The State of Mark Lint Music
What's been going since 2018? Why should you care?
Since I began my ascent to very minor Internet celebrity via The Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast (which started in 2009 but took a couple of years to get featured on the front page of iTunes, crash our initial server from too much traffic, and continue its rise which has more or less leveled off in recent years as we approach 50 million downloads), my music has been known as the thing that I inflict on my podcast listeners without their consent. For our first 100 episodes or so, I’d put one of my songs in full at the end of every episode. I created my music website in 1997 or so using some free Netscape tool, and apart from adding a footer via Dreamweaver maybe a year later, it looks comically archaic. I have continued to periodically update that site, but my new home base is marklint.bandcamp.com.
That Bandcamp site is now pretty up to date with my “catalogue.” Over the last couple of years, I managed to finish up and patch up several long-unfinished and/or never-before-released-in-digital form albums, and so I’ve now got 17 releases up there, at least half of which sound quite good, and all of which, I hope, have their charms. They certainly have a lot of love packed into them. Songwriting has never actually been a habitual activity for me; most of the daily melodies the pop into my head are nonsensical fragments praising my pets that I would not inflict on anyone (though last year I did record these for a couple of weeks on my phone and send every one of them to my sister as a form of comic torture).
But songwriting used to be the thing that I cared about more than probably anything else, the thing that I felt like I had to do as a central part of my life or die trying. It was also a central emotional coping strategy as I navigated my pre-married life, and the songwriters I admired were models for me on how to think and feel, moreso than the philosophers and novelists I was also being introduced to.
The short story: My college band The MayTricks became by the end of our 4-year-run a well-oiled machine with four very strong, distinctive musical personalities (though Steve and I hogged most of the songwriting). With some luck and different career choices (Steve had a conservative mindset and couldn’t see even trying to tour, and eventually I left Ann Arbor for grad school), we could have eventually gotten signed, with poppy/quirky tunes like “Wonderful You” and “Pure As Silk.”
I left for Austin in 1994 fully determined to create something marketable, which started “alternative” with songs like “No Mind” and “I Like Life” and with changing personnel got some more Texas (and funk) in the mix. The R&B element was retained when I moved back north to Madison in 2000 and started Madison Lint, which was stocked with professional quality players backing me up and managed to pick up a booking agent and some good will in town before falling apart in 2004, by which point I was 33 years old and more or less ready to retire from trying to “make it.”
I was fortunate enough to connect with a new musical partner to co-front New People from 2006-2013, finally producing albums with recording professionals involved that I didn’t feel like I had to apologize for. Matt was a great motivation for me to complete and present songs, a real force in challenging me to narrow my vision to what fit his well-thought take on likability, and he did most of the work in actually making the recordings (with his many guitar parts vs. my single bass part), despite my often wrestling for control in deciding what we would play (set lists, album order). But neither of us was up to the task of running a band as a business, and we made very little dent in the Madison scene, and Matt grew tired of our dynamic and lack of a vast, demanding audience.
During that time I was periodically recording either by myself or collaborating with PEL listeners over the Internet, which resulted in two albums worth of material. When the first of these was released, I fortunately had a friend who owned a meadery that was starting to have live music, so around 2016 I re-gathered some Madison Lint bandmates with some new folks to form an acoustic band that recorded my last album (made of about half new songs and half ones that had been hanging around for a while), which was released in December 2018.
Soon after that, some of those bandmates left, though there have been maybe half a dozen reunions, and though we’ve not met up for nearly a year, I never formally broke up that band. I really miss getting together regularly to play music, but I felt like I didn’t want to be just replaying previous shows (or we talked about learning a bunch of covers, which I’m sure would have been fun), so I felt like I should wait until I have a new batch of songs written.
Thus the point of this most self-indulgent post: To present/keep track of the tunes for the next album, which I hope to record within the next year, certainly.
Time Between: In 2021 I wrote a nice song about reconnecting with old friends, and 4/5 of my band reconnected to play two shows that featured this song: here it is live. (The other show was for my 50th birthday, incidentally.)
Advice from a Songwriter: The band next got together about a year ago, and in preparation for that I wrote an ironic tune about how you shouldn’t listen to advice given in songs. My modus starting at this point is to practice the tune until I could play it decently, record myself on my phone, and that’s all the demo the world will get. Here it is.
Spinning Roses: A mid-tempo song about death, written Sept. 2022. Watch it.
Brontosaurus: March 2023. Goofy, but easily the catchiest of the bunch: Watch
Voicemail from the Earth: May 2023. This one followed me around the most since it was conceived last fall and demanded that I finish it. Watch
In addition, I wrote a new final version for “Twitch,” an old MayTricks tune that was recorded particularly poorly the first time, so I’d like to put it on the new album. We played the tune in its newly extended form at the 2021 live shows. Watch
That’s all I’ve got for sure. I also wrote a couple of podcast-specific tunes, like “Structure of a Tragedy” from May 2020 about Aristotle’s Poetics (this could be the solo demo, or maybe just the finished solo song) and “Brave New World” from May 2019 (with a full solo-band treatment, very hastily recorded) which I don’t imagine would make it on to this new release, but anything’s possible.
So hopefully posting this will motivate me to get going and flesh out a couple more tunes from my storehouse of lyrics and/or phone-recorded fragments to complete and get on to laying down guide (or final?) solo tracks with my good microphones so that, for instance, I can get my daughter’s harmonies on them this summer while she’s home from college (she is amazing, and if I can think of a non-gross song to write for or with her that she could sing lead on, I’ll do so).
It was great when I recorded the album several years ago that included my then-newly-enlarged group of Internet friends. I also used the opportunity to reconnect with some of my past musical cohorts from Austin. Well, since that time (2015), I’ve run a podcast interviewing amazing musicians for many years, and now have multiple promo people whom I regularly correspond with that I can get advice from, so that if I actually finish one more album, I can market it property and maybe attach more minor-music-celebrity names to particular tracks, though I will likely record the bulk of it myself and with some trusted personal friends (some remote, some local). If any musicians reading this might want to be involved, do give me a shout!
I suppose I’m theoretically in a much better position than I’ve ever been to get signed to a (minor) label for a new album, but I’m not sure labels are actually a thing at this point. I will for sure have to pay for the album myself, and I’m comforted by the fact that many of the unquestioned professionals whom I interview regularly are likewise recording what some might still called “vanity projects,” i.e. albums they have to pay for which will no doubt not recoup their costs, much less let the artists earn a living from them. But this is the world we live in: I may have broken into the music business not through rising up its ranks but by bringing most of it tumbling down to my level, so that I as an occasionally lauded podcast host who’ve befriended some musicians who are already in “the club” may yet gain some access to said club, if only I can drag myself out of retirement ONE MORE TIME.