Mark Westin

Songwriter and guitar slinger with a mild penguin fetish. Also cats.

2024-12-04

Every year since 2011 I’ve put out Go Santa as a holiday benefit single. 100% of proceeds are donated to worthy causes depending on greatest need. For just $1.49 you can get this fun rockin’ tune for your holiday playlists or for friends. And you can even listen to it all year long. markwestin.bandcamp.com/track/

2024-11-21

current situation on my lap #catsofmastodon

closeup photo of a cat
2024-09-19

martha being martha. #catsofmastodon

a cat in a guitar case
2024-09-05

@Ricardus yeah, it’s good. what a great overlooked band deserving so much more recognition.

2024-09-03

All this to say that if you’re thinking of giving up music because you’re not gaining a bunch of superficial followers on social media, you might not be in this for the right reasons. Likes and follows don’t require any real investment in your career. They’re fair weather friends. Don’t chase trends. Focus on making music that matters and hit it hard every single time. 10/10 end

2024-09-03

There were plenty of nights when there weren’t a lot of people in the room. I remember playing at CBGB once when the only person in the room was the bartender. What did we do? We rocked as hard as we ever did, and got him nodding his head and air drumming along with us. We figured this guy had seen a thousand bands at that job, so if we could get him to respond we took it as a victory. 9/

2024-09-03

Throughout all of this you’d be sending tapes and photos to press and record labels, inviting them to your shows and trying to get signed. If you were lucky, the Village Voice or a local zine would write about you, and sometimes that led to more shows in new places. If you stayed in the game long enough and behaved professionally enough, you eventually met people who enjoyed what you were trying to do, and tried to help you. But mainly you said “yes” to every potential opportunity. 8/

2024-09-03

When it was time for the gig, if you didn’t own a band van, you hired one to get you and your gear there and back. If you played well enough and brought enough people to your show, the club would book you again. If you were serious and didn’t let drugs and drink get in the way, your band would improve and eventually you’d start getting better time slots on better nights. As word of mouth spread, you’d get bookings in different neighborhoods and eventually out of town. 7/

2024-09-03

To promote your show, you xeroxed your homemade flyers, went out in the middle of the night, and stuck them to every flat surface you could find in as many parts of town as you could cover. In the days before email, you also mailed flyers to the mailing list that you got by asking people to write their names and addresses on a clipboard at your shows. 6/

2024-09-03

You copied your demo & photo and took them to every club you wanted to play. You got the booker’s phone number and called every week on a landline – no cell phones, so no texting - to harass them about when they were gonna book you. When you did get a gig, you hoped it was a good time slot. Back then, nightlife didn’t start until about 10pm, so if you got booked for an earlier slot you were bummed. Midnight was prime time, and it wasn’t unusual to see bands playing to full rooms at 1 am. 5/

2024-09-03

When the band was ready you paid maybe $350 to go to an 8-track studio and make a 3-song demo tape. Yes, there were cassette portastudios and reel to reel decks, but most people didn’t have the necessary space or outboard equipment to make a professional sounding home demo. Yes, you could do it in an empty loft or garage with your own gear, but it would sound like crap. After you made the demo you took a band photo. Good music videos were expensive, so that wasn’t really an option. 4/

2024-09-03

You got a day job that you didn’t care about, just to pay your rent and bills. You saved every extra penny to buy gear. You split the cost of a rehearsal space and spent every night of the week doing something musical. If you weren’t rehearsing, you were gigging, and if you weren’t gigging or rehearsing, you were on the scene, checking out bands, making connections, trying to become part of a community. 3/

2024-09-03

Among my friends, deciding to play music wasn’t a career choice, it was driven by a need for creative self-expression. There weren’t schools or online courses promising shortcuts to glory like there are now. Sure, you wanted to be successful, but that wasn’t the primary motivation. You did it because you literally knew no other way to express yourself. It’s not an exaggeration to say music was life and death for a lot of people. 2/

2024-09-03

#musicians #musiciansofmastodon Making music in the ‘80s- for musicians of today

I see a lot of young musicians on social media saying they’re considering quitting music because they haven’t gotten enough clicks or likes or follows. I’ve been writing, performing and getting paid from music since the early ‘80s so I thought I’d provide some context of what the game was like back then, in my case in New York City, in the pre-social media, pre-video universe 1/

2024-09-01

i call this shot ‘two things falling off the couch’ #catsofmastodon #mainecoon #photography

a cat and a sweatshirt in similar positions on a couch
2024-08-27

Finally, "exposure" is a myth created by those club owners and their ilk. All it means is you're working for free. I never personally benefited from "exposure" gigs, even with power brokers in the crowd - do you know anyone who has? Would you ask a chef to spend their own money and time to cook for you and your friends for free because it'll give their restaurant "exposure"? Of course not. They're running a business and you're paying for their artistry. Music is exactly the same. /end

2024-08-27

I've been a working musician for probably three decades, and when I'm offered a gig I calculate the time it takes to learn the material, hours of travel to and from, gas, and my level of experience and self-worth, among other factors. If the money being offered isn't close to what I want, it's a better investment in myself to stay home and work on other projects. 3/

2024-08-27

The problem is venues mostly see music as background noise to sell beer, not as the art form musicians view it as. There are qualitative differences in music, and you get what you pay for. But when club owners can't discern those differences and have no incentive to, they don't understand why they should pay. It's like you went to a restaurant where steak was $45 and asked why because it's $15 at Sizzler. Yeah, it is, but there's a difference in the quality of the meat and the chef's skill.

2024-08-27

#musiciansofmastodon This is my take on why musicians need to stand our ground for fair compensation when doing shows, and not settle for the token $ many venues offer: We have to know our worth, not the value a club owner puts on us. They will always try for the cheapest, and as long as someone takes them up on it, they'll never think it's worth paying more. And if enough bands take them up on it enough times, it sets a standard of devaluing the work for musicians everywhere. 1/

2024-08-25

I play the NYT spelling bee game by my own rules: you have to use every letter at least once, and you have to define the words you create. Four words from the same letter set for Installment no. 2 #spellingbee #wordplay

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst