Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain

I started playing guitar in fourth or fifth grade. 

The older boy next door shredded. He’d open the garage door.

The sound exploded in my ears. The vibrations surged through my chest. 

I stood in the driveway and watched like the kid in Up.

Captivated. 

My parents noticed and asked me if I wanted to learn to play the guitar. 

They asked the neighbor to teach me and bought me a guitar.

I have good parents.

Like any young boy I wanted to learn songs like Thunderstruck on the electric guitar. Rock and roll power chords and riffs with heavy distortion. I’d play a riff over again without ever learning the rest of the song.  

My grandfather hollered at me one day, You gonna learn a full song, son? How about some Willie or Waylon? My grandfather was a real cowboy. 

Yes sir.

So I learned Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. It was the first full song I learned on the guitar. The first song I learned how to strum and sing at the same time. The first guitar solo I ever learned. 

Been playing it since. 

Thanks, Paw Paw. 

Feelin’ Fine Update (for the data nerds)

Since its release, the record has had over 3,600 listeners and 7,500 streams. This is huge!

There are listeners from all over the world. Check out this heat map below:

This is mostly due to the algorithm. For example, when you finish listening to an artist Spotify throws you, the listener, into a “radio” of that artist. My music will appear there based on who you are listening to. Or the music will appear in your Discover Weekly based on your listening from that week. This is what they call a programmed audience. 

This far outnumbers active listeners; ie, listeners who intentionally stream my music from active sources like the artist page, album, or their own library. 

I imagine this number will go up when I start playing shows (which is in the works).

But if you look at my profile on Spotify you will notice that the top cities listening to the music are: Brooklyn, Berlin, Helsinki, and Pomezia. And these cities overshadowed my audience in a single day. 

This was weird. I looked into it. 

There is an interesting explanation for this.

Bots got a hold of Gracie last week. You read that right: Bots.

There’s this phenomenon in Spotify where AI bots create and control specific playlists. This exists because other artists out there pay services to artificially boost their streams with bots. They do this to make themselves appear bigger than they are. It’s dishonest to say the least. 

I contacted Spotify and they were able to remove Gracie from that playlist, but not before it got 899 “streams” and 600 “listeners.”

It’s good to catch this stuff early on because it distorts your data and confuses the algorithm. If left unchecked it can actually be really bad for the music because it gets dumped into a massive playlist full of an array of genres, which buries your music under a mountain of the wrong music, keeping it from getting in the right people’s ears.  

The more you know. 

Until next time, 

CLO