Once the album was finished and the release date was set, that’s when the real “work” began: the promotion! This has always been my least favorite part of the process and the one I’ve had more trouble with, for several different reasons.
First of all, because time is my most precious resource, I’ve always felt that time spent talking about something is less time doing it. In the music business, the irony is that the bigger and more successful a band gets, the more time needs to be spent on promotion and thus less time actually making music.
Another reason is that part of me still has an idealistic vision of art where it should stand out for its own merits, it shouldn’t need to be pushed down people’s throats or even explained, for that matter. I’m well aware this is pure utopia in today’s world where we’re constantly bombarded with tons of information every second, but I could never get rid of that subconscious feeling so it was always a struggle to find a compromise between the rational and the emotional.
That being said, promoting an album envolves many different tasks and some of them were actually fun. As a small band permanently on a low (sometimes no) budget, making videos was essentially a labor of love and an exercise in creativity that was only possible thanks to the incredible generosity of some very talented friends.
One such case was the making of the video for the single Pro-Procrastinator, which to be consistent with its title was postponed until there was no more time left and the whole thing had to be done in one single night! 🙂 That seemed hard enough by itself, but this happened in the middle of a working week when most of the people involved had already been working all day and would have to go to work the next morning as usual. It would’ve been a complete nightmare if it wasn’t for the fact that we were among an amazing team of friends, who made it feel more like a night out than an actual working night. With the help of a lot of pizza and beers, we mounted the whole set at Pataca Discos‘ 15A studios and filmed everything in less than 12 hours, which was a record time considering all the work involved. We wrapped it up around 5 am, went home for a shower, a power nap and then off to work again.
Needless to say the whole thing was physically exhausting, I think that’s quite visible in some of the photos from that night. But looking back at it now it certainly was a great testament to the power of team work and to that old saying “where there’s a will, there’s a way”.
Life, Unintended 