Resurrecting Punk Rebel Renegade, Pt. 7
I unintentionally left you hanging for more Resurrecting Punk Rebel Renegade content over this last month or so. Sorry. Between the site being down and the songs being rolled out at different rates to the various digital outlets, it made for difficult marketing. Not that I intended on marketing the album, but it was awkward to even mention it. Since it’s available everywhere now, I’ll try to make this the last entry in this blog series.
So yeah, the official release date for Punk Rebel Renegade is August 30th, 2011. Just like all my other releases (except for Heat Stroke), there was not really an actual release date as I didn’t actually release them. So it’s kind of fun to look back in my files and postings and things to triangulate an appropriate release date for these old collections of songs.
June 10th is when I began releasing the album onto the Internet. It started with Bandcamp and YouTube since I can control those outlets. Then came Amazon, Spotify, iTunes, and the rest. Unlike with Heat Stroke, there wasn’t a wave of traffic to robbysuave.com or the YouTube playlist or anything. That’s not surprising, given that the site was down, plus I wasn’t spreading the word about it really. And I realize I have a limited audience, but people I know didn’t even pretend to be looking forward to listening to it. Maybe it’s because Heat Stroke wasn’t their thing. I don’t know.
It’s too soon to say how many ears have heard Punk Rebel Renegade since it’s been available for less than a month, but I feel like it’s getting less fanfare than Heat Stroke. But like I said, there are a lot of factors as to why that could be. I mean, PRR isn’t that much different musically from Heat Stroke. If I released Boobs, Butts, and Feets instead, that would have more than likely been a much bigger thing. But, again, there are reasons why I didn’t do that.
Not that I love my own music, but odds are that I listen to more Robby Suavé songs than other people do. It makes me happy to hear the older songs I’ve recorded sounding so much better than they used to. The lyrics make me laugh. When I listen to them, they bring me back to the time and place when I wrote them or at least dreamed them up, for better or for worse. That’s why they still sound good to me, and I’ve come to realize that since the lyrical content isn’t relatable probably, or even understandable, the songs aren’t memorable to anyone but me. And I know everyone says this, but I think it’s obvious that I speak the truth when I say all my music was written and recorded for me and because I like doing it. It surely wasn’t done for money since I wasn’t even trying to sell it. I wasn’t even making it available for anyone to listen to except for a tiny selection of people.
Anyway, I feel like I’m apologizing for what Punk Rebel Renegade is or what it sounds like because no one has given me any feedback at all. I know that people are listening to it on Spotify and YouTube, but I have no idea what people think of it. And now that I guess I’m making my music a little bit more of a product now, I’m curious to know what people like and don’t like about what I’ve officially released so far. I’ve been debating with myself about whether or not my songs are constructed strangely by design or if it’s because I don’t know how to put together a solid composition. I mean, there’s a sense of fun or something that I get when listening to songs by other artists that I don’t get when I listen to my own. Maybe that’s to be expected though.
On one hand, you have songs such as “Punk Rebel Renegade” or “That Effing Door” that more or less follow a standard song structure. That’s how I feel anyway. Then there are songs like “Banging My Head” or “3:00 AM” that definitely don’t have a standard flow. If I had more songs like the former and fewer songs like the latter, would people dig my stuff more? Let me know. And ask/tell you friends too. 🙂