Hello October!
The latest:
September was the first month of no-more-Lex-Land and hello-Holly-Frost for the rest of my world (outside of Twitch and The Vault). This has been a scary transition and of course I wish I didn’t really have to do it this way, but now that I have - can I tell you? I am so much happier, and feel like there’s been a big weight lifted off my shoulders.
It’s given me an opportunity to really affirm for myself what this project is, what I want it to be, and where I want it to go. It’s allowed me to let go of some things that have bummed me out or made me resentful in the past. There’s a freedom, excitement, and enthusiasm I have now that I’ve been searching for for a good several years now…
If the Lex Land to Holly Frost name change happens to be news to you, or you’d like to read more details, I did create a public blog-post which you can read here if you are interested.
This was a hectic month full of streams, a LOT of IRL gigs and a LOT of writing as I managed to complete my SEVENTH 7 Songs in 7 Days.
September Recap:
We started September off with a real upswing: I released the FIRST TWO official singles for the fresh iteration of my primary project, getting Holly Frost set up with two brand-new original-song releases We’ll Find a Way on September 1 and Sleepy Sunday on September 5th.
I made the big name-change announcement on September 8th, and then started a balancing act between a string of IRL performances, my standard recurring commitments, and this year’s Seven Songs in Seven Days, the latter of which launched on September 22.
I’m pretty happy with my output for this last 7s7d and was even prouder of myself for being extra proactive in completing them, often super early in the day so that I wouldn’t have to tackle them late at night after a performance.
It was at about the midpoint of this year’s 7s7d that I discovered there are currently SEVEN HOURS of mostly-publicly-unreleased original songs I’ve distributed here at The Vault between the three projects, mostly just in the last two years since I started hosting this membership on my own site. 🤯 So, yeah… I think it’s about time to really start focusing on releases, which is now my big goal/plan for 2024 and the rest of 2023.
Event + Broadcast Schedule:
In an effort to improve my effectiveness and optimize my schedule, I’m currently experimenting with moving all the recurring evening streams to the daytime. That means that Mouseketeer Monday will, for now, take place at 3PM EST on Mondays, and the monthly One Big Dark Room event will move to the same slot (3pm est) on its standing second-wednesday recurring day for now (though I will probably immediately regret that decision and might have to move it again 😑).
On a related note, I would like to try something else new: instead of “another” livestream similar to what we do for everyone for free on Twitch multiple times a week as our exclusive Vault event, I’d like to reformat it to a more casual afternoon Zoom hang.
Since these events tend to be more of a catch-up and check-in about the current state of my art and my music business, I think it would be nice to intentionally connect in a slightly different way. I’ll be considering these more like “shareholder meetings” since you keyholders are essentially my board! I can outline my plans, get feedback from you when needed, and then be able to give you updates and projections about how the plans have gone. They’d continue to occur sometime in the last week of each month, likely on Wednesday afternoons, but for the time being I will schedule them one at a time and keep you updated as we go until I find a good flow. Don’t let the Zoom part scare you, you absolutely do NOT need to have your camera/audio on or participate outside of simply attending unless you want to.
I would like to continue to offer “special” evening concert-style broadcasts (like the full-band One Big Dark Room Vault Concert we did last October) occasionally, but those will be bonus :)
I’ll host our first Keyholder Zoom Happy Hour on Wednesday, October 25 at 3pm EST. I’ll still play/share any new material with you for the first time in addition to catching you up on any business details and plans.
The public-stream Twitch schedule is kept up to date at http://hollyfrost.com/live
We’ll have our regular October One Big Dark Room livestream event on Wednesday, October 11, 2023 over on the One Big Dark Room Twitch channel but at the “afternoon” time (3PM ET).
If you happen to be in Austin and would like to hang out for a casual evening at The Wildflower Center, I’ll be providing some ambient music there for their Fall event series on Tuesday, October 10.
What’s Next + Long(er)-Range Schedule:
Next up for my big plans to get some momentum rolling for the HF project (and hopefully, then, for the others) is to start to drop public releases at a high volume and a high frequency - definitely throughout 2024 and if I can manage it, for the rest of 2023.
Not having new relevant releases or a recurring release strategy/plan (and the creation/release of social content to support the music releases) is the current bottleneck for my growth, so that is where I’ll be focusing my energy outside of my recurring commitments here and at Twitch, most likely for the next 4-5 months at least while I get some workflows set up and get completed mixes into a future-release queue.
In order to do this, I will need to spend a good chunk of time “batching” tracking in order to get ahead of my planned release schedule.
With the most recent releases as an observable data set, I can reasonably churn out a decent track with 2-5 business days of devoted and undistracted effort. (So long as I try to keep them relatively minimal in production, with only a few overdubs each.) This is a significant investment of time (especially at the volume I’m shooting for), but since I don’t have the capital to outsource the labor necessary to expedite this process, it is an investment I’ll have to make.
To make a dent in what needs doing for the remainder of 2023, I’ll be taking the first week of November “off” from streams and gigs in order to get some tracking done. (That’s still a ways away, so it could change before then, but that’s my intent).
So - just a heads up that after the Crooner Coffee Hour on 10/27, I’ll be “away” for a minute. I have a commitment that will keep me from streaming on Monday, November 6, so I’ll be back on the HF Twitch Channel on 11/10/23. (Though we will meet for our November OBDR event a couple days before that, on Wednesday, 11/8.)
It’s highly likely I’ll have to do something similar, and possibly for a lot longer, in January in order to get the 2024 releases going… but that’s a ways out and I have no definitive plans for that yet - I’ll be using 2023 Q4 as a testing grounds and then I’ll be able to have a better idea of what will be required/feasible.
In closing:
If you haven’t yet had a chance to check out the newest singles, I hope you’ll give them a listen on your preferred platform!
Especially in these early days of “seasoning” the data/algorithm/recomendation-engine on the DSPs (Apple Music, Spotify, etc) with this new Holly Frost artist profile, your listening will be REALLY helpful so that these services can learn what kind of folks like my music and can then, in turn, recommend it to those most likely to enjoy it. It’s a pretty simple and painless way to help me grow and is so appreciated! 🙏
Here are the songs’ smart links that will direct you to the different platforms (or you can find them all at the Holly Frost Bandcamp):
Haven’t managed to quite get around to it yet, but just another heads up that sometime soon you’ll be hearing from me via a Love Letter Music email address as I continue to retire lexlandmusic.com and associated addresses.
So excited for the future, and so grateful to have you here with me for this adventure. 🥹
Our October
Keyholder Zoom
will take place:
October 25, 2023
at 3PM ET
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/88237875642?pwd=6iVb1wK9qSlFj0AawszJa8WcbIQBke.1
Meeting ID:
882 3787 5642
Passcode:
qcfbK0
THANK YOU.
❤️LL
rewards access:
