[approaches dais, clears throat]
"Thank you, shareholders and thank you to our parent company, Berkshire Hathaway. During this last fiscal year…well, you’ve probably read in the trade & industry journals that our cutting-edge R&D team is well under way with new product development and recording and…well, this is Wrens & Co. Inc. LLC and we will mic no drum before its time. So yeah, we both aren’t and we are..."
Here’s what we have done:
See our Report to Shareholders Part 1, here.
Here’s what we haven’t done:
Start recording yet.
Yep. Not a typo.
Here’s why: Um…
Um…we’ll get to that in detail later in this shiny new year. But for now, suffice it to say that a big part of what’s taken so long has been undoing/redoing 20-year habits of how we um, do things, especially how we make records.
Vowed when we were done the Meadowlands that we’d never make another record that way or take that long to do it, again. Of course, the irony is that it took about 6 years to set everything up to ensure that it would never take 4 years to make another record. See the kind of Lewis Carroll world we inhabit?
A not-insignificant part of all that is the nuts & bolts of running any small business, the knowing (or learning / cramming last-minute) enough about a sultan’s variety of aspects of music business to keep your own small-business boat not only floating but solvent, handling the more mundane emails & calls and things faxed, not too mention gaining the experience to make the big plays, head things off at passes, negotiate forks in the road, generate business clichés, etc.
And doing that yourself around real life (i.e. jobs, children and their ceaseless petty demands) seems to mean that as a musician, you often find yourself taking conference calls but rarely setting up mic’s.
Let’s call it Death by D.I.Y.
talk to our people
So in an effort to reverse that ratio, and for a thousand other reasons that are proved almost daily lately, it gives me nearly immeasurable happiness to announce that….we’ve signed on with official management –Ben Dickey, and his wonderful team of do-greaters at Constant Artists.
They technically start on the job the first week in January (hey, that’s this week) so be sure to drop them a line and present them with your “actionable” business model for bringing us acclaim and riches.
And they’ll quash it so we don’t have to.
With Ben riding at our side, the last piece of the apocalyptic puzzle is now in place and so begins the End of Days. Only regret we didn’t do this sooner.
Still to come: What’s to come?
Timeline 2010, wrens-style, in Part 3.