Charlie Cheney

I saw on Facebook's cool chat pop-up list that my friend Julia Brown was going to be in Michigan for her brother's wedding over the weekend (she lives in NYC). I quickly messaged her "Where in Michigan?" and she responded "Holland, I think it's miles from civilization." to which I responded "60 miles from me, can I come see you? Maybe give you a ride to the airport?"

Worked out perfectly for both of us.

So on Sunday I showed up in Holland at 1pm and discovered she had 5 hours to kill before her flight so we went to the closest beach so she could see Lake Michigan. There was a perfect westerly breeze so the kites were flying. One enormous parachute kite looked like this one:



It was really cool, they had it tied to a post. and it spun round and round like an enormous bicycle wheel.

Anyways, Julia and I walked down the beach a ways and sat down close enough so I could build a drip sand castle (my favorite beach activity) but far enough away to stay dry. Talked a long time about music and being an artist, recording and touring. Julia has a new album coming out shortly, she actually has the pressed discs in hand and is starting a promotion campaign asap with a radio promoter in Boston. I was stunned to find out that Chris Stamey from The dBs is one of the producers, as well as Anton Fier from the Golden Palominos, way to go Jules!

Julia Brown http://www.juliabrown.com

We had some cool discussions about being "social" as an artist and what it means... the whole idea of moving out of the sequestered life of writing and recording and out into the world of booking, touring, and spreading the word about the record. It was cool to hear she had almost exactly the same issues and concerns I have. It was so weird to hear her say that she thought I did it better than she did, because I think the exact opposite! :-) But I think the point is... we're both learning how to do it as we go along.

I found myself giving her a bunch of the tips I learned at Bob Baker's Indie Buzz Bootcamp like Derek Sivers concept that persistence is polite. People are so busy, only mentioning a thing once is almost impolite because it may not stick in their mind. What if they really want to learn more about that thing? Or more about you? But they get distracted by everyday life and forget. A cool way to look at marketing really... that it's polite to be persistent.

Of course we talked about booking and networking and I said I'd like to help her book a short tour through Michigan next June in conjunction with Steel Bridge SongFest so she could get involved there as well. She's such a great songwriter (as many of you may have seen for yourselves during the last two FAWMs) and she's a joy to be around, super smart, well-read, well spoken, and of course beautiful as all get out <grin>.

A wonderful wonderful day. At the end we both enjoyed fabulous burgers together at a restaurant in the GRR Airport. Yummy. Sorry I don't have any pictures, Tory has the camera at camp! Julia looked fabulous too. :-)

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