversation”

* how emotional alignment in film scoring connects with “the making reels grind”

* why your music project should be your “art” project

* Jesse’s current Adam Curtis tattoo as well as his planned Aphex Twin tattoo

do is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

WD: I don't know if you read any of the other newsletters I’ve done, but [they’re] usually casual and I'm just trying to have more of a conversation than ask you questions. I'm kind of looking for it to go wherever it goes.

As a starting point, I've been noticing a lot of artists omitting their artists' names on their album covers, sometimes not even having the title of the album on it, but Brat obviously has the title on it. Still, no [artist] name.

JC: So in the 90s, I ran a couple different record stores, one on St. Mark's, which was the big punk record store I was the buyer for. There'd be this funny thing that would happen with vinyl. Sometimes they would only have the artist's name on the side of the vinyl. When you buy cheap vinyl, that often crinkled or faded. You have no idea what record it is. You can't even stock it… [So] you had to have the name, you had to have it so people saw it. If you didn't just breeze through it and say, oh, that's this, I've heard of this, you're losing an opportunity for sale.

The other thing is, going from the 40s into the 60s we get this professionalism of music where we start to see best practices. The only people who can afford to do vinyl are not very indie people. For a long time there's these established labels that build best practices and learn this is what we should be doing to optimize sales.

And then we've had, ever since the music business unraveled since 1999 and the music business became the internet music business, is everybody being able to do it, but a lot of people don't know best practices.

So let's say the manager says, you know we should really have the name on the album cover so people can identify it when it's on iTunes. A lot of times the artist goes, who cares? And the fight is over because most of these managers don't know enough to push back. They don't know best practices.

The other thing we start to really see a lot is that, in general, when is the art being presented without the context of what it is? So if you are having that argument with your manager or even your bandmates are pushing back to that, it's like, well, tell me when the art's going to be seen without the context of who we are? If it's on Spotify, it's always right next to which album this is. If it's on these things, sure, the font may be small, but the argument just becomes less and less so that it is necessary to have the artist's name and context in full, especially when it is .001%. Less than .001% of releases make it to a physical format.

WD: What do you feel like best practices should be now?

JC: Well, there's an argument for recognizability of a brand from far away is like one of the most helpful things. I've worked with the Misfits for a lot of years. For 25 years I've worked with them. I had a really interesting thing the other day. I was talking to a teenager, and I'm like, do you know who the Misfits are? [They respond,] I don't know them. I pull up the skull. They're like, oh, that thing? Of course.

They are the first group that on the Coachella Flyer are not in the Coachella font. They actually got their logo in there because John, their manager, is an adamant defender of their brand at all costs and would rather walk away from negotiation than not have their brand reinforced.

So what I would say is when we're talking about best practices and we're talking about what people should do is, yeah, you want to be reinforcing the logo. Like, it's just, like, Alec Baldwin, Glenngary Glenn Ross, “always be closing.”

WD: Yeah.

JC: Always be logo-ing.

WD: Right.

JC: Right now, we're talking about Brat. My parents are 80 years old. Now, it may be because I have a Charli xcx tattoo, but they know Brat is Charli xcx.

When you do a really strong branding like that and you're at the Democratic National Convention, I tell this story that a 70-something-year-old senator from Hawaii, Maisie Hirono, comes up to me, looks me down in the eye and goes, I'm brat. And I'm like, what the f**k world do I live in right now? But the thing is, is like, that is that branding that did that.

WD: Right.

JC: So did she need it? No, but most of the time what you do, since you are not using strong enough branding and creating strong enough conversations, you need to be reinforcing. This is what this looks like. There's one of the reasons that, if you look at all the groups, there's two [publications] that show the most merchandisable brands every year. They all have one thing in common. Every one of them never changes their logo. So it's Kiss, Metallica, Misfits. It's always the same ones that are the ones that stay for a decade in the top 20.

Taylor Swift, you could argue very much that, yes, she's changed some things. But in recent times, if you look at the trend of her merch, she was in a very similar font. The fact is every bit of graphic design is an emotion. And you want to be having an emotion that aligns with your brand that you're reinforcing over and over again to people.

Because also it sells what people buy merchandise for and what album covers are for too. It's this virtue signal that: I am part of the subculture. You see me alone in a bus station. You're bored waiting four hours for the bus. We both just mixed, maybe you're gonna talk to me because you see I'm wearing a charli xcx piece of merch.

WD: And I guess in one sense, part of me is thinking, okay, well if you do album covers that are just a photograph, right, and it has no text, I guess you have the chance to put the logo on the crinkle outside of the physical, but you’re losing that opportunity a little bit to have the logo.

JC: Yeah. I think there's also just synergistic ways to put it in. You could argue if you're Axl Rose and you're doing Use Your Illusion or something... where you know you want this expensive piece of art that you paid for that means a lot to your message or whatever that sure you can make exceptions, but most people are not doing this. They're not even putting their logos in the AI junk that they got for free right on midjourney and it's one, I think a lot of time a lack of thought and two, I think a lot of lack of best practices and foresights of what this all does.

WD: Because you were saying in the 90s that kind of fell apart a little bit, the vinyls, and I’m thinking of Aphex Twin as a kind of great example. He just he just pushed [the logo in] almost an ironic way. I don't know. I wasn't really into it. Or alive [then].

JC: Well, here's the thing. Both alive, a fan, and another tattoo I plan on getting, what was interesting with Aphex Twin… they mistake this thing in mystery in artists. A lot of the time the thing of mystery is a person who doesn't do a lot of interviews. [He didn’t give many interviews.] But what did he do? He did the most heavy branding of all time.

He had a logo and what were most of his music videos? He'd take his fucked up looking face, put it on the album covers, the music videos. He'd put it on children. He'd put it on dancing girls. And he was always branding because he was like, yeah, I look fucked up. He's like, I'm an ugly motherfucker, but he kept branding that too and putting [it] up on everything. And the other thing is, is much like Brat is, it's a total alignment. Compared to whatever else that everyone else in that genre would always do… these minimalist art pieces. And then what was he doing? Bad drawings of his face, way too overexposed pictures of his face, right? Just these things that set him apart from everyone else in his genre, which is what good positioning does as an artist that sets you apart and gets a conversation created about you.

