I Am Not Lefthanded Invades 2UIBestow [part 4]

I Am Not Lefthanded invade 2UIBestow


I Am Not Lefthanded are busy. They're currently releasing their second EP, Time To Leave. They're also raising £15,000 to record a full-length album with the help of SliceThePie.com, posting a new free download every week on their website and gearing up for their first European and American tours later this year. To try and share some insight as to how they're coping with the madness, they're invading 2UIBestow with a 5-part guide to holding on to your sanity in the modern music world.



I Am Not Lefthanded's Modern Music Industry Sanity Survival Guide (4/5)


4. Work hard


A lot of people get into music for the wrong reasons, at least initially. When you're young, it seems like the perfect occupation - you get to hang out and impress people all the time, with no desk job or heavy lifting required. There are a lot of people who quite casually enjoy being in a band but never really take it any further. They tend to give it up and find a different career or just continue half-heartedly, playing at the weekends in the local pub. To actually persevere and try and get somewhere with your music is one of the toughest tasks imaginable, in terms of sheer drudgery and hours put in playing to empty rooms of disinterested people. And there's a lot more heavy lifting than you'd think...



If you are serious about it though, what will lift you above the throng is putting the time in. You don't have to work on every area all at once - no one can, it'll drive you crazy. Make sure you put in enough time for writing and rehearsing, and beyond that, find something you're good at and work it. Whether it's touring relentlessly, working on remixes, performing in a different band every day of the week, endlessly schmoozing your way through every party you can find, making friends on social networking sites or creating incredible album art for yourself and others -if you put in the time, it'll pay off.



We've been given a chance to earn £15,000 to record an album. This goal seems a lot more concrete than the lottery ticket nature of being spotted by a record label at a show, or being picked up based off of an unsolicited demo. The reason for this is that we can see the work we put in being rewarded. When we were selected we knew we had to go for it full steam ahead, so we decided to post a new Thing every week on our website. These range from old songs, live recordings, covers of songs that are important to us, brand new material and any other quirky bits and pieces that we can come up with. It makes us put the work in - every Sunday we need to get something up there, and keep it fresh and interesting for ourselves as well as for our audience. It keeps us working and improving, and we get feedback straightaway on whether people like it.



So here are two of our recent Things - One is an acoustic version of Late Night Drive. It's one of our newest songs, the words aren't quite finished, but the gist of it is there.









The second is a cover of I Will Follow You Into The Dark, a song by Death Cab for Cutie, a band we're pretty fond of. They've certainly been a big influence in terms of how they do things. We were very reluctant to play any covers at all for a long time, we wanted to be sure about the music we were writing before we lead ourselves too far down someone else's path. But we've put in the time and we're pretty confident we know what sounds like us - now it's an interesting challenge to bring that to someone else's music.







More info: http://www.iamnotlefthanded.com/