Animal Creative Consultants
I cannot tell the story online of how I got George. You will have to buy me many drinks to hear that one. (And maybe poutine.) But I can tell you that he got liberated from a bad situation.
.
George actually got up and posed for this photo. I was trying to get a shot of something else. I know he posed on purpose: when I went to the other side of the room for a different angle, he got back up and posed again. George is a poser.
I suppose I would be a poser, too, if I looked like a panther.
Dodie Goldney and the Instamatics
More Creative Interpreting
Yesterday I posted pretty much exclusively about my love for Deep Purple and the new Deep Purple tribute album. Today I’m going to share a few more of my favourite, unexpected cover tunes.
When I was a kid, my mom had a fantastic record collection. We had one of those blond wood cabinet stereos – an entire piece of furniture! – where the lid lifted on top and everything was laid out like a little bar. A bar that served music. I loved to lay in front of it, drawing and listening.
The first unexpected cover I ever encountered was through this stereo, and it was Aretha Franklin‘s version of Simon and Garfunkel‘s Bridge Over Troubled Water (click here for the original). Honestly, if I’d been Paul Simon hearing this for the first time, I probably would have fainted dead away:
.
.
Of course, most people know CSNY‘s Woodstock, but not a lot of people know it was originally written by Joni Mitchell (click here for Joni’s original). Curiously, Joni couldn’t actually be at Woodstock, due to a previous gig commitment.
Creative Interpreting
I had rather unusual taste in music for a teenaged girl. I wore my Iron Maiden and Stevie Ray Vaughan concert t-shirts to school. And I distinctly remember being asked, twice, by a very good-looking boy, what I was listening to on my headphones. Both times, my answer was, “Deep Purple.” Coincidence, yes. But that boy gave me strange looks both times, and he never asked me again.
.
.
I am blessed to have a musical mentor these days, who is so heavily influenced by Deep Purple that his face lights up when he hears or plays their music. I think Ritchie Blackmore is his personal guitar god.
Yesterday, we were listening to some tracks from a new CD called Re-Machined, a tribute album of songs from Deep Purple’s Machine Head, and discussing all the creative things you could do with a song. For starters, how creative would the classic Smoke on the Water be if it was re-imagined by Carlos Santana?
Getting Paid for Creative Work
.
If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me to play free music “for the exposure” – well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d probably have a couple of hundred dollars.
When you are starting out in any creative field, you are untested. If nobody knows who you are, then yeah, you probably DO need to do some free stuff to get yourself out there. But the other side of that coin is the expectation that you SHOULD give your work away for free: you enjoy doing what you do, therefore, you should enjoy doing it for nothing, and be grateful for the opportunity while you’re at it.