NOTE: This is a bit of a TMI/NSFW entry.  You’ve been warned.

I tend to not be a very debaucherous person[1. I think I just made that word up.].  Most of my time is spent at home, either noodling on the guitar or playing Fire Emblem or some other incredibly nerdy task.  When I lived in the Dorian House, even though we would have some pretty crazy nights, it’s not like every night was crazy.  Generally we would sit and watch TV and make fun of shows on VH1.  Or they would watch baseball and I would wonder why I was watching baseball.  Or I’d play Final Fantasy XII and Aaron would bitch about the fact that I was playing Final Fantasy XII.  Or some combination of all of these. (more…)

This is gonna be a long post, I reckon, to make up for all the short updates I’ve been doing.  It feels good to be writing again! (more…)

Todd tagged me to do this, and I must, by law of the Internet Meme Act of 2007, respond.  The deal is that it’s six random things about me.  I talk a lot about myself so I hope that you haven’t heard these before.  Here we go! (more…)

I’m not shy about my love of the Decemberists.  At one point I owned five of their t-shirts and an assortment of CDs and vinyls (some of which were all but stolen by my ex-girlfriend), and I can play almost all of their discography on guitar, and know most of the lyrics by heart.  So when the time came for them to play the Crystal Ballroom, I was excited.  Like, little girl excited.  Little girl watching the end of American Idol excited. (more…)

The M83 show last night marked my triumphant return to the Doug Fir Lounge.  As I have spoken about in my other blog, I had an expired driver’s license for a good five months or so, and the only venue in the city of Portland who would not let me into their log-laden hallways was the Doug Fir.  That was back in September, and the act was Laura Gibson, so I wasn’t too upset about it (don’t get me wrong, I like Laura Gibson, but if I don’t see her, meh).

So when my friend Paul told me that he had scored tickets to M83, and that it was at the Doug Fir, I was elated, first because it was M83 and their new album, Saturdays = Youth is one of my favorites of the year, but also because I had a brand new shiny Oregon state driver’s license!  “Take that, Doug Fir!” I shouted to the stars.  But in the end they didn’t give a shit. (more…)

Tonight I went to a free orientation at MetroEast Community Media, one of five public access stations in the Portland metropolitan area.  You have to do orientation in order to take their classes on editing and camera/studio work, etc.  We have satellite here and not cable, unfortunately, so I can’t watch public access TV, but a significant portion of my time in Boise was spent checking out what was on the only public access channel there, TVCTV.  It was primarily either terrible shows, boring shows, or hilariously bad shows. (more…)

I spend a lot of my time, probably too much time, thinking about ways to get my music out to new ears without actually getting out of my house.  Playing shows is obviously the best way to get your music known, the reasons behind it being deeply rooted in history, of gatherings of people to hear a troubadour or a classical piece, or a lute player sitting at a muddy street corner, playing folk songs for pennies.  This part of musicianship will never die, even as forms of music change (and in fact, some new musical genres — DJing, for example, thrive more at the live show than they do on an album).

The internet, however, is another beast altogether.  Busking is non-exististant.  There are no “live shows” unless they are online streams of an actual live show.  Thus, the sociology of what it means to play music, the gathering aspect of it, the culture of going to see a show, dissolves, and we are thrust back to square one without even realizing it.  So I thought I would attempt a discussion of the sociology of the internet, as it pertains to online music and fan gathering.  I would appreciate feedback on this, since this is mostly off the top of my head, and I could be dead wrong.

I have broken this down into three parts: Primary Sites, i.e., social networking sites; Secondary Sites, i.e., websites/music sites; and Tertiary Sites, i.e., weblogs/internet word of mouth. (more…)

UPDATE: This post is getting a lot of attention!  If you’re here from some website or re-Tweet, I hope you stay and check out my site, and download my free Christmas CD!

I also have a permanent continuation of this page here.

I’m sure at some point in your lifetime, you’ve thought, “Gee, I really like Josh Belville’s music, and I really want to help him become rich and famous, but I do not understand these Internets.  What can I, a simple beggar, do?”

It’s easy! (more…)

The fine fine people at Artists House Music Tweeted this article and it immediately caught my attention.  I wanted to reply to them but 140 characters is not enough for what I want to say.  Then I thought, I have a blog!  Yay!  I’ll just write something there.

AND THE REST WAS HISTORY.

So I’ll just reprint what the article says, since it’s pretty short and some people (like me) don’t like to click on a bunch of links sometimes.  It reads:

A few legislative notes:

Yesterday (the very day the CMA Awards were hosted in Nashville) Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen signed into law SB 3794, a bill that requires all public and private universities and colleges in the state to take proper steps to assure that their networks are not being used to illegally trade copyrighted material. It also requires each school to develop and enforce a policy for computer usage, network usage and ethics. The House IP subcommittee was abolished and will be bumped up to a full Judiciary committee.

My immediate thought upon reading this was: they’re gonna screw it up and get a bunch of college students pissed off at them. (more…)

I think this election is particularly interesting because it illustrates the fundamental breakdown of individualism vs. community, immediate satisfaction vs. long term satisfaction, and church vs. state, among other things.  I found it to be a very Epicurean campaign.  Epicurus, for those of you who do not want to read a biography of Epicurus, was a Greek philosopher who was interested in immediate gratification vs.  long term gratification.  He was also one of the first people who spoke of the world in terms of atoms — I think he may have even coined that term, I can’t remember.  He might’ve just said particles, who knows.  Crazy Greeks.

Anyway, Epicurus argued that long term satisfaction was ultimately more worthwhile than immediate satisfaction.  I won’t go into why he believed that, just that he did, though I’m sure you could make your case for both sides.  (more…)