In the last installment of this blog I talked about whether the CD was dead or still alive. Even though it might be on life support, my decision to release a new DownTown Mystic CD was a no-brainer for me…and I’m so glad I did!

This past year has been special in many ways. The release of the DownTown Mystic CD took on a life of its own at Americana Radio, spending 40 consecutive weeks on the AMA Radio Charts!! That was something really special for me and it never would have happened if I had gone with the current thought that the CD was dead.

If that wasn’t enough proof for releasing the cd, then going to #1 on the Roots Music Report’s Alt/Rock Song Chart and #3 on the RMR Alt/Rock Album Chart in the same week surely was!! As they say, “The proof is in the pudding” (what does that mean?) and, at least for me, the results of releasing a CD more than proved it’s still alive and kicking.

While I might have answered my own question Re: the CD, the real reason I’m writing this blog installment is to talk about Synch Licensing and how important it is today for Artists. If the radio airplay for DownTown Mystic was successful, it pales in comparison to the Sync Licensing of the music for TV and such.

I don’t think an artist can rely on any one thing these days, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that Sync Licensing should be at the top of their todo list. The best thing I ever did was to hookup the music of DownTown Mystic with Jingle Punks for getting the music placed on TV. I didn’t know it at the time, but Jingle Punks was becoming a hip NYC boutique music licensing company that would become one of the leaders in supplying music for Cable and Network TV shows.

Most of the sync deals are non-exclusive, which allowed me to hook up with similar companies like Jingle Punks. But it was Jingle Punks that really took off. The thing I really like about them is that everyone that works there seems to be a musician. Jingle Jared Gutstadt (CEO and Co-Founder) has assembled a group of very talented creative people.

Also, becoming an Exclusive Jingle Punks Artist has proven to be quite beneficial for Downtown Mystic. Jingle Punks placed Way To Know on The Voice at least a half dozen times, including one of the Live Finals shows. That was the #1 show in the US at the time and I’ve got to believe that millions of people have heard it, even if only subliminally. There might be some truth there because when Sha-La Music released Way To Know  as a digital single in 2013, it garnered worldwide radio play on over 10,000 stations prior to the release of the DownTown Mystic album. Coincidence??

Besides having DownTown Mystic with Jingle Punks, I also caught on with another rising star in the Sync field — Eddie Caldwell of Music of The Sea in Chicago. My outside work as a Writer/Producer paid off when Eddie placed my track Fly Like The Wind with Alexandra Patsavas of Chop Shop Music, for the 80s-based show The Carrie Diaries. Patsavas, arguably the #1 Music Supervisor in LA, would end up selecting 3 of my songs for the show.

Ok, so things have been going very well for the music of DownTown Mystic with sync licensing but it might never have happened at all if I didn’t learn a costly lesson. The main thing every artist should remember to do when recording is always do an instrumental mix. After you do a final mix on a song, do 1 more by muting all the vocals and running an instrumental mix. It’s the instrumental mix that the sync companies will use for TV shows.

As I said, I learned this the hard way when I didn’t do any instrumental mixes on a project I was doing. Sync Licensing was just starting to happen and I was not aware of it yet. Ouch! By the next year I knew what it was and I was kicking myself for not doing the instrumental mixes when I had the chance. All that work and money spent in recording and mixing, and I couldn’t take advantage of it!

But I learned my lesson the hard way and the following year I was back in the studio recording a new project and this time I made sure we clicked a few buttons when it came time to do the mixes. From there on, the DownTown Mystic Brand began to grow via radio and syncs. The latest sync for DownTown Mystic is a very cool one.

Thanks to Jingle Punks, DownTown Mystic has 2 tracks, Lost & Found and No Exceptions featured in a web video promoting Dr. Pepper and 8-time Female Wrestling Champ/Country Singer, Mickie James. The video features James as being “1 of a kind,” like Dr. Pepper, which is a perfect setting for DownTown Mystic’s brand of  vintage yet modern music—a unique “1 of a kind” sound that sync licensing is helping to take DownTown Mystic to the next level.

