Well that was a hell of a ride! 4 days on the youtube homepage and 400,000 hits later, I still can’t believe it…
Saturday afternoon 3pm, I was playing an open mike at Banjo Jim’s in front of 5 intoxicated people. Saturday night 10pm, I had 600 emails in my inbox, and my myspace player had smoke coming out of its ears and numbers in the 4 digits. I hit the youtube homepage immediately, and boom, there’s my mug right there, first thing you see on the page… 80,000 plays in a few hours, hundreds of comments, dozens of messages, and suddenly I’m like, what do I do!? Well, there wasn’t much to do really, it was like a huge wheel had set in motion, and all I could do was watch… Well, watch and try to answer as many messages as I possibly could with only two hands (man, where’s that third hand when you need it…)
Three days and three sleepless nights later, I had learned something quite interesting. People actually like my music. I mean, sure people tell you they like it, your friends, your mum, the occasional lonely dude on myspace, but 400,000 people, now that’s what I call a decent sample of the population. I mean, that’s a chunk! I think it qualifies as a bona fide ’chunk’… So, more than anything, I’m grateful for the confidence boost this experience gave me, for the doubt it dissipated and the certainty that came in its place, the certainty that what I was doing was right, that it was useful, and that my music could really affect people and move them…
So now what? Well, I’m gonna keep going, baby, you can bet your ass! I’m gonna play that guitar till it screams and sing those tunes till your ears bleed. Because if 400,000 people like’em, why not 4 million, right? I got a feeling it’s gonna take us a little bit longer to get to these folks, but we’ll get to them… My face may be off the youtube homepage, but there’s no stopping this man, for he believes now, and he knows you believe in him too...
Love and gratitude to all,
Lionel