If you’ve read this far, you are likely interested in music and /or the creative process.  We hope you’ll give us a listen and consider buying a download.  We have lots more to come so we hope you’ll become addicted to BudaRest.  We received a nice review from Middle Tennessee Music. Short and sweet: http://www.midtnmusic.com/buda-rest-the-driving-duo/

BudaRest (Jax Resto and I)  is extremely busy recording, gigging and promoting.  Our First Rock eBook is getting closer to publication this spring.  The biggest hurdle is putting the finished product in front of buying fans.  We need a little capital for that.  So we started a Kickstarter program. We are paying for the recording ourselves.  Most musicians ask for 5 grand to record.  We decided to do that without help but it leaves us no capital to promote Jax Resto’s thoroughly entertaining (even for older adults) YA novel with our, to quote Jax, “Awesome tunes”  embedded right in the eBook.

• You can get a variety of rewards by supporting us on Kickstarter.com.
• You can kick in as little as $1 and get a song download.
• You can get the whole collection and the eBook itself.
• You can get your name mentioned in the book or in a song we will write.
• You can be an executive producer or have your business mentioned in the book.
• We will even write a song about you.
• The top reward is a house concert in your home if you live in Florida.

Everybody can afford a dollar. You can’t even get a good cup of coffee for a buck and it won’t last you a lifetime like our songs will.  So here’s the link to look over our project and decide if you want to be part of the future of music and literature.  We are cutting edge and you can live on that edge with us.  Click Here please!

And I’m too busy to promote it the way I normally do.  You want a free CD?  Easy. Write a short review. A paragraph telling what you like about it. Post it to all three of those sites. Let me know by emailing me bud.buckley@gmail.com and give me a mailing address.  If you’re local I’ll bring it to you or you can pick it up at one of my many gigs.

Here’s what I’m busy with and what you’re on the ground floor of if you are reading this now and responding.
It’s all Jax Resto’s fault. My co-writer, drummer, business partner pal is capable of writing a lyric a day or more.  Thankfully she’s too busy with the rest of her amazing life to do that or I’d have to give up sleep and other healthy necessities to write music that fast and in that quantity.  We have written on that pace and we proved to ourselves we could have a very lucrative career if people were actually buying music. But we are driven by our art. So it continues.

Jax is a novelist among other things. She does everything but windows, I think. Most of the music we write is going into her books which we are publishing as the first (to our knowledge) rock eBooks.  We are constantly recording. Time, money and the the social networks–today’s indie business plan.   We host a monthly songwriter’s night in Sarasota and do some story telling as we play our songs and host other musicians.  We do a weekly web radio broadcast which you can hear if you click the BudaRest Radio tab above.   Here, I’ll make it easy for you; listen to this funny out take. 

We are looking into both radio and TV syndication.  We are in discussion with a playwrite to adapt the novels to the stage.  Can a movie or TV series be far that behind?

After the first of the year we are going to launch our Kickstarter program to raise some promotional capital. We are scraping by on our own with the  recording fees.

It would be very helpful to us right now if you hit that little Like button.  It helps get the word out.

HAVE THE HAPPIEST OF HOLIDAYS

Our format is to bring on guests who in some way practice their art and mash up their efforts with either other art forms and/or real life.  We’ve interviewed our videographer  Ed Vinson, (see Keeping Secrets video above) who is also our recording engineer and a fine portrait photographer. We chatted with Venetian Academy of Music maestro, Chandelle LaForest who teaches many instruments and French as well as her skills as a trained pastry chef to keep her students interested. We had a hilarious transcontinental discussion with with Jax’s old circus pals Jon and Laura Weiss of Circus Vargas about all the different skills a circus performer routinely and not so routinely must have as well as raising a family in the circus. Coming up will be a variety of songwriters and performing artists of every stripe.  Joe Bonfiglio is next as he talks about how he has merged songwriting with the teaching of English Lit. We also play our own music and this is the place to hear, on the web at least, our music for the first time. We also have comical chats from a variety of places.