All during the recording of the new DownTown Mystic CD I was reading about the death of the CD and the Album as an art form. I was in a recording studio, where time is money, wondering what I’m going to do with the music I’m recording once I finish. The engineer will burn me a CDr with whatever I’ve recorded each day to listen to in my car. I’ll come home and upload the cd to my computer so I can have digital files to play with. When I’m done with recording in the studio, I’ll have a dozen or so CDrs that have been created so that I can listen on my computer, my stereo system, my car stereo system and whatever other system I can check out to hear what my music actually sounds like when played on various sound systems.

At the end of all of it, I’ll wonder if it will make any difference to the average listener out there. Did I just waste my time and money, as well as years of experience on something that nobody is going to pay attention to? Do I want to stick my music on a piece of plastic anymore and release it?

One thing that I did notice when I thought about putting an album’s worth of music together was that I didn’t want to listen to more than 6 songs at 1 sitting. I didn’t seem to want to hear a full cd’s worth of music from any 1 artist, even if I was the artist! So putting together 10-12 songs was becoming harder to do for me than in the past. Certainly, the days of filling up a cd with 15 or 16 songs was long over.

The new approach being bandied about in the Blogosphere was to release singles at regular intervals. Why put out 10-12 songs in 1 shot when most people were only listening to 1 track at a time from various artists? By releasing singles, you would be able to get music out more frequently to fans over a period of months rather than them having to wait a year or two before you released a full album. And with attention spans becoming shorter and shorter, can an artist afford to wait 1-2 years not having their product out and expect to have fans stick around waiting for them? Some will and some won’t because there’s so much competition out there now from all over the world.

It made a lot of sense to me…especially with the digital format and downloading now becoming an accepted way to purchase and listen to music. I believe you have to “change with the changes”.  The Internet is the #1 way to be seen and heard today. With DownTown Mystic getting radio airplay in Europe, I only saw Radio being on the Internet because the only way for me to hear those stations playing me was by listening to them on the Internet! This is very cool and very new for anyone who is used to listening to a radio station by tuning in the dial of a radio. 🙂

The other thing about releasing singles that I liked was that it’s really an old school practice. Back to the birth of rock’n’roll, singles were the main way to get heard. Back then, an artist would sign a Singles Deal with a record company, not an Album Deal. An artist needed to have a few hit singles before they would get the chance to record an album. With DownTown Mystic being considered “retro” and having Digital Distribution with The Orchard, I really liked the idea of releasing some digital singles and working my way up to an album release.

But I am “old school” and I do like the album as an art form. Having grown up buying LPs on vinyl, I also like having the physical product in my hand, looking at the cover art and reading the credits and lyrics and whatever else is included. And because I grew up listening to 45s and LPs, I became interested in quality sounding recordings. Now we can argue about Vinyl vs CD in terms of which is better sounding, but 1 thing audiophiles can all agree on is that both are far superior to the MP3.

The Record Business became successful thanks to my age group—the Baby Boomers. And as it turns out, many in my age group who are on the radio side, still prefer listening to physical product as opposed to digital. When it came to making the decision whether to do a CD, it was a “no brainer” for me because I wanted to hear my music while holding and looking at my own CD and I wanted to create it for the people who also like doing that.

Now making an Album to put on cd was my challenge. I wanted my Album to have a “vibe” to it. Part of creating the “vibe” is the pacing of the songs and somehow putting them together in such a way as to tell a story. I do think that the CD had a good deal to do with the “death of the Album as an art form”. The vinyl LP has 2 sides, which means breaking up the songs to 5 or 6 a side. In the past, because of the format, great LPs would put emphasis on the opening and closing tracks to each side of the record.

I think that was definitely lost with CDs, where you listen to 10-12 songs in a row. With the LP, an artist had to have 3 or 4 songs that were standouts to lead off or close a side. But with attention spans getting shorter, an artist is confronted with having to put the best songs at the start of a CD because people might not get through to the end. Also, with the LP there’s the physical act of having to get up and flip the record over to listen to the other side. So just having to do that breaks up the flow of music, which can be good or bad, depending on the listener.

So how do I feel about the death of the CD and Album as an art form? As I stated earlier, I’m “old school” and like having my music on a physical format. As long as there are people like me, I’ll continue to make CDs. As for the album as an art form, I think the jury is still out on that. Like anything else, an art form is only as good as the artists who use it and take pride in it. 🙂

Lost & Found

Something quite amazing happened this past week. On February 21, 2014, DownTown Mystic’s track Way To Know went to #1 on the Roots Music Report’s Alt/Rock Song Chart! Not only that, the DownTown Mystic album went to #3 on the RMR Alt/Rock Album Chart!! The Roots Music Report is the #1 independent music chart in the world.

