Scenery

My Grimey Dreams Video featured on Echo Cloud

Echo Cloud is a very cool blog, website and community for the Arizona music scene. They have featured the video that Brent Henderson made for our song, My Grimey Dreams. Very cool! Check them out.

Scenery

—Boat of Family Bones (Demo)

I came across this old Scenery demo while going through old songs for a project we’re working on. Aron and I made it in 2010. Its never going anywhere so I figured I’d share. Lyrics below:

Scenery - Boat of Family Bones (demo)

I called towards the hills and the mountains
Asked them which way I should go
They responded by showing a roadway
Going west off to San Antone

I reached the great white river
Looked around to find tall bones
They were the remains of my family
I tied them up to make a boat

Whoa, whoa, don’t let me
Whoa, whoa, leave me
Grab my coat, walk me out the door, embrace me
Send me on my way, forget my name, you won’t find me
On my boat of family bones

I reached the shore of Naches
Saw a tree tucking in the dead
I was jealous for her attention
So I slept underneath it

Hitched a rag-top ride to Houston
With a sad little man named Webb
He drank whiskey for mile after mile
Said it helped when the cancer got bad

No mom to call me home
No dad that I can phone

It was a crisp January morning. San Antonio’s streets were bare. I walked up to the walls of the Alamo, blew my trumpet, the walls turned to air. It was mere minutes i was arrested. I was infamous by that night. The cameras and microphones caught me saying, “Hi mom, i hope you’re all right.”

——

Scenery’s 2013 album Humdrum available for streaming and download:http://scenerymusic.com

RPM Challenge Listening party during Nerd Nite at Filmbar

Thank you to Serene Dominic for organizing the (sometimes) annual RPM Challenge Listening Party this year. It was part of Nerd Nite and took place at Filmbar here in Phoenix.

Scenery didn’t finish RPM this year. The release of Humdrum (http://scenery.bandcamp.com) got in the way. Serene was nice enough to play one of the songs from Humdrum, though. 

It was great mingling with other RPM contestants. As one of them put it to us after the show, “I hated it, but I will definitely do it again.” That just about sums up RPM: a giant pain with sometimes awesome results.

We will make sure not to miss two years in a row. Here we come 2014!

Humdrum in all the Fancy Digital Stores

I just noticed that Scenery’s latest album, Humdrum is out on Spotify, iTunes and a few others. We were told it would take 6 weeks but it happened sooner. It should be in over 200 online, digital stores within the next 4 or 5 weeks.

Why did we do this when you can just download it for free from: http://scenery.bandcamp.com ? Mainly, because so many people use streaming services such as Spotify exclusively for their music nowadays. 

If our goal is to get our music out to the largest audience, we really need to be on these sites. iTunes as well. There is a large swath of people who only buy their music from iTunes. Also, it allows seamless integration with iTunes Match.

If you buy from one of these stores, we won’t blame you. Just realize that you can always get our music for free.

Below are the Spotify and iTunes links. You can rate our songs or something if you really love us:

Spotify: Scenery – Humdrum

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/humdrum/id619098739

Thank you for the support!

-t

Michelle Blades

—I Want You (To Think About It)

slowocean:

here’s something new titled “I Want You (To Think About It). 

somethin’ to ~chill to~

~so if you’re feelin chill~

Chilled but not frozen. Something from our good friend Michelle Blades

Brent Henderson has directed a video for My Grimey Dreams ft Michelle Blades, a song off of our new album, Humdrum. 

Download the album at http://scenery.bandcamp.com

Why Our Music is Still Free (But We’ll Take Your Money Now Too)

Note: I’m Troy. I’m a member of Scenery but these are my own views. The other members of Scenery all have different views on this subject as I will explain.

Download or Stream Humdrum by Scenery

It was January. The four members of Scenery and friends were sitting in Lux (A very cool cafe in Phoenix) trying to figure out how to release the album we had spent the last year recording.

Our first three albums were made for RPM Challenge so we only spent a month on each. We liked our albums but we didn’t think twice about giving them away for free. Our newest album, Humdrum, was different. It took us a year to complete. We fretted over every little detail. We were very proud of the result. Could we just give this away for free?

The question I posed to the group was: Would you rather have a few hundred dollars in your pocket or a few hundred more listeners? Everyone agreed. More listeners.

But were we devaluing our art by just giving it away? My girlfriend sells paintings for hundreds of dollars. She would never dream of having a watercolor fire sale; take what you want.

Music is different, though. The market is different. I spend a lot of money on music. I buy vinyl and I support my friends’ and local music. I invest in Kickstarters and go to shows. I even buy t-shirts sometimes. Most of my music I get for free, though.

The days of making any significant amount of money from selling recordings has ended for most artists. I’d wager that it will end for everyone in the near future. Musicians can still make money through performances, merchandise, licensing, etc. Just don’t count on anything more than beer money from selling your album.

Music is the most basic communal art form. Its primal. If you’re a musician, make music and then let everyone hear it. Stop thinking about money and careers and buying expensive studio time. It’s cheap to record music these days. 

What was the result of our conversation at Lux? A compromise, but a good one. The “In Rainbows” model. You can pay what you want for the album or you can pay nothing. We expect most people will enter zero into the payment box and that is OK with us. We just want people to have a high quality version of the album we love so much. If someone does enter in a few dollars, we are humbled and honored. We will use the money for our listening party and new equipment for the next album or live shows. 

Download or Stream Humdrum by Scenery