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

“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.

See the question/answer photo set here and download “Olympian” for free!

“Weighty issues and edginess form the crux of her eagerly-anticipated debut LP – Disarm (out next week, and buyable here) – which contains a plethora of diamond-sharpened grunge songs documenting love, loss, betrayal, homicide, genocide, crap friends and animal urges. If you imagine the grainy tumult of Blood Red Shoes fortified with an intriguing blend of Telecaster, ukulele and loopology, then polished off with an angsty ranting rasp, you’re close to the proverbial bone.”

Big thanks to Tom at Breed Media for all his help and to Steve and Xander for the video and photo respectively.

Up in Edinburgh for a couple of days work, soaking up the Fringe festivities at all opportunities. Man I love this city.

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.

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?

I realise I’m constantly flinging links and content out in to the wilds of the web but hey, that’s just me I guess – and so much is happening to share with you! I have two pieces of news about my latest She Makes War video, “Scared To Capsize” that are making me smile on this lovely sunny day:

UNO: The latest blog to feature “Scared To Capsize” along with some of my recent photos (taken with lenses lent by Canon via 1000 Heads) is the excellent CanonCameraBuzz – view the post here, and big thanks to 1000 Heads for organising the recent lend of lenses and CanonCameraBuzz for featuring the video.

DOS: If you like the video you can vote once a day for me to win £20,000! An almost inconceivable amount of money for an independent musician, potentially supplied by Pepsi Max via its Max It Challenge. The video is on their site now waiting for your votes so please have a look – vote for unicorns everywhere to get their boats on the water once more. I promise gifts galore for my lovely fans if I win.

Sneaky TRES: STC was shot on the mighty Canon 5D Mk II by super talented director Judy Jacob of Beggar’s Velvet, whose credits include visuals for Pixies, Peter Gabriel and many more, and our next 5D collaboration – the video for July single “I Am” – is also nearing completion…exciting times…

So, last week I was invited to be the special musical guest on East London’s fantastic Painter’s Radio Show by old friend and bandmate, Seymour Patrick (of Miss Black America and Ten City Nation), and spent about an hour on Tuesday evening giggling, forgetting the names of my favourite bands’ albums and performing a couple of album tracks acoustically – “Let This Be” and “Slow Puncture”. There’s a “Listen Again” link here for the whole show or scroll down to hear the live performances.

It was all a lot of fun and I enjoyed the rush of power from choosing some songs by other artists to be played on the air – “World Sick” by Broken Social Scene (guest vocal opportunities always welcomed, people!), “Thief In The Sky” by Carina Round and “Help I’m Alive” by Metric. I was obviously getting my Canada on in preparation for my upcoming trip – and in Carina’s case getting my Wolves on – Wolverhampton is my stop-off point this week between giving a lecture about freelancing at Leicester College and spending the weekend hula hooping at Hoop Gathering. Just call me eclectic…or plain weird.

Anywayyy, here are the recordings of the live tracks, courtesy of XStreamEast. I encourage you all to listen in to the next Painter’s Radio Show this Thursday 6-8pm, there aren’t very many places you can hear such a diverse range of real music these days and I’m fairly sure there are no other radio shows which feature Cope O’Clock…:

She Makes War : “Slow Puncture” Live In Session on The Painter’s Radio Show by shemakeswar

She Makes War : “Let This Be” Live In Session on The Painter’s Radio Show by shemakeswar

In other news – hectic weekend. The video for “I Am” is nearly done after a mammoth editing session yesterday and I’m finishing off a few client projects in preparation for being away for most of next month. I sheared Mister Benji today…yes, sheared – it’s the only way to describe the feeling of removing so much fluff from an animal’s body – and he seems a bit more relaxed now. That’s what the photo at the top is all about, he was trying to make sure I definitely melted in the heat this afternoon.

And so to bed.

Photo by Dina Karklina

My amazing new camera bag – the Think Tank Streetwalker Hard Drive (weird name!) – got its first outing on Friday for a shoot in Canterbury and though it cleverly distributes the weight via its various straps my body was suffering greatly after wielding such a heavy heap of camera tech. My last work bag was quite a bit smaller and couldn’t hold a laptop so I’ll have to get used to this one – and maybe start doing yoga again very soon.

Today was very productive: I went on my first run in yonks, started making concrete plans for September’s European InterRail tour – dates, cities, train journey durations (more about this soon) – and finished editing the “Scared To Capsize” video. STC is the first song I ever used my loop pedal on live, the first ukulele song I ever wrote (back in 2006) and it’s the opening track on my forthcoming album so I’m really looking forward to sharing this beautiful video – a collaboration between Judy Jacob of Beggars Velvet and myself.

I’m just starting work on the vBlog episode to accompany the promo and everything will be online this Wednesday. If you’re on the mailing list you’ll be the first to know, closely followed by Twitterfolk.

In other news, forthcoming single “I Am” is now up on MySpace and Reverbnation along with the album version of “Olympian”. Please listen, comment and share with your friends.

How was your weekend?

I did find time for some fun birthday outings last week though, the highlight of which has to be seeing The Pixies at Troxy on Friday night. I can’t imagine them being any better back in their heyday, they were so brilliant, and it was lovely to see Joey Santiago playing the guitar hero card and Frank and Kim joking around on stage. Thankfully, being thrown around inside my backpack for an hour and a half in a sweaty moshpit didn’t harm the precious SMW album stems I had just loaded on to my external hard drive…good to know for the future that sometimes “rugged” really does mean rugged. Thank you Lacie!

My first article for The Hospital Club went online last week. Entitled “Unicorns & Paper Boats: Or, The Day I Made It”, it’s a brief, conversational piece on my experiences of using social media to promote my music, how it’s going so far and what I think is important. You can read the full piece here – let me know what you think…

I’ve also started taking part in Project 365, taking a photo a day for a year and uploading to my Blipfoto page and to Flickr. Here are my images so far:

Night all, sweet dreams.