I’ve been at this for quite a while in the music biz, and I assure you, nothing like this has ever happened to me before. It’s been said that “good things come to those who wait”. Sure, I’ve been waiting a long, long time but even this seems a bit unreal!

As an independent artist in the marketplace, without a publicity and marketing machine behind you, the odds are heavily stacked against you. You can set goals to reach but you also have to be realistic about attaining them. That’s why I’m a big believer in SUCCESS being how YOU define it. Being totally independent, this is a HUGE victory and by any measure, being #1 is SUCCESS!!

Four years ago when I was recording the Standing Still album I knew we had something good, and when it was finished, I knew it was the best thing I had ever recorded. But Standing Still did not get much attention at Radio in the US. Now three and a half years after its release, I was ready to release the DownTown Mystic album, which I thought was even better. Since I’m not an artist who actively tours, and not having any music out in such a long time, I was wondering if Radio would even remember DownTown Mystic.

As I already stated, I believe that success is how you define it for yourself. By all measuring sticks, the DownTown Mystic album has been a great success. We’ve had more stations at Americana Radio play DownTown Mystic than ever before. The cd has been on the Americana Music Assn. Radio Airplay Charts since its 1^st day of release nearly 5 months ago, increasing spins for 20 consecutive weeks, breaking into the Top 50 in Total Weekly Spins.

For me, the DownTown Mystic album has far exceeded all my expectations and going to #1 on the Roots Music Report Chart is like the icing on the cake. While radio promotion is all about going after the radio stations not playing your release, I want to thank all the stations who supported and played DownTown Mystic, because they’re the ones who helped to make this happen. #1—what a trip!

Way To Know

Today we celebrate The Beatles landmark performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. There’s been nothing before or since that had the kind of impact like The Beatles appearance on TV that night. It was the A Bomb going off in Music that night and it changed the World for generations to come.

It’s always been Ground Zero for me. I’d been listening to their Meet The Beatles record for a month previous to their arrival. I listened to that record so many times that it created my love for listening to new music and going to actual Record Stores to find and sift through all the releases to bring new music home to devour. I even remember looking at their names on the back cover of the LP, trying to figure out how they were so great. How was it that these guys, who nobody had ever heard of a month ago, had this kind of greatness in them?

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Did their names portend greatness? The names seemed average, except maybe Ringo, but the music was anything but average. I was transported by it. And it only got better the more I listened! And it got better with every new album! I would call my local record store when they expected delivery of the new Beatles album and go down to buy it the minute I found out it was in.

So 50 years later I’m creating new music and releasing it. I wonder if there’s a connection. 🙂 I’ve always felt that The Beatles were creating and changing so much with each new release that they created whole musical areas that could still be mined for new material today.

One of the reasons that I like the Americana genre is because it allows for all the kinds of music that The Beatles introduced me to—Rock’n’Roll, Folk & Country. Americana allows for even more styles than that, which kind of reminds me of how the 60s felt and how FM Radio sounded. All that’s changed now, with every musical genre having its own Radio Format.

So I stick to my own style and follow the format I belong to, but I still look to find and hear new music within it. My 1^st Americana release was Standing Still and one of the great things that happened in promoting it to Radio was discovering the Band of Heathens. Sha-La Music was sponsoring the Alt/Country genre on an internet station. I would go on to listen to hear how my song sounded with the other songs, and I would hear these songs about the LA County Jail and Jackson Station. After a few times of hearing a song that caught my attention, I would wonder, who is that? So I checked the playlist every time and kept finding the song’s artist name was Band of Heathens. Who?

