GUH Fall CD Progress Report

I am trying to find out how to obtain licenses to legitimately release the cover songs on our CD. I've looked at

1. ascap.com. I think four of the tunes are licensed from there and it had publisher contact information on four of the songs.

2. bmi.com. Representatives of Lou Reed, TMBG, R.E.M., Billy Bragg. Site was fairly useless, except for its link to...

3. harryfox.com. All but Sweet Child are represented by the harry fox agency and we can obtain mechanical licenses in 24 hours online. Here's the catch - they only do licenses for 500-2500 copies of CDs. We can get the right to print (up to) 500 CDs for $400, not including Sweet Child. We are likely only going to print 50 or so, as we are not technically a terribly "popular" music group.

I'm thinking that even though it will take longer I will try to get conact information for the songs' individual publishers and write, call, or e-mail them explaining the situation. I have addresses or phone #s for four of them already. I am hopeful that process will not take a terribly long time and may result in some or all of them saying, "just go ahead." or "just send us a check for 15 bucks." So that's where that's at.

I didn't go to Memphis South, our graphics preparation haven, because of the snow today, so no further artwork progress. I'm going to take a picture of the rock garden where the heads were, which is now 2 feet deep in snow. I will now call the photo series "Après L'Automne, L'Hiver". Assuming we go with a clear tray, there will be a very generous 6 (six) high quality artistic photos included with the disc at no extra charge. I will also be previewing these on the web at the earliest opportunity.

It's after midnight now and I'm too tired to continue. Inspired by Chazz Vader's blog, I was going to put up a bunch of stuff about setting goals, finishing this CD and thinking about other future CDs, promotion, promotion of songs, etc. But it's simply too late. This is an interesting quest, as production of a CD always seems to be. One of these years perhaps I will get the whole process down to a science and release like ten CDs all in the space of a few months. That would be sweet. The music is all there and mostly even good!

p.s. Recording on Great Uncle Helmer's next original music CD will continue at Mandimae in Deer Park on April 1 with the latest composition from the band, Bass Guitar, being the only currently targeted composition. Now I have actually fallen asleep and am only typing with general momentum. Zzzzzzz...