Red River's Latest Video

Have you heard? Red River's latest digital CD is for sale! Yes! Just scroll on over to the right-hand side of the screen to see this ^ cover and click on it to buy! Plus, if you join Red River's mailing list, you get free goodies! You won't be sorry! Red River has too many great songs to include on "Life Is A Dream", but you can get some of those songs for free. And as if that wasn't enough, I'll send you a missive every now and then that's even more intriguing than my blog...really.

The first track on "Life Is A Dream" is a personal favorite of mine. I've been messing around, trying to come up with a video for "As Best I Can", and the good news is, I finally finished it tonight.

Thanks, Mrs. Procrastinator!

Red River's New Digital CD!

All the cool kids are doing it, so we are, too! Nobody buys physical CD's anymore, but that doesn't mean Red River can't get its music out to the public.

Our new release, Life Is A Dream, is now available on our website, and will soon be available on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, Shazam, Pandora, and YouTube Music, which I didn't even know was a thing. I'm unclear regarding Amazon ~ there's a bunch of legalese on CDBaby's site regarding that, but I'm rather pumped about all the different distribution sites at our disposal.

If you've ever uploaded something for sale online, you know that having one's teeth ripped out would be more fun, but I accomplished in an afternoon, after editing most of our music tracks for one reason or another. Now I wait...well, I wouldn't still be waiting, but when our CD went live, I wasn't happy with the sound quality of three of the tracks, so I re-edited them and re-uploaded. DYI is great...

I can say that I'm very happy with how the project turned out, and I want to thank our designer, m2design for delivering awesome cover art.

Even if you're not in the mood to buy, surf on over to our website and click on a couple of track previews, and leave us a message if you're so inclined.

Thanks for reading!

A Few Last Glimmers

I've written before about the endless stream of emails I receive, touting the latest music opportunities.

I always click on them....eventually....out of curiosity more than anything else.

For example, the latest Music Dealer's "opportunity" is a song about Grandma.  I think grandmas are great, although I barely remember one, and I never knew the other.  Hence, I have written no songs about Grandma.  I've written a song about Mom, but that isn't what they're going for here.  It does make me wonder, though, about the grandma I never met.  I wonder if she was more like me than my mom was, because Mom and I weren't exactly simpatico, if you get my drift.

But, as always with these posts, I do digress.

Generally, with the Music Xray emails, I just delete them without reading.  Because they're always touting the most recent "opportunity matches" that don't really match in the least, and I don't have the money to toss around like some wild-eyed millionaire anyway.

Not to mention the scathing reviews I received from some of my earlier submissions.  I never even asked for critiques!  What was that?  Just an extra-added soul-crushing bonus?

One guy said something (I actually deleted the email, so I can't reference it) about how tentative the singing was.  Well, yea!  I hate (hate!) recording!  In fact, I'll make up any old excuse just to avoid it.  I'm tired; I have a tummy ache; my voice is shot from all the smoking (which is true, by the way).  I AM NOT A SINGER.  But the fact remains that I have no money to hire a professional singer, so if I want a demo recording of any of my songs, I have to do it myself.

But for some reason, tonight, I clicked on the latest Music Xray email, and it said something about submissions for radio stations, or something.  And I thought, well, let's see.

So, I surfed on over to the site, and I found a particular outfit that shops music around to various regions of the US (because apparently different regions have different tastes; little did I know) and to radio stations in the UK.  The UK thing was somewhat intriguing, because I find that those fine people are more discerning than the dolts that market and/or listen to music here in the good old USA.  No offense to the US, but here, it's all about the cheese quotient, and about the butterflies and rainbows and unicorns; not the actual music (ahh, cynicism is alive and well tonight!)

So, I thought, what the heck?  Why not give it a go?  I could put it on my credit card, so that's not like real money.  Is it?

I'm a big fan of this song by my husband, so I bit the bullet and clicked the submission button.



Then, I thought, well, let's see what else is out there, radio submission-wise.  And I found this place called, "Women of Substance Radio".  Isn't that precious?  Women of substance.  As opposed to what?  Women of Superficiality?

But I figured, hey, I'm a woman.  So, I, in a fit of insanity, submitted this:



I'm really pulling for my husband's song, though.

And I, too, looked at song critique opportunities.  I almost thought about doing it, but then I saw the submission price ($35.00) and thought, why in the world would I pay $35.00 for somebody to diss me, when some of these other guys took it upon themselves to do it for free?

I'm a realist, and yet not a masochist.  My focus now, really, is promoting the other band guys' music; not mine.  Yet, there's still that little self-indulgent side of me that wants somebody to say, "That's a good song!  Terrible singer, but good song!"

Just don't feel compelled to send me a critique, cuz I really don't want one, and I'll just send it to my "trash" folder anyway.

Thankfulness

Here it is, the morn of Thanksgiving, and I feel like I should write something about thankfulness.

I'll admit, I've not been in a very thankful mood lately, so it's a bit difficult to wrap my mind around the concept, but I'll give it a whirl.

I think, when the big things go wrong, one has to remember the little things.

Here are some little things, in no particular order:

A hot cup of coffee in the morning.

Slapping on a CD of old, familiar tunes (today, I like this one):

Watching a Modern Family episode, and always welling up at the end.

Waking up to see my dog stretched out on her back in the middle of the night, paws up in the air, serene. (I don't actually have a photo of this!)

Expressing creativity with $0.00.



My cat curled up next to me on the bed.

Talking to God.

Finding a book that's so good, you think about it even when you're not reading it. I recommend this one:

A good friend. (That comes before all that other stuff; just so you know!)

Last, but MOST, my husband.

(He doesn't like the publicity.)

I don't really know what to write about my husband that wouldn't sound cliche and superficial.

I guess what I would say is, he's my best friend (really), and he takes care of me. And I take care of him. And he's really smart and really creative. And life hasn't exactly been fair to him, but I was just going to go with the "thankful" stuff today, so disregard that last part. (Besides, who said life was fair?)

So, thankfulness isn't really that difficult after all.

There is a definite dearth of good Thanksgiving songs. I'm not really interested in hearing about a turkey, if you know what I mean. So, every year, I come back to this one.