Because of discovering and listening to The Beatles growing up, I can hear when something is fully there or not. And when it’s there, I know I’m listening to the “real deal”. Listening to The Heathens brought me back to the 1^st time I heard The Band or Little Feat. This was very exciting for me to discover something new that was good and “old school” in this day and age! I really liked Robert Plant’s Band of Joy too, mainly because of discovering the venerable Buddy Miller. 🙂

With the recent release of DownTown Mystic, I got to discover a whole slew of new artists to my ears. With the recent success of Mumford & Sons, it was so great to hear Country, Folk & Bluegrass being played in a new exciting way. Being on the Americana Charts with this new release has led to my discovery of Sarah Jarosz and her brand of Folk & Acoustic. Brings me back to my college days when I was touring Coffee Houses with a 3 vocal/3 acoustic guitar band.

It does my soul good to hear a new generation of Artists who take their writing and craft seriously. There was a great Austin City Limits show recently with Sarah and The Milk Carton Kids, who are also a new discovery that I enjoy. Of course, being more of a rocker, I’m interested in listening to things that reflect my taste in sound and style. In that regards, I just discovered a new band called The Wild Feathers.

They were near DownTown Mystic on the AMA Radio Chart, so I checked them out, which turned out to be very interesting. Interesting to hear, because it sounded like The Everly Bros. rocking out in 2014! But it was their PR/Bio that caught my eye, because if I didn’t know better, I would have thought they were talking about and describing DownTown Mystic! 🙂

What caught my eye was the line “cosmic melodies with vintage roots and modern tones”. Outside of that, the comparison ends.  I think they should embrace the Americana genre because it’s perfect for them. And just like hearing Band of Heathens, The Wild Feathers put a new spin on “old school”, which is where I work. Good to hear and have some up-tempo rocking music to keep me company! 🙂

Hard to believe that The Beatles were here 50 years ago to start a revolution and become an inspiration for generations to come. No time like the present to pay it forward. 🙂

As pointed out in my 1^st Blog post, 2013 has been one crazy kind of year for me. Now that the year is over and 2014 is here, it’s a good time to reflect on what has happened and what has been accomplished. In that 1^st post, I started with the final Quarter of 2013 because that’s when all the action that had been pending, was finally unleashed. But it was the previous 9 months that set the stage.

2012 had ended on a good note, with DownTown Mystic in the studio finishing the new recording and releasing the digital Read The Signs EP on the Winter Solstice. The 7 song instrumental-only EP would be digitally released in Europe in late January 2013 by my German Label, AGR, who I signed a Licensing Agreement with in 2011. AGR had released the Standing Still cd just before Thanksgiving in 2011, with European Distribution via Sony Music, and it received much critical acclaim from the European Press. With the Read The Signs EP release, there would only be 1 more release left on the Agreement with AGR.

Since I had originally released Standing Still in June 2010 in the US, it was now going on 3 years without any new music from DownTown Mystic. While Standing Still received enough radio play to make the AMA Chart, it was in Europe on the Euro/Americana shows that DownTown Mystic finally found a place. It was quite a surprise to see DownTown Mystic on the Top 25 Euro/Americana Chart! From that point on, I wanted to get over to Europe to tour. 7 months later I met with a legendary A&R man named Juergen Kramar at Midem in Cannes. He was now an independent A&R scout for Universal in Germany and it would be on his recommendation that I would get the deal with AGR Television Records.

For me, the sole reason to sign with AGR was if they were willing to bring me over to tour. The very 1^st conversation with AGR sold me. They told me they would only consider signing me if I was willing to come over to Europe and tour. The reason being—AGR is probably the only full Country Label in Europe and there is no national Country Radio or TV station in Germany…so the only way to promote an unknown Artist from America, would have to be live shows there. AGR has signed some known American Country Artists like Charlie Daniels, Joe Diffie and Sammy Kershaw. But DownTown Mystic was their 1^st Americana signing. Unfortunately, the Germans at large don’t really know about Americana because Country is way down on their list of music genres. So the most important way to sell DownTown Mystic would be good word of mouth from live shows.

I went into the AGR deal with eyes wide open because it had the potential to be very good for both sides. But the long & short for me, was that AGR would set me up with a good promoter and fund a tour. It took AGR 6 months after the deal was signed to release Standing Still, but the reviews were great and continued that way for a few more months. The original marketing plan was that I would be brought over for a week of promotional shows. With all the great press for Standing Still, it seemed like perfect timing to have me come over and play. But for whatever reasons, AGR did not bring me over to help promote the cd. Now euro for euro, AGR had only about 20% invested compared to me, so I brought a good deal more to the table and not being met even half way!

