I’ve been playing banjo off and on for a few years.  It’s not something I’ll ever master, but it’s fun trying to at least fool people that I know something.

Anyway this song was inspired by Flatt & Scruggs and borrows from an old Outlaws song too.

Completely different, I know… but I’m trying to fit it all in!

Love-Jude 🙂

 

Black Mirror this year was meh. Three of the episodes were unwatchable. 3 were fair to mid. Netflix loves dystopic tales, then smears the notion of conspiracy theorists. Ah, the irony. I personally think it’s time they embrace some fresh new concepts, which can only come from conspiracies.
So I have a treatment if you will, for Netflix, for next season. It’s called:

“Someone Out There Wants You Gone”.

The chart above is LA’s weather forecast for the next 10 days.

In this new episode, and just like the previous 10 days or so, and the 10 before that, the sun keeps trying to shine, but every time it does the planes come out, spray and spray and spray until there’s 10 more days of stagnant, lifeless sky that turns cold, gray and drizzly.

Chance, a young girl of 13 is impervious to media’s cartoon-like reasoning for this madness and knows something is going on.
When she looks at the weather forecast online she doesn’t see a chart with icons of sun, clouds, etc. She sees airplane icons smattered across all the nice and sunny days.
It’s like a vision that speaks to only her. She knows what they’re doing.

Wanting to take action, she’s still a child. No military or government connections.

But she has a brave, dystopoic idea. Netflix loves brave girl dystopia… how could they resist?

Through her science studies she’s able to concoct a laser, right above the camera on a new state-of-the-art drone her parents bought for her 13th birthday, and mobilizes the camera to move at a 180º angle in all directions following the specs of a VR set she got for Christmas. Her parents are rich.
In her scientific brilliance she’s also able to scramble her flight frequency to undetectable levels. Yeah she’s really f’ing smart. She’s like Tom Cruise juggling bottles in ‘Cocktail’, only with brains.

Alone, Chance waits for the next beautiful day. Finally she spots a plane above, bellowing more filth upon the town. She closes her eyes and presses the 80’s style buttons on her drone remote, and fires the laser in hope, as it miraculously drills straight into the engine of the aircraft. A huge explosion erupts in mid-sky, and people everywhere look up in horror, believing it’s a freak accident.   Of course there’s no one actually in the planes.  These are military remote operated vessels being operated from a land base somewhere in Langley, Virginia.

Suddenly another plane is struck, and another. The Pentagon is called in. “Someone is taking out our planes!” they cry. “Immediate action is paramount and must be taken now!”.
Trucks, tanks and armor move in on the town with dramatic, ominous music. They have no idea what’s causing the disasters.

They plot a mission to fly remote helicopters over the entire town to find any activity from the ground that may be causing the calamity..
But, as the helicopters hover above, they too are blown into oblivion. By the time the deranged, evil-doers receive any visual evidence, it’s too late… they are scattered pieces of confetti, floating and shimmering slowly to the ground.
The sun dimming mission is aborted until enough intel is reached.

Chance calmly walks back to her room, puts her drone in the closet and walks to school.

As she sits slowly down to her desk, she suddenly bolts up in her bed in a cold sweat. It was all a dream. She frantically grabs her phone, face ID’s, and logs into the weather site to check the forecast.

The forecast shows airplanes where sunshine should be. Her vision wasn’t a dream, just the mayhem. She rests her phone down on her nightstand and shuffles to the kitchen for an extremely colorful bowl of Lucky Charms and milk. The camera slowly pans in on the cereal box’s toxic ingredients, as the screen fades to black.

The end.

People ask all the time how they can support my music and other artists like me. I always say ‘just enjoy it!’… but you know there is something you can do to help us who are kind of dismissed to the middle for whatever reasons… not on a major label, older than the mainstream public, not that well known etc.

Anytime you add a song to a playlist, it gets played more frequently. The more songs you add to playlists that play during parties or just on weekend listens, it gets streams where normally it wouldn’t.  You can get creative with it, adding songs that sound like they’re from other eras and just slipping them in, or if you have totally random playlists where they fit in, that’s good too.

Back in the 80’s and 90’s they had a term called ‘turntable hit’.  That was when a song was a legitimate hit at radio, but the artist didn’t become a star.  You could classify ‘Baby It’s Tonight’ as a turntable hit.  It was actually #4 on pop radio (R&R Magazine), but because Billboard Magazine tallied that number with actual sales, the song only made it to #16 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Many songs on Spotify get millions of streams and no one knows the artist because the songs were cleverly placed by a curator into a hot and trending playlist, alongside more popular artists, therefore riding the wake of songs that people actually tuned in for.

So, adding any of my songs, especially new ones like ‘Subliminal Seduction’, ‘New You-niverse’ or really anything from the albums ‘Coup De Main’ or ‘Coolerator’ really seriously helps with awareness and streams.  Putting them closer to the top helps even more.

My version of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ from Coolerator has, on it’s own gained momentum on Soundcloud with 375k streams.  Pretty successful when you consider most listeners on Soundcloud are into EDM and youthful pop.  It’s flattering to read all the mails I’ve gotten on this rendition of a song I loved… so this is another example that, if you add it to your playlists, it helps the song snowball into a more organic success.

THIS can really help… but whatever you do, enjoy it!

Cheers,
Jude