WD: What you're saying is making me also think about is the decisions that you're making in terms of, do I put the logo? Do I not put the text? You want to balance being easily recognizable, but then having people to do a little digging to find the lore. You know what I'm saying?

JC: Asking someone else how they feel about it is often the thing I see. So a good example is like when you see even Kanye satirizing a Metallica thing, what did that make you feel? That he took their culture? The discussion of that Kanye was the first black artist to largely take from white culture to start conversations, whether it's working with Daft Punk, John Bryan, whoever, you know, you see that same thing, Metallica obviously being as white as it gets. You create another conversation.

So I just did this thing. I did the largest music listening consumption survey of the year.

WD: I participated in it.

JC: Amazing. I appreciate it. So one of the things we saw is the top two ways people still discover new music, according to the survey, is word of mouth. Number one, being word of mouth in person. Number two, being word of mouth online. Trusted friends telling you what to do.

So to your point, what is that? It's the discussion of what this artist just did. A lot of times the word of mouth is did you create a conversation from that piece?

Another piece of shitty AI art? Not so much. A very well thought out image that says something about the artist or gives an emotion? Often great. So I think ultimately that's probably the more important thing, rather than if something is going in this direction of having less text, more text, whatever. It's more just the balance of expressing the artists and their intent. Who they are and then doing something that's a bit different or that's kind of an event.

An event is a word I like to use. One of the big things, I think, is often a contradiction. So I have this saying, the contradictions are the conversation. For example, Charli's Brat contradiction was that if you looked at every other pop girl who put out an album in the last few years, you can't show me one that they didn't put themselves on the album cover, usually with their ass prominent in the photo, Billie Eilish being an exception to the ass. But, like, that's usually what it is.

But shitty, abrasive, green with a faded font is the polar opposite of that.

WD: Right.

JC: If you listen to her Zane Lowe interview, she fought for that because she knew that that was the position she wanted to take is, I don't got to play this f*****g game. I'm above all of you.

That is often what the game is, is you're saying I'm above all you. Sabrina Carpenter's whole message is, I'm more expensive than all of you b*****s. You know, each one has their own position. What are you serving with a contradiction that contradicts either people around you or something within yourself that you're saying: this is different. Charli's even saying this is different than my previous work. On Crash, I'm in a bathing suit, but I'm also bloodied, because I don't care about being as polished as Taylor Swift. I could show myself with my face smashed and not care.

WD: I’m curious what you think, but it may be that for an artist at her level, trying to get to that next stage, [doing the art in that way] really mattered. But for people who are just starting out, who are trying to get into the grind of reels or that kind of thing, how do you think [album] art plays into that?

JC: One of the most controversial TikToks and reels I've ever put up was when I said album art is the least important place to put your budget when you don't have one.

One, it very rarely affects somebody's decision about whether they're going to click it because most of the time when they're presented with music, it is smaller than your pinky nail. You can't really see it, so you have no idea what they're signifying in the first place, if it's even present, which it often isn't on playlists depending on the app.

WD: Well, that's the other thing that I was thinking, what are they… canvases? Actually, this happened to me the other day, which honestly, as someone who likes album art, it's a little frustrating…

JC: Same, same.

WD: You might find this funny, but I noticed the album art for the new Kendrick Lamar album. I found it funny that Jack Antonoff worked on the record and I noticed that his record was also a black and white cover standing in front of a car. And then also The 1975 record was black and white and had a car, which I was like, this is funny, but I wanted to look at the record. And I was like, I can't look at the record cover close up because there's a canvas on every freaking song on it.

JC: I think when you're making all these YouTube thumbnails, you're creating so much art every single day, right? Artists create art constantly and so because of that you are almost in a fatigue, I think it's sometimes that you're having to do so much creative. And then with the canvases, canvases are interesting now that people are using the Spotify For You page feeds, in that you do need something eye-catching and culturally signifying.

Like when you're scrolling through a lot of people, then you go, oh, that looks striking. That sounds striking. If there's an emotional alignment with the two, you can often convert a listener a little better.

We've seen numbers. Spotify also pushes the artists to do canvases more. They basically made it mandatory at this point, basically to push you to have a canvas to your song.

WD: Which I think makes sense with what you're saying with that controversial reel, because if [album art is] not going to, in the grand scheme of things, be converting listeners or holding that much weight in how people are seeing you, then why are you putting this much time and money into it?

JC: Yeah, and that's kind of my thing. What I was saying in that reel, and obviously there's always context collapse when you're doing short form compared to the things that you've said in long form, because you can contextualize more. But when you're telling me I have $2,000, I can't advise that.

The album covers doesn't help your click through. What it helps is brand reinforcement, which you may not have the money for, right?

WD: Yeah so maybe people should just create one logo and then just cycle out colors. *laughs*

JC: To be honest with you, one of the things I would advise is take your pose if you're a person who wants a picture of you and then remove background. Keep swapping through colors that are in the brand. Or start changing filters. Learn some wild effects with color correction.

A master class on early imagery. They even had multiple creative directors in the group but like Brockhampton when there was only 3,000 of them. What were they doing in the Saturation era? They were saturating a bunch of images that they would then use in other ways. It was like “saturation” was also that they were going to saturate the market with a massive amount of music, but they also extended that to the brand of let's just take the same photo and saturate it in a different way.

WD: Which was also genius for those covers for all the albums, because they could just put a different guy on the cover.

JC: Different guy on the cover, different title card on each video. Just very simple, small tweaks that were not hard to make.

WD: Something that I always hear you talk about is YouTube is still huge for Discovery.

JC: I mean, I’d argue bigger than ever.

WD: Yeah. Because I definitely remember [Brockhampton] being a big band that blew up on YouTube.