Ok, so that’s the setup for 2013.  13 months after the release of Standing Still, in early 2013, I just finished recording and mixing the new DownTown Mystic project. I know I owe AGR 1 more release and I don’t want to give it to them. I already know that AGR won’t fund a tour and I will not fund a Tour that they had agreed to pay for. This is a “no brainer” for me. I don’t want to wait around another year with a new release being held up. It makes more sense for both parties to go their separate ways.

So I call and tell AGR that I have a new release ready to go and right off the bat, they start in with how they need to rethink if they should release a new cd if there’s no tour with it. I tell them I’m always ready to tour but since they won’t fund a tour, don’t release the cd because I certainly will not fund a European Tour. I tell AGR that it would be best for us to terminate the Licensing Agreement.

When I told them that I didn’t want to keep going back and forth with this, AGR finally agreed with me to terminate the Agreement by not picking up the option on the final release. But nothing is ever easy. Needless to say, it would take me another 3 months to finally terminate the Agreement, but I managed to do it. When June rolled around, my deal with AGR was finally over.

While this had been going on, I was thinking about how I would release this next project, and had decided that I couldn’t just print up a cd and release it as in the past. I had built legitimacy for my music, not so much by being played on radio or appearing on some chart, but by Sync Licensing my music for TV and Film. A very cool indie Licensing company in NYC called Jingle Punks had been licensing my music for a few years, and when I heard it on shows like The Voice and American Pickers, I knew my music had arrived, along with the royalty checks!

I needed a better way to build to the release of a cd and get my music heard. Having the ability to release my music worldwide via The Orchard by having them digitally distribute it, was a big asset. The best way for me to use that asset was by creating and releasing product. From what I had been reading on the Net, you were better off as an Artist to release music more often than in one shot like a cd. This was giving rise to the notion of the cd and album, as an art form, being dead. Whatever…

Releasing singles made sense to me, particularly, digital singles. No need for hard copy, but for some reason, that becomes a problem with Radio. So I decided to release digital singles to radio stations worldwide that accepted digital media. There are certainly enough of radio stations out there on the internet or otherwise…over 30,000 stations worldwide! If you got airplay on 100 stations in the US, that would be a big deal. How about 1000 worldwide? I thought it was worth a shot.

As it turned out, it was definitely worth the shot. By the time I had released my 3^rd single, Way To Know in August, DownTown Mystic was being heard on 8000 radio stations worldwide! Also, I found out via The Orchard that iTunes allowed a Digital Single Release to have up to 4 songs on it. So I would have 3 songs on my Digital Singles, which exposed songs that would be on the cd, to have a chance to be heard prior to the cd release. Now I felt confident that I could release the album I wanted on cd and take it to Radio in the US.

This is where my 1^st blog post picks up from. The releasing of the singles, building to the release of the full DownTown Mystic CD proved to be very successful. It set the stage for a successful 9 week  run on the US Americana Charts, making 2013 a great year for me and looking forward to 2014.

No Exceptions

Hearty congratulations are in order with the announcement of The E Street Band being inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame on April 10, 2014. It’s a well-deserved recognition for the band and long overdue. Of course, part of the problem for the band not getting in sooner is the fact that the albums are listed under “Bruce Springsteen” as a solo artist. But I can tell you that as talented as Bruce is, he would not be where he is today without the E Street Band. That’s a fact!

When I first met bass player Garry Tallent, the band was recording The River with Bruce. The E Street Band was on retainer to Bruce. He paid them to always be on call despite the fact that he was still in the hole financially. That would finally be remedied after The River World Tour. Everyone in the band could do whatever outside projects they wanted to, but being on retainer to Bruce meant that they would have to drop everything at a moment’s notice if he called them to play with him. No wonder they call him “The Boss”! 🙂

The reason I say that Bruce would not be where he is without the E Street Band is simple—they’re great players. I saw in a number of the European reviews for Standing Still that the reviewers wondered if the album would be as good without the name players on it. In a word—NO! And there’s a reason for that. I had played in bands for over a dozen years and when it came to doing original music, there was always a problem trying to get the bass and drums together. That was until I worked with Garry Tallent and drummer Max Weinberg.

