fysigunkus | jay hathaway dot com

There’s a post idea traveling around a lot of blogs right now, “Eight Things You Didn’t Know About Me.” It’s been done very well by my friend Christina Warren, and Marina Martin tagged me to do my own version of the list. The problem is, I’m not really that interesting. The things you don’t know about me would put you to sleep. So, in lieu of that post, I’m going to do an ongoing series about unlikely things I wish I could do, and the lies I would have to tell myself to make them happen. This is the first lie of eight. Buy into them along with me if you’d like, and post the results in the comments or on your own blog.

Lie #1: Being a Rock Star is Easy

Sure, everybody wants to be a rock star, but the task is daunting. It’s probably going to involve playing years of unappreciated gigs in tiny clubs where the sound guy deliberately screws up your levels because he thinks your hair is stupid. You’ll likely have to spend all your paychecks on a van and some used equipment, until you get signed by a major label who will take a huge cut of your hard-earned booty. This sounds really hard, so let’s lie about it.

All you have to do, really, is come up with a bitchin’ band name, a poignant album title, and an iconic CD cover. This is definitely not as hard as it sounds, especially when you have this simple three-step process from the CD Cover Meme Pool on Flickr:

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RandomThe first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. mikelietz.org/code/flickr-ccgettr.php This picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. [Note: The original game used the third picture from Flickr's new and interesting pool, but most of those images are not licensed under Creative Commons. Mikelietz was nice enough to write this script that fetches CC-licensed photos for you to use.]

4. Post to the poolThere’s mine! The band is This Earth of Mankind, and the album is And Life Stands Explained.

From here it’s a quick step to imagining what kind of music your new band is going to play. And if you can do that, you can handle the next part of this little lie: recording an album is easy! In fact, hundreds of people are about to record 35-minute albums in just one month. It’s called the RPM Challenge.

This is the challenge: record an album in 29 days, just because you can.That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

At the RPM Challenge site, you can get inspired by listening to over 8,000 songs that were recorded during last year’s event. You can also hit the discussion board or start a blog on the site, to get help with the technical parts of recording or feedback from other soon-to-be-famous musicians.

It’s basically a huge, bright blinking sign guiding even the most amateur of artists down the path of finishing an album. You don’t even need fancy equipment, just whatever you have that can make noise, and some recording software like Audacity.

So now you’ve got a band name, an album title, and your CD cover, plus a bunch of friends to support you while you record. At this rate you’d have to try really hard to avoid becoming a rock star!While you’re out on tour, don’t forget to leave me a comment to let me know how things are going.