Here we go...

My name is Ted E. Gray and I have a band called Pudge. Right now the band is pretty much just me and my friend Mark on drums/percussion.

I used to be in a band called DragKing. I still think DragKing was a great band but we made one big mistake. When we first started we released several 7" singles. Singles were "hot" back then. We made a bit of a splash and our singles sold well and got critical recognition. Then we decided to record our full length CD.

We had a big advantage over a lot of bands in that we had our own recording equipment and home studio. This was good and bad. We saved a lot of money but we also had to learn to do everything ourselves and it took time. We ended up taking over two years to finish the CD. By the time we released it our fans had moved on and forgotten about us.

Several years ago we had a DragKing reunion and a bunch of us got together. I had been thinking about it and I told the rest of the band that I thought we made a big mistake by taking so long to release the CD. What we should have done, I told them, was to keep on recording 7" singles. Just concentrate on a couple songs at a time. Then over time we would have released enough songs to put out a full length CD comp with all the singles on it. That way we would have kept up interest and kept on putting stuff out every few months instead of waiting for over two years.

Hindsight...

After I left DragKing I was in a couple of other bands. But for the past five or six years I've been pretty much working on a bunch of songs on my own. Formed my own "solo" band I call Pudge. With modern technology I also have a home studio in my basement. It hit me recently that I'm falling into the same sort of rut that hit DragKing. I've been working on my CD for years now. A bunch of the songs are pretty much done and some need a lot of work. But it might take me years to finish the whole thing to my satisfaction.

Then recently I read an interview of Sufjan Stevens. He was talking about the death of the CD. About how with the web it doesn't really matter anymore. Songs can be as short or as long as you would like. Since people download songs, and rarely buy or listen to entire CDs anymore, why should artists even bother putting out CDs anymore?

Thinking about all this stuff (and perhaps having recently watching Julie & Julia helped) I came up with an idea.

The Pudge Song of The Month web site.

First, get my shit together with web hosting and set up a site for my band. Also take control of the DragKing web site and get that hosted in a good place.

Then, instead of working on the entire CD focus on one song at a time. Release one song a month on the web. Send out a mass email to every single Facebook friend I have to promote it.

I can do this. It seems a very realistic project. One song a month. Most of them are already done anyway. I just need to clean up some tracks and really work on mixing them nicely.

I've already set up the web hosting and started a basic web site. My goal is to put up the first song on March 1st. wow...