When I played in my bands I was always stressing about the grooves and all kinds of things I shouldn’t have been stressing about. I was never comfortable. When I played with Garry and Max, my eyes were opened–all I had to do was play my guitar—WOW!  I didn’t have to worry about what the bass and drums were doing. What a feeling! After that experience I knew I could never go back to playing with anyone but the best that I could find.

If I wanted to be good, ok, get some decent players. But if I wanted to be great, I needed to play with great players. It’s really that simple. If anyone tells you differently, tell them to ask Tom Petty if he’d be as good without The Heartbreakers? I don’t think so. Great bands do not grow on trees and the E Street Band and The Heartbreakers are 2 of the best I’ve seen. We’re lucky to still have them around!

I’m often asked how I came to meet Garry Tallent and Max Weinberg. It’s not the way one might imagine…

There would be 2 highlights in my life that would occur within weeks of each other. The 1^st was when famed DJ Vin Scelsa on legendary WNEW-FM in NYC played my record. This was the very 1^st time I ever heard a song of mine played on the radio…this was a big deal! Made even more memorable when Scelsa played Side B of the single when he said he couldn’t find any music in the studio, so he flipped the record over and played my band’s cover of Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little 16.

The 2^nd highlight came a few weeks later when the record that Scelsa was spinning that night, found its way into the hands and ears of E Street Band bassist Garry Tallent. I had printed up 45’s for my band and one night we were playing at JP’s, the infamous club on NYC’s upper Eastside, owned by the late Jimmy Pullis. I decided to give out free 45’s because many of JP’s clientele were in the music biz. The waitress came up to me and asked if she could have a record for her boyfriend. I handed her a 45, and out of curiosity, asked her who her boyfriend was. She said Garry Tallent, to which I incredulously asked—of the E Street Band??!! Yes, the very same, and she gave Garry the 45 because a few weeks later he came down to JP’s to check us out, and that was the start of a friendship…and I think I owe it all to Sweet Little 16. 🙂

Now I went to Columbia High School in Maplewood, NJ with Max, but he’s a year older than me. We didn’t know each other back then but I had friends in his class who knew him. When Garry brought Max down to the studio, I started throwing out names to him that he recognized and before you knew it, we were back in high school…lol

When I released Standing Still in the US, it had 13 tracks. When it was released in Europe the following year, it had 14 songs. That’s because the German label wanted an extra song. The song I decided to give them was Hard Enough with Garry & Max on bass & drums. The reason I kept it off the US release was because I didn’t want to use their names to promote it. Anything that’s associated with them vis a vis Bruce Springsteen, naturally gets a good deal of attention. Also, it’s rare that Garry & Max play together on something outside of Bruce. So I didn’t want that to be the story instead of my music.

In Europe, I knew the label would actively promote the E Street connection and they did. They also added the other drummer & bass player to the mix—Steve Holley & Paul Page, the rhythm section in rocker Ian Hunter’s Rant Band, who played on the other 13 tracks, and 2 great musicians in their own right. Steve was also the last drummer in Paul McCartney’s Wings when Sir Paul was arrested in Japan. When I would read my press, even I had to wonder who the hell Robert Allen was?? LOL

In Europe, the reviewers liked mentioning the E Street/Bruce Springsteen connection, with some reviews comparing me to Bruce (makes total sense, right??). This was all based on the 1 song but that didn’t seem to matter. Thankfully, the majority of the reviews were very favorable. The best one I liked said that the 1 thing that Bruce and I shared was our passion for the music. I thought that was cool. The majority liked to emphasize the E Street connection, and in my view, you can never go wrong with that. 🙂

On the new DownTown Mystic release, Garry & Max play on the track Way To Know, which Garry did the arrangement on. I put it out as a single and had a spot in the Direct Current to promote the release of the CD. I think there were 8000 stations around the world playing Way To Know and I have to believe it was mostly due to Garry & Max playing on it. I will say it’s the 1 song of mine that does remind me a bit of Bruce. The 2 things I will always remember about recording the track with them is 1) Garry telling Max “to play like Charlie Watts” and 2) Garry’s signature bass run up the neck of his bass on the last line of the song. It always makes me smile. 🙂

I feel very lucky because not everyone can say they got to play and record with a Hall of Fame Rhythm Section. I know they’ve affected me in a big way, as well as the many people around the world who love them. Congrats Garry & Max and the rest of the great E Street Band! 🙂

Way To Know

Hard Enough

Now that DownTown Mystic has a new website, it only seems natural to start a blog. With the successful release of the DownTown Mystic cd, it makes sense to talk about what’s been going on. When I look back to the start of the year and where DownTown Mystic was at, to now at the end of the year, 2013 has been one crazy kind of year. Since the last Quarter really rocked, I’ll start there.

