5 February 2002
The Business Side

Just got off the phone with the founder of an independent record label in New England. It was just like the way playing a show felt when I was first starting out...trying to talk myself out of my anxiety in the minutes before it started, stumbling here and there out of nervousness, but also having the whole thing go pretty well, in the end. Mutual good first impressions. I really like the idea of working with a small company; provided the people in it have good connections and/or experience, it seems like an ideal setup for going about this music thing the way I'd want to.

Still working on my bio. It's harder than even I thought it would be...and I'm not even the writer anymore! Yes, I've offloaded the task to a commercial writer, one who asks good interview questions at that, and it's still agonizing to try and condense the story of who I am and what I do down to a single page of text. There's at once too much and too little to talk about, and with bios, unlike my particular brand of music, catchiness is everything. Right now I'm glad I don't write songs for Britney Spears for a living. Sometimes getting to the hook is damned difficult.

- VT