JC: 100%. You can take two polls of how YouTube did it. One, they showed up so much to YouTube. They made lots of more important content. But three, Fantano. And Fantano is a creature of YouTube.

So YouTube changed their algorithm about four or five months ago to surfacing smaller artists' music again on the browse page.

WD: It’s great.

JC: Yeah, and it's an unbelievable change I see in artist. I get like a video from a band that has 3,000 views on the thing that came out 14 days ago and it's like well clearly [YouTube] sees this is for me I hit play. And I may like it, I may not.

WD: What do you think are some of the mistakes, besides just not being your thing? If the algorithm is feeding you something, is that even something that you can help, or have you already done everything you can by the point where an algorithm is feeding you to someone?

JC: So there’s a two-fold problem. One, I am paid to listen to so much music it’s impossible for an algorithm to understand me unless I went and did that on a separate account. I actually do. I keep a separate TikTok account to look at when I don’t want my algorithm fucked up. I used to do it with Spotify.

But the big thing I really see is that, you can align yourself and make a better algorithm. So if you think about it this way, a group I think about a lot who I work with and are my friends is a group called Health. Health basically build the algorithm they want by collaborating with other artists. Now, not everybody's as fortunate as them to have all these other artists be like, of course we'll work with you, reaching out to Lamb of God or 100Gecs and them be like, hell yeah. But the point being, you can do lots of intentional things to build the algorithm.

You can't get connected to Drake when you have 40 monthly listeners, but you can get connected to a smaller artist Drake's fans like and keep building up from there and from there and just keep going up the thing by just doing a lot of smart practices.

WD: Not that you can trick the algorithm necessarily, but if it’s giving you the same type of stuff, how are you going to stand out in that way, if you’re just given a version of something you’ve already listened to? I think sometimes you could have a better chance if it was something you’ve never heard before.

JC: Artists will come and be like, I don't really sound like anybody. I'm like... A gift and a curse. It's going to be the hardest to get your first fans. It's going to be the easiest for you to grow.

People don't need a shitty version of Blink 182. You hit a certain point where you hit a certain amount of people who will listen to a shitty version of Blink 182. They just want real Blink 22.

When you're doing something unique with a unique set of emotions, there's a lot of potential there as long as the emotion is powerful. So you can create that, but you're right in the sense that I think people think a little too much that people's tastes are really narrow, when I don't think they're very narrow these days. In the average music listener, we see such a greater display of a vast interest of music than we ever have before.

WD: People are becoming more genre-less types of fans.

JC: While they may like discussing genre, they still are very fluid in all the things they will listen to and I think have a wider palette than we've ever seen before.

WD: I don’t know if we quite answered all that, but when I was talking about if someone’s getting to your algorithm, what are the worst mistakes that people are making once they get there?

JC: So a lack of emotional alignment is a very big one. What I mean by this is, somebody will go, you know, we're in a coffee shop right now. I always want to film a video in a coffee shop and then they're a black metal band. That doesn't align emotionally.

Now the contradiction can be hilarious. It would be really hilarious to have the black metal band playing at the coffee shop while everybody's trying to be peaceful and chill. But what I think most of the time I see that goes wrong is it's just like, I have an idea, I shoehorned it, and it has no emotional relevance to [the music or band].

One of the more interesting things I saw this year is Gigi Perez being one of the most viral artists of the year. It's like, girl makes sad girl music and she makes viral TikToks laying in her bed being depressed. It feels like the song because her music is about laying in bed being depressed. The emotional alignment is shocking how well it works.

Do you know there's this group called tsubi club?

WD: No.

JC: It's nuts. Two songs in two-ish, maybe three years. Both have millions of plays, but also the insanest music videos you'll ever see.

You look up tsubi club laced up. I have very rarely seen more conversation around an artist with two songs out being like, this is the craziest music video I've ever seen. But it also feels like the song, which is why it also works. Because the emotional alignment is really, really important.

I think people forget that, like getting back to album covers, whether it's TikToks right now, whether it's the album, whatever it's like when you're aligning and making an emotional world that actually other people are like, yeah that's what that feels like, it makes everything more powerful.

WD: For some of the readers or listeners of my newsletter who might be scoffing at, you know, these reels, or frustrations with making reels or whatever. What I’m hearing is it’s kind of the same thing as scoring a film. Where the thing works when the visual and the music are emotionally aligned. That’s when it’s working and that’s when it’s powerful.

JC: It's 100% that. I truly think a lot of the time when people are mad about these things, it's like, yes, I can understand if you're mad that you don't have the time to do it, stuff like that. But what I would also say is, are you familiar with the Magdalena Bay?

WD: Yes.

JC: So one of my favorite things about them is that everything they do is their art project. It's just this giant thing and there's even groups, we were talking about Thursday before we started recording. Thursday has always just been the band's art project in any way they're doing. They don't want to do a video if it's not part of the art project. They don't want to do album art or merch if it's not part of the art project. I think a lot of times musicians are not getting inspired by how do you make this an extension of your art project that you keep doing cool things that are within this artistic world.

I see the numbers. No one studies this more than me. A lot of the groups who are treating things like it's their art project are getting rewarded in a very big way.

WD: And by art project, are you saying that every piece, from the TikToks, and the things that people might be more careless about, they are all feeling part of the world of the band or group or whatever?

JC: They make a hat for a benefit. It still has to have a tie back to the world. I hate this world building term.

WD: Why is that?

JC: Because at best most of these people are barely building a cottage never mind a f*****g world. It's the same way that when you're like “marvel cinematic universe,” It's f*****g eight characters with barely any development. F**k off. I don't want to hear universe.

I went to Virgil Abloh's museum exhibit. I don't want to hear the Virgil Abloh universe, but I saw it was a body of artwork. And there's nothing wrong with that.

And you can be diverse in your artwork. To be honest with you, I create lots of different things. I treat every one of my YouTube videos as a part of my art project.

