Liminal Life

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Joe

NoiseTrade has been nominated for a Mashable award in the music category. We’re up against companies like Last.fm and Pandora, which is pretty cool for us. I’d really appreciate it if you’d vote for us. You can vote once a day per email address. This would be huge for us if we could beat some of those companies. We put the widget on our blog to make it easy to vote for us. Or you can vote below if you prefer.

In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t written a blog post in three months. I’d love to say I’ve just been too busy, but I seem to find time to watch The Office and The Fringe, so I must not be that busy. So let’s just mark it up to distraction.

But it’s going to get busy starting next week when I start working three jobs. Yep, three.

My day gig is going to be contracting with the Tennessee Department of Transportation. I’ll be doing project management in the IT department 7.5 hours a day. We’ve been in Nashville almost a year and in that year every dollar we had invested is now worth 65 cents. Tough economic times indeed. So, like almost every artist in Nashville, I’m getting a day gig. This is how I made my living eleven years ago and I can do it in my sleep. So I’ll go in early every day and get out mid afternoon with time to do focus on the stuff I care about. The lady I’ll be working for is great and I’m looking forward to serving her.

I’ve also joined the partners at NoiseTrade, which is a major cool music marketing company. We help artists build their fanbase by targeted campaigns of giving away music. I have great partners and we have a great reputation. There’s lot’s of great music available there for free. Check it out.

I’m also starting to work part time with my church, The Village Chapel. We’re starting a college age group and I’m heading that efort. Betsy and I have commented a lot over the last year that we feel like we are doing an adult version of our first year of marriage when we lived in Gainesville and I worked with IVCF. So here I am working with college students again. I guess the circle is complete.

I’ll try to start blogging more often, but I’m making no promises. But I am starting to blog a lot on the NoiseTrade blog. It’s all geared towards the business of music, but we’re starting to build a great community over there. You might enjoy subscribing to that blog too. And I’ve turned into a Twitter nut so you can follow me there.

Joe

Brilliant.

I went to the the launch of the Ten Out Of Tenn tour launch show at the Cannery Ballroom last night. There had to be 1000 people there to hear a bunch of artists that most people outside of Nashville haven’t even heard of. I moved to Nashville last fall because I wanted to be in a town that nurtures this kind event. This is the second time that Trent and Kristin Dabbs have pulled together ten great Nashville artists for a modern day Rolling Thunder Revue. I’d have gladly paid to see any one of these artists. It was almost overwhelming to see all ten of them playing together.

There’s no headliner. They run it like a big noisy songwriter in the round. The artists all play on each other’s songs so the band keeps shifting. Sometimes there are ten musicians on the stage. It feels like a big family of songwriters that all respect each other and love each other’s songs.

I liked all of it, but a few people’s songs really stood out. Matthew Perryman Jones, K. S. Rhodes, Griffin House and Katie Herzig really brought down the house. And Butterfly Boucher proved that the chicks can rock as hard as the guys.

I sponsored the first tour during my days at Paste and it was plenty cool the first time. But they’ve learned from the first tour and taken it to a new level for the second outing. I’m looking forward to how it will evolve for the third, fourth and fifth tours.

You can hear their music at the Ten Out Of Tenn MySpace and many of the artists have music available for whatever you want to pay on NoiseTrade. But you’ll miss a great night if you only listen to their albums. Don’t miss the opportunity to see them if you are in one of the 16 towns they are visiting in the next few weeks.

God I love this town…

Joe

So, I am trying out this Jott thing, my friend Chuck told me about it. It seems like a pretty good way to make blog postings. I get to talk, using my mouth and it converts it into a blog posting for me. It will also do Twitters and probably lots of other cool stuff. Seems perfect for a guy like me who talks better than he writes. listen

Powered by Jott

I had coffee yesterday with Jim Thomas, my pastor from The Village Chapel. He’s taking the church through the Sermon on the Mount and has hit the section where Jesus says several times “You have heard it said… But I say to you…” Jesus takes concepts like murder and adultery and says that we better not feel any spiritual superiority if we haven’t committed these acts because anger and lust are just as bad.

So is Jesus just proposing a stiffer form of legalism? Not only do I have to make sure I don’t kill someone today, I’ve got to make sure I don’t call anyone an idiot. Is he just setting the bar higher? In a way, yes. But I think he’s setting it so high that no one can reach it. And that’s the point. In 5:20, he says that we aren’t getting through the pearly gates unless our righteousness is greater than the world’s most extremely religious people. In other words, we might as well give up because we’re never gonna be holy enough. The only option is to get humble and broken and throw ourselves on God’s mercy. As Steve Brown says, “Cheer up, you’re worse than you thought.”

This is pretty counterculture stuff. Our society tells us every day to be strong and get our act together. Even the Christian bookstores are filled with books on seven steps to being better. And don’t even get me stated on Oprah and her new guru…

So raise a glass to the broken and sing a song for the losers. I’m thankful that I’ve found a community with a bunch of worn out people who don’t have what it takes. I hope you’ve found one too.

I’m reading UnChristian. A book I can’t recommend highly enough. The premise of the book is that Christians have alienated ourselves from the rest of the world by acting in ways that can only be described as UnChristian. Where in the world would they get an idea like that?

My buddies in Manchester Orchestra have a video for the song “I Can Barely Breathe.” I like it a lot. Very surreal, but very beautiful. Looks like it was made by Clay Lipsky, who appears to have RED camera. Cool.

Click here to check out a great collection of behind the scenes photos from the video shoot.

This so called Wall Street expert says Jobs needs to put either Blackberry or Windows Mobile on the iPhone if he wants it to succeed in the business world. Quick, somebody buy this guy a clue…