The Letter

This is pretty much what I do all night, every night.

Down here where the daylight sleeps

I found a spot in my apartment that picks up a pretty good wireless signal so I'm going to try to update this more.

I really enjoy writing entries for this blog, I just hate writing lyrics. Don't get me wrong, I love it when I finally word a lyric the way I want to, and I love finally finishing an entire song, but the process itself is the hardest part of songwriting for me. I can write guitar riffs and melodies all day long, but writing structured lyrics that don't make me cringe is a whole other story. If lyrics came to me HALF as easy as melodies do, Energy would probably be ready to head into the studio for another album already. Whatever, at least I don't settle for mediocrity, and just pump out dozens of songs filled with empty lyrics and boring melodies.

It's been a while since I've made an entry about how bad I think modern music is, so here we go:

I think that in popular music, artists have forgotten how to write a traditional pop melody. Either that or they just think that they are too corny and/or predictable. I know that there is no way to really explain on paper what a "traditional pop melody" is, but I do know that there is an intangible X-factor that some people understand/grasp, and others do not. I know, I know, "Well Tank, how do you expect these artists to correct their lazy ways, when they haven't been enlightened?" I don't, because THEY don't even know how bad they are. No band says "boy do we suck...let's keep doing this", they believe that what they are doing is good, so they keep pushing forward, because they just don't know any better. That's why I wish there was some scientific theory proving once and for all the difference between good and bad music. Unfortunately, at this point, there isn't. I still believe that musical preference exists and is exactly that: a preference/opinion. In fact, there are a lot of artists out there that I don't enjoy, but I wouldn't necessarily say that they are bad. I'm just saying that there is a LOT of music out there that I believe will someday be proven through science to be inferior.

I'm so glad that I have no idea when I'm going on tour again.

This hasn't happened in a long time. There needs to be a certain balance between new music and repetitive live reproduction of that new music for me to maintain my sanity. It has been almost 15 months since Energy has released anything new, longer since we've recorded anything new, and even longer since we've written anything new. Since September 30th, 2008, when Invasions Of The Mind was released, we have played around 200 shows...out of a possible 450 dates. That's like 7 out of 15 months spent touring. I know that a lot of bands tour more than this, but most of them are either temporarily doing it just for fun, with no plans of making a career out of it, or they're extremely popular and are reminded on a nightly basis that they have a lot of fans everywhere they go that continue to support them. We are neither of these. We are a group of people who want to play music and make it our paying jobs, but after almost 4 years of releasing new music and touring relentlessly, we barely even have a modest fan base. If the 15 year old Jason Tankerley heard the almost 25 year old Jason Tankerley complaining about this, he wouldn't know what to make of it...but that's because he's only 15, and everything is still magic to him.

100th entry

I've been putting off making any blog entries because I knew the next one would be number 100, and I wanted to make it especially significant, but I can't think of anything to write about that is that important.

Recently, Julia and I moved into our new apartment and it's awesome. I hope we stay here for years.

Energy was on the cover of the Stoughton Journal last week:

Click here for the story

Today I concentrated on Children Of The Night a lot. We recorded for a few hours, Mike mastered and mixed a few things, and I made a Facebook page for the band. Add us:

http://Facebook.com/ChildrenOfTheNight

I can't wait for the album to be finished and come out.