I always go back to Phoebe Bridgers. Phoebe Bridgers treats it like an art project. She can also be real f*****g silly on Twitter and on short form. She can take a topless photo on Instagram and laugh about it. She can fake kissing Matty Healy in front of her boyfriend, Bo Burnham, and make a post about it. But she's also creating her art project. She's filming the Boy Genius video at a monster truck rally, and that's part of her art of like, isn't it weird I'm in this situation? Your art can be whatever you see it as, and that world can be built whatever you see it as, but I think that that's why so many people don't enjoy doing this, is they think that they have to twerk on camera when they're not a twerk on camera type of person and that's not what it is.

WD: It’s funny because it’s making me think emotional alignment is just like a meme. It goes viral usually because it’s hitting someone’s emotions, whether it’s funny or fucked up or whatever it is.

JC: I think it’s either Brad Troemel or Joshua Citarella have that theory that a meme is just the most effective way of telling a story in a fast way. And yes, you may need to know some of the backstory to get it, but it still is the thing.

I always think back to Mac DeMarco years ago, hired a meme maker for his music. You can Google it on Pitchfork.

WD: That's very, very interesting. That's very genius of him.

JC: Yeah, but it really is the thing of that, at that time, the highest currency— we're often thinking of music marketing about ROI for your dollar— When I saw that, and I should say, you could waterboard my best friend's darkest secrets out of me by playing one Mac DeMarco song to get me to get it to stop. As a band, I have no interest in their music. I saw that, I was like, that's one of the most genius things, because it's the most effective marketing at the time.

WD: It reminds me of, I think I heard that Gracie Abrams’ team was hiring people to do fan accounts.

JC: This is the most common thing to do. In fact, the most interesting thing we see right now is that artists who don't post and kind of refuse to post, that's what their teams are doing to compensate for them.

I'm going to not say I know this for a fact, but I'm going to say I heard it from a reliable source that that is a lot of the Mk.gee strategy is because he won't make content, what they basically have is tons of accounts that are just posting anything he does. They get it out there.

WD: I mean, it's genius.

JC: It really is. And then the other genius thing is, you know this, that Shaboozy hired that firm to make fake fan fiction of him?

WD: No, I didn’t know that. It’s like manufacturing consent.

JC: Yeah, basically. It’s not far from it. There’s this term, do you know this term hyperstitions?

WD: No, I don’t.

JC: I highly recommend, I have a friend Brogan who goes by Art Chad on YouTube. He made a really good explainer on hyperstitions, but the hyperstition is the idea that you creates something that's not true.

So for example, “JD Vance having sex with a couch,” but it becomes so popular everybody believes it's real. No one could tell.

So Shaboozy hired this firm that said that he is Dolly Parton's godson. He is not Dolly Parton's godson, but they paid to create that myth online. They used a AI generation of Charlamagne tha God saying it on Breakfast Club as if it was true.

WD: Crazy.

JC: And that got it into the zeitgeist. It got a conversation. And what do we have from that? The longest-running number one song from an independent artist in 50 years.

I wouldn't say that's the sole reason. I think the main reason for its success is it's a very good song that people like yelling in bars very loud. And the contradiction. A large black man with dreadlocks singing a country song. Very big conversation. That’s a contradiction that creates a conversation.

Naomi Klein has this theory in her book, Doppelganger, that we’ve kind of hit a point where a lot of people would rather believe the most ridiculous version of the truth than the truth.

WD: Yeah.

JC: That is the logical conclusion, is that a bunch of b******t and hyperstitions are going to spread.

But yeah, Gracie Abrams doing anything to spread her music, especially more legends and lore and things about who she’s dating. Well, her father is one of the greatest fiction producers of the last century.

WD: Makes a lot of sense. Does that kind of stuff excite you, creatively? Or does it scare you?

JC: So a lot of people don't know this, that I speak on, produce two of the most popular political podcasts in America. I used to, one of my other political podcasts was a podcast called Fever Dreams, where we chronicled the conspiracy theories and QAnon for two years. I see where bad things go.

There's a very good documentary that shows a lot of this HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis. I have a line from him tattooed on my arm, “lost in a fake world.”

When people believe they're lost in a fake world, they don't believe anything. They lose motivation, they lose hope. They stop dreaming and a country goes to decline.

I usually condone by any means necessary promoting your music. I think this is fire that the world burns down with.

WD: So when you're advising and consulting, you're kind of trying to go different routes than that kind of manipulating? It’s hard to because you get pulled into it, just by the nature of [the internet].

JC: The place I like to be is leaning into what fans are saying about you. If it’s just fun and playful and playing with it a little, I think that could be kind of fun. Do I think making up outright lies where people no longer know what the truth is? I find that unethical personally. But that would be the line I personally draw, but it really is for the artists to do themselves.

WD: It’s interesting with the Shaboozey thing. I could see a little bit of annoyance at all the Nepo-babies. So his team’s like, why don’t we f**k them?

JC: Well, it's one of the biggest conversations. It's a very funny thing, when I talk to people about viral TikToks, the number one thing I have to say in their feedback, they're like, we're going to do this thing. I'm like, too smart. You got to be more dumb. People are f*****g morons. What's the dumbest thing everybody can discuss? Your parents are rich. You got here without merit. It is the easiest thing in this culture to discuss right now. So when you're creating this conversation, that is the easiest thing to discuss. It's way more apt to go way more viral.

Whereas, if the conversation is a complex one about, is country music still scared of race? Well, it's a complex conversation. Beyonce not being the country music awards, strike against it. Shaboozey being on, but not as honored as he should for a song. is that harder conversation to have, with a lot more detail and a lot more knowledge.

Whereas you could just say, it's fucked up Dolly Parton's famous, he's Nepo-baby.

WD: [To] end on a more optimistic note maybe, any particular words about what’s exciting you?

JC: Every week of my member feed, I cover artists who went viral, going from no fans to a bunch of them. I look at the most viral song in America right now. It’s Sam Austin's “Seasons.” Dude was homeless in the last two years. Did not have much going for him 700 days ago. And now is getting 2 million streams a day on a song going viral. Has a great back catalog that's getting discovered too.

