People, people, people – I am overwhelmed. The support I am getting for my debut album, “Disarm”, both in link sharing/Tweeting/Facebooking and orders (physical and digital) is amazing. I am so appreciative and over the moon to hear people are loving the tunes. This has been a lot of work and time and effort and I’m just happy to have people listening.

If you haven’t listened / downloaded / ordered your homemade physical package please click here for all the options.

My wrist is hurting a little this morning after I spent last night writing lyrics on to postcards (handwriting is so old school!!) but I wanted to take a moment to say: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

I’m staying at my parents’ place for a few days and it’s been interesting explaining to them the costs involved in something like this. As the sole funder of everything, paying for stuff myself from whatever freelance earnings I can muster, I have full control over the purse strings in a way an artist on a label does not. Marina & The Diamonds has some wicked videos, but did she agree to spending £20,000 of her money to get just one of them made? My folks thought I was spending an obscene amount of money on all this until I told them about that…

True, my album could have cost a lot less than it did, had I recorded it myself along the lines of the home recorded EP I released in 2009, but I made the decision to make it in Myles’ studio instead because I wanted to do it once and for all, and I wanted to show people that indie artists could make a product with a quality of sound and aesthetics on a level with or better than those with label backing, at a fraction of the cost. By being prepared for the recording sessions (the songs were all written and arranged) and getting down to work in the studio rather than wasting time playing pool and drinking coffee you can get a professional sounding album made for a reasonable sum of money, and I’m happy I chose to work with Myles rather than added the pressure to become a good quality engineer to my already full plate. It made it worth all the not going out drinking and not going on holiday and not buying clothes to be able to save up for all this, too.

My videos so far have cost between £450 and £1000 apiece. While I save a lot of cash because I direct / creative produce and edit all the videos myself, I also try to pay people a decent amount of money for their time filming me, letting me use their warehouse and lights and making me look like a tree. There are still favours happening, and I’d like to be able to pay everyone more, but I think the great people I’ve been working with understand the situation I’m in and know that I hire people based on what they do and how they do things. I’ve experienced those freelance jobs where the client micromanages and takes away your autonomy so much that you wonder why they didn’t just hire a robot in to do the job, so while I know what I want to get from a shoot and (as with the album recording) I plan and design things beforehand to make sure that happens, the idea is that everyone gets a crazy little holiday away from the real world of work, gets to add their touch of flair to proceedings, gets the praise they deserve for being brilliant and walks away feeling proud and happy they were involved.

As artists, musicians and videomakers we have all the tools at our disposal now and absolutely no excuses not to use them. Gone are the days when bands could get away with saying “That’s not my job, I just make music” and expect to be handed opportunities. I prefer it this way having been stuck in a stingy record deal in the past with all rights removed, no say over the spending of money and told off by the label boss for asking too many questions (thankfully I hadn’t written the entire album of songs that got lost in the ensuing band / label split…), but hey, since I was a little girl I always wanted to be in charge.

The late nights and early mornings in front of the computer and the money spent on printing, videos, ribbon, glitter and suchlike is all time and cash well spent, in my opinion, in the quest to create my funny little world of art and music, and feels even more worth it when the reaction from the world is this warm.

You’re all brilliant, and I thank you, and please keep telling everyone you know they’re also invited to the party. Viral may be a wanky marketing term, but peer to peer recommendations have always been the way I found the best stuff to listen to, from the mixtapes my friends and I made for each other at school to the blogs I read now. If you like what I’m doing please tell a friend, or two, or ten, and let’s continue to create something interesting.

XXX

Here’s the official album ad – please forward the link, embed, rate, comment and enjoy!

Please also check out the newly refreshed “Disarm” microsite for more new video and audio content.

I’m off to do a little dance around the room then have a rest day in the lovely sunshine.

XX

Read the full post here.

“She Makes War…ends the night on a high as she effortlessly switches between guitar and ukulele to deliver a beautiful set of addictive melancholia and soaring vocals.” – Elizabeth Martin, The Girls Are.

