Watch Seger’s facial expressions and body language. It almost looks like he is happy. We have a suspicion that there might be a few happy lead singers trapped inside the brooding and tormented frontmen we see wrestling with their inner demons on stage night after night. And we want to free them. So, if you want to be happy on stage and but you are fighting that urge for fear of being accused of having no edge, just tell them that you have been to Fire Lake. And if Bob Seger is too old for you, go find some footage of Josh Ritter. They are proof that being soulful and happy on stage are not mutually exclusive.

Today myself and a musician friend of mine were trading stories of bogus gigs, mostly pretty standard- playing to empty rooms, dickhead sound guys, beautiful women who watch your set but vanish once your gear is packed up and you are ready to talk to them.

It was fun. Swapping shitty gig stories is always fun. Its what I imagine the camaraderie is like when cops get together and talk about raids they’ve made and people they’ve busted-the same basic stories, but wrapped in different locations with different characters. If there’s a common denominator among musicians, it has to be the bad gig.

Anyway, my friend is what you would commonly call a singer-songwriter, by virtue of the fact that he sings and plays guitar, often at the same time. Maybe it was insensitive to have said this outright, but as he was describing a recent discouraging performance, I said something to the effect of, “yeah, well it must be extra hard for you, given the type of music you play”.

I wouldn’t normally make a sweeping statement about an entire genre of music, but I really do think being a singer-songwriter at this point in time is unbelievably difficult. Why? To say simply “because there are so many other singer-songwriters out there” would be remiss, but still the beginnings of truth. It is how this soaring number of singer-songwriters is affecting the way we hear and judge music of this genre.

The Internet changed everything. Ugh. I will never say, “the internet changed everything” again, because it should just be assumed that, in any discussion pertaining to music nowadays, the internet did in fact change everything. The ability to create, distribute, and promote music is within the grasp of just about anyone. What does this mean?

It means we are graduating from the withering model of big-label A&R manufactured talent, but are still lost is the chaotic musical populism of the Internet. Myspace, youtube, and inexpensive home recording setups have given the tools to just about anyone, but we still lack the critical infrastructure to keep up with all this damn music.

Why target singer-songwriters? There’s nothing more basic and accessible musically than guitar and voice. But I’ve heard so much singer-songwriter music, that I honestly have trouble differentiating the good from the bad. By giving a venue to everyone, our collective standards have gone down. Because we are inundated by mediocrity, it has become harder to recognize true talent when we see it. It has caused a widespread degradation of our expectations.

But we are catching up. Music discovery services. Those are the buzz now, right? Sites such as thesixtyone.com are helping us wade through the masses of independent music online right now, and identifying which may be worthy of our time. Pandora is great, but doesn’t help us tackle the indie jungle as well.

As far as the singer-songwriters I’ve offended, the same argument can be used for a lot of the music out there and DIY music culture in general- anybody with a condenser microphone, a Pro-Tools rig, and a desire to objectify women can be a hip-hop artist now. And to further appease the SS people, I’m listening to Bon Iver right now and he makes me want to quit my job and spend the rest of my days on a dirt farm. A few chords and a voice can still do it.

Not too long after the Soviet Union collapsed, I was in this bar in Moscow called The Armadillo (not far from the Kremlin) when two guys from Tiblisi, Georgia (the country not the state) began to play the blues, acoustic.  They were not messing around either, and I instantly became their self proclaimed biggest fan and proceeded to help them get a live spot on a local blues radio show and a number of gigs at bars that catered to Americans. 

Soon after that I became friends with one of the guys, his name is Levan.  One day I was hanging out with Levan and he was working on learning a new song.  I don’t remember the name of the song, but there was a line about “standing on the corner sucking on some Tanqueray.”  Levan spoke English with a heavy accent, but when he sang he managed to lose the accent mostly.  But as he practiced this song, he was singing the line “standing on the corner sucking on some tangerines.”  He didn’t know what Tanqueray was, so the reference was lost on him and the closest word he could think of was tangerines. 

When I explained it to him we had a good laugh and then he was relieved, because he really didn’t understand why the guy in the song was standing on the corner sucking on a tangerine when his life was falling apart.  It just didn’t ring true when you sang it Levan’s way.  That’s just not what people do when the shit hits the fan.  We don’t reach for citrus fruit to calm our nerves or to forget our troubles. 

But, I have lived now for a long time with the line in my head, “standing on the corner sucking on some tangerines,” and I am here to tell you that there is wisdom in that line.  You cannot eat a tangerine in some half-assed manner while your mind wonders over your troubles.  When you are eating a tangerine, there is too much happening not to get caught up in the moment, caught up in the act of eating the wet, messy, sweet fruit.  So for that short time, while you stand on the corner sucking on a tangerine, that is all that you will be doing.  And stopping to do just one thing and really do it, is sometimes all it takes to get away from the rest of the lyrics that fill your day-to-day life long enough to gain a little reprieve and maybe even some perspective. 

Of course, it doesn’t have to be sucking on a tangerine.  You can get the same relief from uncompromising focus on the moment when you practice.  Next time you pick up your instrument, say the line to yourself.  “I’m just standing on a corner sucking on a tangerine,” and then practice like it.  I predict you will play better, and when you are done you will feel much better than the guy in the song.  Even if your rent is still late.

 Here’s Levan playing Sweet Home Chicago:

What is Wanduta? Who are we? Why are we here? Why are you even here? All very pressing questions.

But more importantly, what the hell is a blog?

If you used the word blog before the Internet was invented by Al Gore, it would have conjured up images of swampy marshland in a Dickens opening chapter (because it sounds like “bog”), or you would have figured that the person was describing a symptom of a bad hangover, as in, “it feels like I have a blog in my gut,” or “I can hardly see straight through this blog in my head.”  It may have also come up in scatological conversation, as in “dude, you have to come see the blog I just cranked out in here.” Anyway, today a blog is not that much different.  

There are so many blogs that you can get lost in the thick of them as easily as one could get lost in a bog (although you won’t lose your boot wading through blogs like you might a bog).  People write them hungover.  And they are usually full of a lot of crap.  We have no delusions that our blog will be any different.  If we did we would have used a different word to describe it.  We might have called it a Blo(o2)g (a blog with some extra oxygen), or something totally different like The Word. We didn’t.  Because it is just a blog.

Truthfully, and like all bloggers we think our blog is going to be all cool and refined. Are we tripping into the same pitfall as every other self-indulgent wank with a blog? Perhaps. But we haven’t even told you anything about Wanduta, or what this blog will be.

Couldn’t hurt our chances.