They uploaded through TuneCore. They're not on a major label. They were out for a little while. They were on Atlantic where I used to work. But right now that song went up through TuneCore. It went viral six months after it was out because TikTok liked doing fit pics to it.

Show me another time where we had that happening as often as it does as now in the history of music. The 1950s, some people could point to some songs like a “Louie Louie” that had success like that, but I'll remind everyone, 1952 was almost three quarters of a century ago. That's cool. That's a long time of lifetime since things have been this good for it.

The problem is we don't compensate very well for it. Musicians get paid worse than they've ever been paid.

WD: Oh yeah, totally.

JC: That's the thing we have to start doing, and the way we start doing that is we hope the Justice Department burns Live Nation to the ground, and we hope we can stick a fork in it the rest of the way after that, since Live Nation is the single greatest [reason], way more than Spotify or YouTube.

WD: Oh really?

JC: Look up Live Nation More Perfect Union on YouTube. Live Nation is the greatest reason that musicians are not making money on touring, which used to be a very big reason for the way musicians were funded. And then the second being that when music piracy happened, we were met with the lowest common denominator in negotiation because major labels were their most weak during negotiation points and since then major labels now are so weak by just lack of power.

There’s also Securities and Exchange Commission laws that make it so that the major labels can't bind together and “unionize” since they're corporations. The four governing parties (big major lables) can't negotiate against Spotify as a monolith, so they don't have more individual power and if they communicate with one another about the negotiations, that's a security and exchange violation.

What we have to do is we have to unionize and boycott, and then we can get a better world.

WD: Well, thanks so much. Kind of more optimistic…

JC: Yeah, I’m not really good at that.

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This is not something that I composed for. This is something that I've been working on for a while, before I was diving deeper into the composing stuff.

And it's called Beyond Being Well. And it was based off a podcast, which I made in 2020.

I'll get into the story of that stuff, because I'm going to talk a bit about it. But first, I just want to say the film is screening this week! This Thursday and also next week, December 20th. The first one is at Videodome and the second one is at Millennium Film.

I'd love to see anyone who I know or I don't know who's a subscriber and they live in New York to come on out.

Also, Millennium Film has the film streaming online that they're screening that night as well. So I will put that link in there. And if you follow me on Instagram, I'll likely share that the night of as well.

And then there's hopefully going to be some screenings of it in the new year as well.

Short Film Inspirations

But yeah, it's been a long time coming.

To give a bit of a backstory and then go into more of some lessons that I learned from doing it: The movie was based off of a podcast, which we did like a short run of episodes of in 2020 and it was something I made with my brother and I over the pandemic which we had talked about doing for a while, basically it was a health, alternative medicine satire podcast and we had just talked about doing it for a while.

It was inspired by our dad who's a holistic dentist and is interested in a lot of the alternative medicine stuff. So he had kind of introduced us into the world of that. And it was also getting, I would say, more mainstream online in general.

But yeah, we always found a lot of that stuff funny and interesting. And I think that's probably my favorite type of things to write about. It's just something that I'm genuinely interested in, but at the same time, it's something that is kind of funny and laughable, probably because of contradictions within it or within that world.

But yeah, so we finally made that podcast in 2020 (peak pandemic) and we developed these two characters and we did improvised episodes that were fictional. They were fictional characters kind of meeting and then making the show.

It's an easy binge if you're interested. The episodes are like no more than 20 minutes usually. We try to keep it short and really tight. There's a sort of narrative that goes through the thread of the episodes.

But yeah, and then kind of life got back. Life was happening a bit more. And so we stopped doing the podcast...

And then I had moved back to Maryland for the pandemic from New York. And I was getting ready to move back to the area in New York. And I really wanted to film a short... It was actually originally a pilot episode for a series based on the podcast. But it kind of got cut down into a short film. Anyway, I just wanted something to commemorate the time. Because interestingly enough, my brother was also going to leave and go start actual medical school.

So it was just something we wanted to make to commemorate this time that we were able to have together coming back, which we didn't think we would, you know, because of the pandemic. And so it was a little thing that we were able to do.

And we enlisted my good friend, Sam. He's my co-director for it because I acted in it. And then he got us through an edit.

So that's how we kind of came to put the film together.

Short Film Lessons

I would say there's definitely some lessons that I learned because it's been a long time since we shot it. We shot it in 2021. And it's like only a 15-minute movie, but it took quite a while to finish. And that was mostly because we had issues with the hard drive. Of course, we didn't back it up because we're dumb. And so we made that mistake.

We were able to luckily get a string out of an edit before those issues happened. So that's kind of what we had to work with, unfortunately, moving forward.

I still think I was happy enough with that cut that we were just kind of tightening it from there and the takes we had ended up using were the best takes.

But it was unfortunate, especially for, like, color purposes and, you know, a variety of things. I think what we came out with was definitely something I'm happy about, and I want to put it out, and I've been wanting to screen it to places just to see what the reaction is.

But, yeah, that was, I mean, everyone is told this. Hopefully everyone does it. But sometimes even backup drives have issues too. And this can happen.

It's a little bit of a lesson just sitting on something. And especially if you don't have a deadline and you haven't already made something and you don't already have an audience waiting for something else… it really doesn't make a lot of sense to rush things. So sitting on things for a while longer to see what might come from that is really good.

And I think I was able to do that, have a number of iterations of edit and decide that it was more effective as a short film than a pilot. That kind of thing.

So yeah, that is kind of what I wanted to share. But I would love to see anyone from the area come out to the screenings. And yeah, I'll keep everyone updated on if there's any more screenings in the new year.

And also look out for the following post is going to be like around two weeks from now. I'll be posting near Christmas time. My best-of list, which I did last year as well. So it'll be my favorite music, my favorite movies, that kind of thing.

Everyone jumps the gun with the lists. I mean, maybe I should even wait until after, into January. But, yeah, I think I'm going to post that right before the holiday.

But, like, even today, I was listening to an album that came out last week. And it's great and it's probably not made many lists.

I always feel bad for those December releases to kind of get lost but I admire people who choose to drop something [then]. It's unfortunate if they don't want that choice but yeah…

And then also, one more thing is look out for a release of mine and other friends who were putting together our It's Christmas Volume 9, our ninth year of doing Christmas covers to raise money.

This year we're doing it for anera.org. They're giving aid to Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, I believe. And we did that last year, and we'll be doing that again this year.

And if you're reading this, too, and you are interested in submitting a track, we still have a couple more days...

If anyone feels inspired to record something or has had something in a chamber for a bit or was going to release something anyway that's Christmas or holiday themed, please send it my way and I'll be happy to include it before that gets released.

I think we're going to release it on the 15th, but the deadline is the 12th. It's kind of casual. So, yeah.

Those are some little musings and updates there at the end. But thanks for reading and listening.

And I think it also causes me to be able to do more posts. Because I don't have to sit down and write, all I have to do is go on a walk and sit with my thoughts.

I'm not sure how coherent this one will be, but it's something that I was thinking about today.

Cohesion vs. Distinction

The idea of: a lot of things in art have a sum of different parts and they make up a whole of a project. I think this is the easiest example and the one that I was kind of thinking about was an “album.” Because the idea of an album is you have a cohesive thing, a cohesive work. But then inside the album you have different songs.

And the thing that I'm always really interested by and striving for is like a sonic cohesion. But... Not so much that it's to the detriment of the album as a whole, or I should say, well, yes, to the album as a whole, but I should say a detriment to these individual songs, right?

Because I like an album where each song stands alone on its own. They each kind of have their own character and they stick out in their own ways and they're memorable in their own ways.

But then you obviously want the album to work together, the songs to work together to present a bigger picture.

For instance, I don't really want to badmouth this artist, but a recent rap album that came out. It's good. The music's good. I can't say that it's not good, but the production to me is just so cohesive that it's to the detriment of the album, I think.

Like, sonically, the production for each song just sounds so similar that I can't really, place which song is which. To me, that's a negative aspect.

I mean, some people are just like, oh, I don't know, I'll put on this album and I'll just kind of listen through it. And, you know, that works for me too in some instances.

For example, the mk.gee album I think does that really well where it's one that I just turn on and listen through. And the textures across the board are pretty cohesive.

But at the same time, I don't know, it works more than that rap album, I'll say, because it feels like there's these moments of punctuation that stick out in the songs themselves that keep it interesting, I guess, for me, even if it gets a little muddy as to what song is what.

But I think the balance is an interesting idea, to try to balance that.

This is what I try to do on my albums, or the albums that I've written so far is I try to, since my high school band, and into this project that I've been working on called Sure!, where I am trying to have each song have its own character.

And I'm pretty specific about cutting songs if it feels like, oh this is just a rehash or a similar feel to this other one, then I'll cut it because I don't want the mix up I don't want someone to be like, oh that was this song? I want the songs to stand alone and then also hopefully have them work together and that's the balancing act that's fun and a challenge and an interesting idea.

And I was thinking about it in terms of movies as well. How you do have these individual moving parts like frames, the different shots, I think, and different scenes, but I think probably, and we're talking about the songs working all together, I think a good parallel for film would be the frames, the shots, and the color, which also comes into play with that.

I mean, there's so many moving parts to film, but yeah, just how off-putting it can be if there's a shift. But then you want to keep the movie interesting as it goes.

So you do have to incorporate some changes so that it feels like you're in the same world. It's like a world-building sort of thing, too, where you try to keep all the songs within the world. And you're also trying to have a progression, keep it interesting.

Yeah, I don't really know what the answer is, but I do think that being cutthroat about it is maybe one way into keeping that balance.

In film, being harsh with the edit. If scenes are feeling out of place, they're not needed for the story, or they don't feel like they're working in the world.

… I feel like that analogy is maybe falling apart now. But I don't know.

I think it's the case for albums, too. You can fall into the trap of doing it either way, where on one end you make it so cohesive, kind of like this rap album, that nothing really sticks out. It's like, okay, this is good. If you listen to an individual song, it's not like I'm thinking this is a bad song. But then when I play the whole album together, it's just kind of muddy, and it's like, oh, it's background music, which has its place, but I'm not really into that as much when we're talking about making art.

And then the other end of it is like, you're making such disparate songs or maybe this is a good analogy: like anthology films are kind of similar where they try to keep a certain tone across the board where you have to keep them similar enough. I just watched Kinds of Kindness so it's kind of on my mind, but it's interesting because a friend of mine wrote on their Letterboxd review that the first short and the third short felt like the Willem Dafoe characters and the themes were too similar. And I think that's a good point. Or it's an interesting point. That it's like that idea of differentiation. There were a lot of similar themes across the board, the tone was similar across the board, you had the actors to help you, and the kind of austere style and stilted dialogue and stuff was there across the board, so you already had a cohesion in that sense, but are you differentiating what you're exploring in each of the shorts or whatever little films that you want to call them. It's hard. It's hard to strike the balance.

And I think it also ends up striking people differently. And so that's something, you know, it's for the artists themselves to kind of feel out. And then, you know, work with their collaborators to feel out too.

Because, you know, someone could watch [Kinds of Kindness] and think, oh, they were definitely different enough. Another person could watch the movie and think, I don't know why they included both of these. If they were so similar, why didn't they just include the one and do something different for the other one?

And that's kind of how I feel. With this new album that I just finished up, that's how I'm feeling.

And then the reason I thought of talking about this is because I've been thinking about the same thing with the visual end of the album. I want to do videos for the songs. And I'm just trying to parse out the balancing act of— I mean, these days it feels very important to give your album a visual identity. And have it be cohesive across the board so people can understand [and] have a sense of who you are as an artist or what you're trying to do with the album.

But at the same time, I don't want to have them all be so similar that the next single that's released, let's say, is not as exciting because it doesn't have a visual that's particularly different and doesn't feel fresh.

