Lost Cause
Saturday, August 5th, 2023 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio
Above is the original cover for album number three; Lost Cause. I've enlarged it here to 800X800, but the actual image is only 456X456.
As you can see it's heavily filtered too, and I lost the original photo... which probably wouldn't have been that great anyway, as it was taken with a 2003 era digital camera.
So today, which turned out to be a pleasantly rainy day, I went downtown and reshot the photo, then came home and reworked it into the new updated cover...
This is one of four statues on the four corners of the New York Street bridge, downtown, which was built in the early 1930s as a memorial to the Great War (cuz WW2 hadn't happened yet).
But what really struck me today, after comparing the old and new photos was how badly this statue has deteriorated in just the twenty years since I took the first one!
It looks brand new in the first one, even though, at that point, it was around 70 years old!
What happened?
But, I guess I shouldn't complain, because in it's current state, and wet from the rain... it does look waaay cooler, and way more befitting of the album title, "Lost Cause."
You may be wondering why the OG cover says, "Mistook," up in the corner.
And that's because of Garageband.com... one of the worst websites in the history of the internet, in my opinion!
Back in the early 2000s, Garageband.com was inviting unknown artists to upload their stuff and offering everybody a shot at a record deal!
People were really excited about it, but it required the unknown artists to review each other's songs, which is how you not only earned credits to upload your own stuff, but how your music rose through the ranks.
Needless to say this was an unmitigated disaster, because there was zero independant oversight and everybody just gamed the system to promote themselves and fuck everybody else.
Then they ended up revolking the whole promise of a record contract, because too many people were on the site and they couldn't afford it!
However, they were also asshole enough to REQUIRE a band name for your profile! In other words, if you were a solo artist, you could not join under your own name. You had to make up a band name for yourself.
"Mistook," was just a random word that was in my head one day that struck me, in the moment, as being interesting.
So, Mistook not only became my Garageband identity, but also the domain of the website I created to showcase my shit for myself... Mistook.Net.
I called the album, "Lost Cause," very much because of my experience on Garageband.com, which made me realize that the attempt to get discovered or even to gain some kind of following online, was indeed, a lost cause.
I still put my stuff out there on my own website and attempted to promote it... MySpace came along a bit later and offered some false hope... but I'd already accepted that I was doing this just to do it, and that nobody was ever gonna hear it.
Lastly, with regard to the updated album cover... yes I did have to fake the missing plaque this time around.
Back in 2003, when I took the OG photo, the plaque was genuinely missing.
Today it was back, so I had to digitally remove it.
At any rate... now that I have the new cover, I'm gonna get back to NightCafe and start generating the images for the 13 tracks that are on this album.
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