After releasing 3 Digital Singles in April, June and August, DownTown Mystic was featured on the RADAR of the Direct Current: http://t.co/p4UAm3Frwa

The DownTown Mystic CD was released the following month in October. Here’s the Press Release: shar.es/Ee6gn …the cool thing about this was that I got the finished cds the day before I went to see my fave band—Band of Heathens at The Mercury Lounge in NYC. They had just released their great new album Sunday Morning Record a few weeks before. I saw them there back in April and met Gordy Quist & Ed Jurdi, hanging with them after the show. So I had a mini CD Release Party, with the Heathens being the 1^st to get the cd. That was great!

The next day we started mailing the cd to Radio. The DownTown Mystic CD was released at Americana Radio in the US and the Euro/Americana shows in Europe, which had put DownTown Mystic on the map with the previous Standing Still CD. The response in Europe was immediate to the new cd, with the Euro/Americana shows playing 12 of the 14 tracks on the cd, and more shows giving more spins to DownTown Mystic than Standing Still. Added to this success was Dani Heyvaert’s cool review in Rootstime: http://t.co/x3lkuFR63s

I love the Euro/Americana show hosts because they really get the music. It’s very immediate. If they like it, they play it. Standing Still had received good airplay and the reviews in Europe gave such high praise, that I was really determined to up my game and put my best foot forward. It was very gratifying to have so many embrace the new release. It gave me confidence to face the US stations, which operate on a totally different level. You have to get the music heard and approved by a Music Director and Program Director, making it much tougher to get your music on the playlists, which are generally smaller. So the completion is fierce because there are only so many spots available at any given time.

It had been over 3 years since DownTown Mystic had released Standing Still in the US and I was hoping that Radio would still remember me. The response at Americana Radio was slow but sure. Standing Still had only managed to get to #157 on the AMA Radio Chart. So the new DownTown Mystic had something to prove. The new release hit the AMA Chart at #247 after the 1st week of release, but climbed up to #137 in its 2nd week, surpassing Standing Still’s best showing. I’m always amazed at the number of releases out there…I mean #247? And there’s another 400 after it! But that’s also what makes the Charts fun…it gives you something to aim for.

It was in the 7th week of release that DownTown Mystic released the new In The Cold Single at Thanksgiving. Here’s the Press Release: http://t.co/yfx9zHeZXX

The Holiday season would start in a big way for DownTown Mystic . On Black Friday, Paul Kerr posted his brilliant review of the new cd in the UK’s Blabber’n’Smoke: http://t.co/4jmRvAz5Ae

On Cyber Monday came the big news—DownTown Mystic would break into the Top 100 on the AMA Charts (#89-Terrestrial and #78-Internet) and have the highest debut for the week at #22 on the Roots 66 Airplay Chart! The following Friday, Shawn Underwood posted this great review in Twangville: http://t.co/Aacuzf1QZ8

The following week DownTown Mystic was at #88 and here’s what the AMA Chart looked like:

I show this, not because #88 is so impressive, but because the names of the Artists that precede me are. I’m a fan of all of them, but the really special one for me is John Fogerty! I mean, many of the reviews of Standing Still in Europe made favorable comparisons of DownTown Mystic to CCR, so seeing DownTown Mystic close to his name on the chart was really cool! A few weeks earlier we were next to Paul McCartney on the AMA Internet Chart and that was really surreal!

DownTown Mystic continues to get strong airplay at Radio and will close out the year with 9 consecutive weeks on the AMA Chart, making this a very Happy Holiday. Hopefully, 2014 will open up on an equally positive note. But as I started this Blog, 2013 was a crazy kind of year, and I’ll talk more about the earlier part of 2013 in upcoming blog posts.

In The Cold