So it's an interesting balance. And like I said, I don't know what the answer is. Trying to be cutthroat about it is a start.

But I think it's like an intuitive thing. Going inward and really thinking about it. What feels right.

I don't know how much else I have on that, but I'm also curious what other people think. Something I'd like to do with this newsletter more is... I want people to respond. I'm curious to have more conversations with people.

Like I said, the interview portion of it is more beneficial to me than just when I'm kind of with my own thoughts. The community aspect of it I want to build up, so please leave a comment or text me or DM me or whatever if you have any thoughts on this, and also if you have any thoughts on it or you want to talk about it further, because it's always interesting to bring more people into it.

But, yeah, I think that's all for now.

Again, if you're reading this, you're reading this. If you're listening to it, you're listening to it. If people really like the audio portion, I would maybe bring up the quality of it. But for now, I think it's about the idea of walking and talking and thinking forward and through ideas. So... I like that kind of aspect of it. But if people really want to listen rather than read, I'd be open to trying to maybe get a portable mic with wind— What are those things called? A wind hat? I forget what they're called. Little fluffy things that go on microphones for wind blocking. But yeah, something like that so that I could just continue to walk and talk, but the audio experience was a little bit more listenable.

Just let me know. Peace out.

Because I've just been thinking about, well, I haven't really stuck to the schedule lately of the newsletter. And that's not because I'm busy necessarily. It's just because I've been uninspired in terms of what I'm writing about.

Some of the things have been forced in terms of trying to put out something obligatorily. Like, oh, it's the second Monday of the month, so I need to put out a newsletter, and then just kind of like forming an idea off of that.

Which, I don't know, maybe some people could sense that for those posts. Any of the readers could sense, like, oh, this is not as special. Or it seems kind of half-assed or whatever.

I don't really want to do that anymore.

The Next Phase

I feel like each post should be something I'm excited about, because if I'm not excited about it, then how do I expect an audience to be excited about it? (Usually I still get excited once I get going on a topic, but regardless, there may be some dryness or contrivance sensed).

So [the posts are] going to be more sporadic. And along with that, I'm not going to do a paywall any longer. I've been doing a paywall for some of the longer posts or posts with some sort of hidden advice or plug-in suggestions or things like that. But I was honestly doing it more because I saw other people doing it. Like, oh, this is how you do a substack. You have a lot of material that's for free and then you have special material, kind of the patreon sort of model, you have special material that's behind the paywall.

Well, there were some people on the paywall. And I think I wasn't even consistent enough with [the paid offerings], so people jumped off the paywall, which is totally fine. It makes sense because there wasn't that much of an offering there. It was kind of barely a thing. And that's totally fine. It's understandable.

But I think I was doing it because that's what I saw as the process of what everyone else does, right? And it's not necessarily why I started the newsletter in the first place. I started it because I wanted to write about my experience and have a document of it. As well as, I was enjoying a lot of other people's substacks and felt like it was a more intimate, natural experience than the way that some of the other social media is.

But now the issues I'm having with it are similar to the issues I have with, say, Instagram or TikTok. That posts feel forced for the sake of having more content or being consistent with the content rather than having quality things, quality work, and that type of thing.

Yeah, I'm going to nix the paywall. I'm going to have more infrequent posts.

The other thing is I'm going to lean into what I do really like. Ha ha, do. I'm going to lean into the thing that I do really like about the newsletter. And I've gotten the most out of the interview portion. I think I've gotten the most out of that.

I really enjoy doing the interviews and learning about other people's processes as well. And so I want to be doing more of that. And I think my time is better spent because it does take time to reach out to people, find people that are willing to put those things together.

And so I think I'm going to continue it in that fashion. I also don't know if people enjoyed the podcast version I did of the interview and if people feel like they would consume those interviews more in the podcast form versus the transcript form. I'm doing music and I used to work in podcasting, so I just like get tired of the listening and I want to turn my ears off and just read. So I prefer having the transcript and that's kind of why I started doing that.

But there is a way to do both on Substack, which is really nice, and just have like a built transcript system. Or a transcript come from the podcast, and so then you have the audio, and then if you film it, you also have the video, which I did in mine. So I think that that is the route that I'm going to go with that.

A couple other things.

I think I'll continue to do updates that are more personal about little projects that I'm working on and other things just because I feel like the initial people who have signed up for the newsletter are interested in keeping up with me. So it only makes sense. I'll continue doing that kind of stuff. But again, that's more sporadic because there's not always something to announce that I've done every other week at this point.

Another thing is... It's changing— my feeling towards the newsletter. Even though I wish I was more consistent with it. I have a weird thing with quitting something.

I don't like to... You know, if I say I'm going to do something, I like to continue it. But... I think in this case, it's a good learning experience for when a project needs to be tweaked and when a project needs to be pivoted.

It's still something that I care about, but I just think my time and my resources are better split up into different things.

I've been talking to a friend of mine about another project that has a similar sentiment to what I've been trying to do with do and I think we're going to collaborate on something and it's in the works and he asked me if do could be associated with it in some way. And so there may be a merging of it. It's kind of an interviewing capacity with some of those interviews, though in a different way. I don't know if those interviews will kind of sublimate into that new thing or whether they'll stay on do or how it'll work, but that's something else I'm thinking about.

The Philosophical Challenges of Mixing an Album

Another thing I wanted to write about and I've been thinking about is I've been finishing up, it's going to be a while before it's out, but I've been working on finishing the mixes for a personal album under my Sure! moniker, which is an indie rock thing.

And it's eight songs, because all my albums are eight songs under that moniker. It's just something I decided.

And yeah, we're finishing up the mixes, and the mixing process is interesting because there's a lot of things that you have to think about in terms of mixing and mastering.

Well, mastering more so, but mixing and mastering are kind of like the packaging of a product, because you have the music and that's like the thing. I mean, the album art is packaging as well, a more literal way. But the mixing and the mastering is also “packaging” and you have to kind of think about how it sounds like you have to think about [how] something looks in the context of the rest of the stuff that it's being presented with. So the way that something would sound on the playlist, you know, Spotify playlist among a bunch of other songs. And it matters about those sorts of trends.