Missing in all my blogging discussion is our trip to the Grand Canyon at the end of September.  Cathy and I hiked more than we thought possible and she is busy planning the next one.  She took 1500 pictures which she is editing. I started writing songs inspired by my love for Cathy and the things we saw and the sweet time we had together.  You can’t capture the canyon in art. You can only imply its vast beauty and wonder, its awesomeness. Same deal with Cathy, come to think of it.

I have recently had a few conversations with fellow musicians about how fortunate we are to be living and working  for what we love. It got me thinking, what about all of you? Are you following your passion? I don’t mean, necessarily, what you do for a living; though some of you are, I know. I mean if you are passionate about something, is it a part of your life and are you making time for it? For me, expressing myself creatively gives me freedom and a sense of tranquility. What about you?

We all are passionate about different things some artistic and some not. Some folks are passionate about working with children, some people with charities; some find their passion in physical challenges like training for triathlons or training for a competitive event. Take someone like Olympic Medalist Michael Phelps, who spends 6-8 hours a day or more training. Can you imagine spending that kind of time in the water day after day? THAT takes passion! I can’t imagine anyone spending that kind of time focusing their lives on something they don’t particularly care for. And I think it is true that you don’t necessarily have to be ‘doing’ your passion as a career. I do believe that one can find satisfaction in their work and spend time on something they are passionate about outside of work, gardening, running, writing. There are just so many options. Speaking of options, my friend Jax amazes me by having so many passions she pursues all at one time. It can leave a person’s head spinning!  If we didn’t both have other lives, we’d easily write a song a day. We’ve had short bursts of doing just that.

So I want to hear from all of you out there. What are you passionate about in life and are you taking the time to make sure that you are carving out time to work with it? What are your day to day conversations about? How often do people have dialogue about what they are passionate about? I think talking about it and sharing, with people who care,  can help energize an idea. That is how it works for me. I can get a phrase or hook and in sharing it creatively with fellow musicians it grows into a whole song. That gets me excited. So please, share what fulfills your life?

While I have not made the kind of sales that would support a growing family, I’m heading in that direction. Um, the sales, not the growing family. Mine is grown thanks to my last career. I have much to learn but I do learning gratefully.

Here are several reasons to love being an indie musician at this time: We are in the last days of albums as we have known them my entire life. I’m at a fantastic advantage now to produce one song at a time and sell downloads. I don’t have to try to fill a disc with enough songs to make the price worthwhile for the consumer. The consumer can buy the songs they like and not worry about a few clunkers that are just filling space. I can still bundle digital collections as I see fit and sell them as a package or one at a time. So concept albums are not dead. Just different. I can even put a song or two on a mini disk and have my business card printed on it. More than likely, though, it’ll be a flash drive. Or the successor to the flash drive. What might that be? A holographic image projected from my iPhone? I can do my own demographic studies and reach the people on the web who are likely to like me. I don’t, as the big labels do, have to dictate what I think you will like. I can tour or not tour. Even if I stay in one place, I can use the web to find my true fans and bring them to me. I can have a life other than that as a full time musician. I can have experiences to write about that exist outside my studio. And the list will grow as time goes on.

Everything changes but there are still only 12 notes to make all those songs to come. This inspires a possible Onion headline: Every combination of twelve notes having been used, musicians recycle. Listen to this week’s top ten nursery rhyme downloads.

What is the good news? Music sales has grown in 2011 for the first time since 2004! And a big thank you to Adele because she is one of the biggest reasons that music sales were up for the first time in a long time! “‘Adele became the first artist to go double-platinum on iTunes — while her massive breakthrough, 21, helped goose digital and physical sales numbers by collectively topping more than 8 million in 2011 — digital sales were huge. Both unit sales (105 million) and revenue ($1 billion) were up more than 20 percent. Single downloads were up nearly 11 percent to 1.3 million.” That is impressive! I hope this kind of grow continues in 2012.

 I know I will surely concentrate on selling more downloads now and I’ll most likely limit my recording to two or three new songs a year. And you know what? I like it this way. The music biz has changed and I’m embracing it. I’ll make just enough CDs for promotion and for the dinosaurs who still walk among us. And for the rest of the world, there is my 2 for 1 deal!  Buy one download and receive one free!