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Last Sunday night I had the pleasure of curating an evening of female centric music as a collaborative effort between my female musician’s group My Big Sister and DIY label Genin Records.

Named Re-Dress and held at Ryan’s Bar in Stoke Newington, the bill consisted of magical looping loveliness from Lobelia, gnarly rock from Dana Jade, quirky riot punk from German touring band Two Tears For Barbarella and a set of Telecaster, ukulele and vocals from yours truly. There was a real family atmosphere – I’ve honestly never felt so much love from an audience before! – I’ve played at a lot of DIY nights but just shifting the male/female balance in the room and encouraging people to give their attention and respect to the excellent performers made a massive difference in how it all felt. We had clapping and screaming, singalongs, dancing…it was quite a Sunday night!

The lovely folks at The Girls Are sent a reviewer and photographer down to cover the night – you can read the whole piece here (and do check out the rest of their excellent site).

As I told the audience throughout the night, us DIY performers need YOU! If you see us play and like it we need you to look us up when you get home, click “Like” on things, mention us to a friend or two, send us an email or a tweet and just generally share.

My huge thanks to all the performers and audience members who came to the first Re-Dress and made it so special – I now encourage you to click on all the links in this post and check out the songs, videos and blog posts all the artists who joined me on stage last Sunday have to share with you. I’m talking to them all about putting a podcast together from the audio I recorded throughout the evening and who knows what future collaborations may bring…there will certainly be more nights like these coming your way – be there!

I leave you with my uke and loop cover of PJ Harvey’s “Hardly Wait” – an example of the magic than can happen when your looper fails (damn you, Digitech!):

Hardly Wait (PJ Harvey cover on uke & loops) by shemakeswar

Photo by Balk for The Girls Are.

So, catching up on posting recent press links on the blog and archiving for my records, more website tweaks (usually done very late at night hence the recent hilarious addition of “Nail Gaiman” to the Disarm microsite), book design, email catching up and making more lists of kooky plans to make reality.

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I also want to take a moment to mention Tunited, a new music social networking site created by Midge Ure. My Mum saw Midge talking about it on TV a few weeks ago and sent me an email telling me to have a look so I duly signed up and uploaded some songs a few days ago.

In general I’m not interested in joining every new music related social networking site that pops up – I have limited time on my hands since the Tory government refuses to consider my petition for the 28 hour day – so anything I do choose to spend my time on has to be 1) useful in way the others I use is not, 2) fast and easy to sign up to and 3) actively engaging with users in cool ways, among other things.

So why did I sign up to Tunited? A mixture of great respect for Midge Ure and people like him who made music in that halcyon time when deliciously dark proggy synthy tunes got the mainstream attention they deserved, gratitude to my Mum for supporting me with my music and never asking when I’m going to get a “proper job” and geekitude – I love testing sites in Beta phase because I am very opiniated. What – you didn’t know that about me??

My sign-up experience was good. Uploading tracks was pretty fast and it was a relief that you can just paste YouTube links on the video page rather than having to upload those independently as well. It would have been nice to be able to paste an RSS feed in to the blog as I’m reluctant enough to cross post to MySpace as it is, let alone anywhere else, but I just posted a link to this blog instead. HTML doesn’t seem to be supported yet, but I would assume that’s coming soon.

So what of my other criteria? I need to spend more time looking around the site and figuring out ways to make it work for me, but I like its outlook already. Tunited is aiming to be a better version of the music side of MySpace, cutting out some of the noise by focusing its intent and gearing itself towards musicians and music fans only, building the community by encouraging users to recommend music they like to others – always the best way to find great bands. The claims to be able to connect musicians with industry bods aren’t particularly compelling – impressing label bosses etc isn’t a priority to me, working independently of the industry proper (whatever that is at the moment) as I do – but if genuine, and if the right sorts of industry people (those who love music not money), that could certainly be a good aspect of using the site.