And so something we were, Max Schoenwetter— who's mixed the album, it's done as of today— talking about is that it's weird how you can have art: You have what the song wants, and that's kind of the most creative thing to think about, kind of in the same way of how people say songwriting and creativity can come out of the ether, or be God that's kind of compelling you, or floating towards your mind. Mixing the songs can kind of define how the mix should be for you. But then there's also the outside world. I don't know another way to explain it other than God and the world.

So [the world is] kind of the trends in society. And then what it feels like, for whatever inexplicable reason, you just have a sense that something should be this way (God). It should sound this way. And you're kind of trapped between those two things and having to balance that.

Like, for instance, the loudness war, which is something a lot of people speak about, where mixes and masters have gotten progressively more crushed, loud, and less dynamic range across a song's length because of radio play. You wanted your song to stick out. You want your song to stick out and not get lost. And so you don't want to have such dynamic range that sections of the song are not heard, or your song just like lower. This is in the relative sense between songs and not just within the song itself. But you want your song to not be so low that, if it's playing through a succession of songs, your song is just like way lower.

Actually, we had this issue at a film premiere of one of the films I scored where it was at a festival and I guess it was not really communicated what the audio should be mastered at for all the films, for the festival play, and so when it came time for the different films, our film for whatever reason was mixed lower. So you had all these other films play before it and then when it played it was still good, but you just heard it at a lower volume, like the dialogue was lower, the soundtrack was lower, and so it's not hitting us as hard as it could have.

And that's exactly why the loudness wars happen too. Because, you hear a song lower and then maybe just it gets ignored because you're playing the radio at a party or you're playing in the car and you're talking over it. Whereas if it's loud, it gets noticed. So that balancing act is interesting with mixing.

Finally, A Good Movie Trailer

Another thing I wanted to talk about was I finally saw a good trailer. And I think more trailers need to do this. But this trailer for The Brutalist.

It doesn't give much away for what the film is, but boy, does it make you want to see it. And it really inspires you. I mean, I was very inspired by the visual language of it, the epicness of it.

And thank God it doesn't have an acappella version of some ridiculous hit that we've heard a million times that has to be in there. (Like I’ve complained about in a past post).

It doesn't need to tell you what the movie's about, the arc of the movie. The two-minute, three-minute trailers that they show in the theaters tell you... They have an arc. And there's no need, I think. There's really no need. Especially when... With social media, you'd think... I mean, they do cut shorter and shorter little snippet trailers. But it's not about the length that makes them boring. It's just, why would you want to see the movie before you've seen the movie?

And so I think... I hope this BREAKS the industry. (lol) In terms of trailers, because I think it's a really special trailer, it made me want to see the movie.

The text layout is fantastic. I mean, it's genius to go horizontally rather than vertically, or rather than appear out of, I don't know, thin air. (Also the music is incredible, how it starts tense and thriller-y but then eventual crescendos to a patriotic feel. Masterful.)

I really, really thought it was beautifully done and very inspiring. So that was another thing I wanted to mention in this newsletter.

Final Thoughts

But yeah, I think I'm going to make the newsletter, as you can see, it's already changing and it's because I'm still deciding if I'm going to do this or not, but I am recording this while I'm taking a walk.

And then I'm going to transcribe it. Or I have transcribed it, I guess now. Because you're reading it. From this audio. And I think it's going to be more... What's the word? Spontaneous. And free-flowing. Rather than... So, succinct, which, again, the newsletters that I've read in the past have been really succinct and short and sweet. And it is probably better for doing sustainable, consistent and useful posts, but it's not what is exciting me.

With the interviews I learned that it's very nice to be able to have the audio and then transcribe it from there and kind of finalize it from there and I like that. I was like, what if I kind of do that myself, interview myself in a sense and then transcribe that?

So, yeah, that's the... I hope this is all recorded. I'm standing between cars right now.

I may decide to include the audio depending on how good the audio is. I may decide to throw it away and just use the transcripts.

But thanks for reading. I hope you'll stick around for the next sort of phase of the newsletter. It's been almost a year since I've had it. And yeah, that's phase two of do.

As you may have heard, I mentioned a short film came out that has a score of mine in it! It’s called Eye to Eye, written and directed by today’s guest Ethan Romaine. If you haven’t seen it: watch it! The conversation above will make a lot more sense that way…

We also released a soundtrack for the film, which you can listen to on all major streaming platforms! It includes all of the score cues from the film, all of the underscore beats, and a couple unused/process tracks as well!

Before watching Eye to Eye or the podcast above, I suggest you watch the other films from Ethan’s hometown love-letter series, 301 Stories (301 is our hometown area-code), of which Eye to Eye is third and final episode. Both Ep. 1 Lover’s Leap and Ep. 2 Family Dinner had festival, online, and 301/Brooklyn premieres. Eye to Eye follows those same characters, so it’ll feel that much more impactful having watched the whole series.

Ethan and I have known each other for a long time. He was my “first friend” in the town where I grew up. We began our filmmaking journey by making embarrassing amateur films together. We also shared a love of music which culminated in throwing many house shows in his basement with our high school surf rock band, Golf of Mexico (pictured).

Since our high school days, Ethan studied at NYU’s Tisch, made those first two shorts I mentioned, and has really found a voice as a filmmaker and artist. I’ve truly enjoyed seeing him grow. He’s always had a great knack for bringing people together in a shared vision, and it’s been amazing to see him bring that talent into film directing.

Our talk was filmed in Frostburg, MD outside of Ethan’s parent’s house, the day after the local, 301 premiere of the series.

Topics discussed:

* how filmmaking can be like dentistry or acupuncture

* how comedy is like “the Blues”

* why you should be open when it comes to what your “next short film” is

* why Ethan thought of me in particular to score Eye to Eye

* & the problem with “results” directing

Watch or listen above! And let me know if you want more!