This morning I had a nice taste of Tunited support and enthusiasm when I was featured in their Magazine. That there are staff dedicated to browsing through the site and highlighting and sharing the music they come across is fantastic, and naturally it’s handy as a musician if there aren’t already swarms of other bands using the site. However it grows, Tunited will have to maintain this sort of activity to continue to engage with users and make the site a compelling place for people to spend their time.

I look forward to having a good browse through Tunited myself this week to see what great music is lurking under its attractive exterior. If you’re already on there please paste a link in the comments and feel free to add me – my profile is here.

So, last Wednesday my face was on the BBC news homepage all day, as part of an interview I did a couple of months ago with Tim Masters from the BBC. Next to my face was the face of famous (and brilliant) writer Neil Gaiman, who also took part in the interview about Twitter.

How did this happen? I’ve made it clear that I’m working on all this music stuff myself, so how did the girl who refuses to pay a monthly fee to a PR company and has to cross fingers her unsolicited press releases and mailouts get opened get her face on the Beeb next to a famous and massively credible person? Why, the magic of Twitter, of course!

I recently gave a lecture on portfolio working at Leicester University (through another Twitter contact, naturally) and one of the areas I discussed with the group of music students was authenticity. It’s something that drives everything I do, and I stressed the importance of being the purest version of yourself as you can, because that’s what people pick up on. I also talked about treating people well no matter who they are – the real life example I gave was meeting Hal Ritson from The Young Punx in his studio a couple of years ago. I was there recording a topline for a couple of dance producers who were hiring Hal for the day as an engineer. Now, as the singer I could have swanned in there, given all my face time to the guys I was singing for, ignored the engineer and gone home, but because I’m not like that I got chatting to Hal afterwards, and that led to us working together, eventually performing together in front of 15,000 people at Yokohama Arena last summer. Crazy stuff.

Similarly, on Twitter I don’t spend my time looking for “important” or “useful” people to add to my stream. For me Twitter is a curious cross section of characters and experiences and I like watching that bubbling away. It’s not a place for aggressive marketing tactics – it’s all about authenticity. Tim Masters, the lovely man who interviewed me for the BBC article, had been following me for quite a while on Twitter and we’d exchanged tweets about this and that but I had no idea who he worked for because his profile didn’t say anything about work. One day I saw he’d tweeted about an actress he’d just interviewed and I shot a message over saying I’d love to send him some music some time to see if he’d like it. It was a completely off the cuff tweet which opened up an email conversation between us about setting up an interview to go on the BBC. We met at one of my favourite veggie cafes in Soho for a chat and that was that.

So, how did last week’s day of BBC fame affect me? As a result of the coverage my Twitter stream was deluged with messages from new people, retweets of the article and thumbs ups from existing followers and friends, and I gained about 200 new followers in the space of a day and a half. I replied to everyone, as is my way, so it was a pretty busy day all told.

The day after the article there were a few more messages and a whole bunch of people retweeting a key quote of mine where I said Twitter is “a bit like Facebook – but with people who actually care about you”. It’s interesting that only one person asked me what I meant by that and told me their experience was opposite to mine when I explained myself, most others seemed to concur.

The quotes Tim picked out for the article were a lot pithier than my full answers, as I tend to ramble (this is rather a long blog post…), but my point about Facebook versus Twitter is that of my 300-odd Facebook friends, all of whom I know personally, a pretty small percentage are likely to be actively supportive of my musical project and possibly less would actually choose to listen to it themselves. That’s because I’m not just friends with people who like the same music as me, plus there are a lot of old schoolfriends on there plus some family members. That’s why when I post about band stuff, or share links to my videos or microsites, I get hardly any “likes” or comments back.

When I post a link to something of mine on Twitter the response is astonishing. The Let This Be video had over 1000 views in four days largely due to people clicking on links from Twitter, and my followers always have something to say back to me. It’s great. For me Facebook is a place to keep up with what my friends and family are up to, and Twitter is where I meet cool new people and share experiences. People who use Twitter tend to be more chatty in general because of the nature of the medium. Whatever – I think it’s a great place to hang out.

The flurry of tweets has died down now and normal service is resumed, albeit with a chunk of extra people participating, hopefully, rather than just watching. That’s what it’s all about, after all.

Digital versions will be available on a pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth basis from 1st September, with a special live EP available for donations of £10 and upwards (extra generous people get more stuff!).

Four different physical packages are also available, with the CD, DVD with a whole heap of video content and an exclusive making-the-album studio film, a live EP download and a gorgeous photo / lyric book up for grabs, plus one-off hand decorated photo postcard sets, badges and whatever else I can cram in, lovingly tied with ribbon by my own fair hands.

Click here to listen to the tracks on Bandcamp, read more about the four packages and make your orders.

Thanks so much for your continued support – this really is a completely independent project, funded and driven by this one busy lady and her passion to make music and art and great content for you lovely people. Enjoy – and please sign up to the mailing list to keep up to date with all the forthcoming video releases, too!

As always, check out the She Makes War website for all the latest video content, photos and contact details.

* SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MUSIC – PLEASE TELL A FRIEND ABOUT SHE MAKES WAR!! *

It’s my last night in Toronto and I’m shattered after another day of adventuring. Today I finally braved the streets on a borrowed bicycle, mirroring my usual instincts as best I could to avoid accident. A hearty brunch at Mitzi’s started the day followed by a trip out to Toronto Island Park where we found a secluded inlet to make our camp. I swam in the lake in a floaty white dress while Melissa played with my Canon 7D. Exciting edits to follow.

The train journey from New York to Toronto was good, though there was a hairy moment at Albany station when I almost got on the wrong train after a snack stop – my laptop, cameras and clothes would have gone off on their own adventures but at least I’d have had cheese bagels and a banana. Unfortunately the promised onboard wifi was a myth so I spent my 12 hours alternately napping, editing video and watching 30 Rock episodes.

The rest of the trip is dissolving in to a pleasantly hazy blur; streetcar (tram) journeys up and down Queen Street West, cute little cafes, vanilla soy lattes, happy hangouts with friends old and new, hunting for unusual photo opportunities in vibrant neighbourhoods, lazy lie-ins, vintage shopping, ukulele strumming, loop building, hoop socialising and sunshine.

The quality of music here is really excellent, just check out HotKid for proof (and a free download), and last week I saw Cameraon de Laat, Andrew DeVillers and Solomon Matthews all sing up a storm at an art bar called NACO. The audiences are great too – I played a show at Rancho Relaxo on Tuesday night to a baffled but very receptive crowd on the same bill as an excellent electro pop outfit called Secrets.

This week I shot more interviews for my film on hooping at Sadie Spins’ weekly hoopjam at Christie Pits Park on the same day my latest article for the Hospital Club was published – read “Hoop and Glory” here – and joyfully hooped in a rainy downpour, much needed after a humid day.

It’s been a marvellous trip and I head back to New York tomorrow night with lots of images and audio to play with when I get home next week.

Here are some of my favourite pictures from my time here, see the rest here:

[Melissa, my lovely hostess.]

I’ve also been gathering field recordings and footage for my next collection of music and working on the artwork for my album, which will be with you in September. And taking lots and lots of photos. Here are my favourites so far and you can see the rest here.

Big thanks to Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn for Thursday’s show, what a cool little bar and a warm crowd. Now, where’s brunch at?

If you haven’t seen it yet the video for “I Am” is online now, check it check it check it.

Also remember to make sure you download all the free music from my site – album tracks “Got Milk” and “NIMN” and my Warriorgrrl remix of “I Am”.

I just watched this very elegant speech Amanda Palmer made recently at Harvard on the subject of artists being unashamed to ask for donations for giving their work, well worth a watch and not just because I have something to plug today:

I’m off to America tomorrow, see you on the other side of the Atlantic!