Since you’re asking—yes, yes they are. We’ve had this conversation with many people over the last six months. Friends, clients, lots of people across the creative and agency landscape, our lovely accountant (shoutout Scott) who works with lots of people across the creative and agency landscape. The general consensus? Q2 and the start of Q3 were somewhat slow as a result of uncertainty around the economic climate.
But things are starting to pick up here at Three Point Four. We just signed two new clients this week and we’re feeling bullish on Q4. It’s not just us. I had four separate conversations in the last two weeks with other folks at studios and agencies (big and small) saying that they are also seeing an uptick in new business. The winds are blowing in the right direction, it seems.
Onto the links.
An Article
If you are like me and have spent your entire life reading various music magazines, blogs, websites, and message boards you have encountered the work (and reputation) of Steve Albini. He was most famously the studio engineer behind Nirvana’s In Utero. He’s also a notorious jerk. Jeremy Gordon spent some time with Albini in Chicago for The Guardian and talked to every music nerd’s favorite crank about his career and how he has started to soften around the edges and apologize for how much of a jerk he was.
It’s a very good profile and this part really resonated with me:
All this might have been depressing to someone who’d borne personal witness to the potential of punk rock to transform lives, and I asked how and why Albini kept doing what he does. “There’s always been a predatory and exploitative level of the music industry,” he said. “But beneath the professional level, you have all the bands that operate the same way [Shellac] operates: it’s our outlet for the creative impulse.” To Albini, making art was something you simply do, without any need for grand external validation. Most of the bands that he records with are not famous, and will never be. “They’re making records for their own purpose,” he said.
***
A Coffee Shop
DTE, the energy company that has a monopoly on southeast Michigan, is ridiculously unreliable. Whenever there is heavy rain or wind in the forecast we make sure we have lots of ice and our headlamps are charged. Power goes out all the time. It’s so stupid—bury the lines! Anyway this is a long way of saying that after the most recent storm I had to work at the public library and various coffee shops because our internet was out. I took a Zoom on the patio of Hyperion Coffee in downtown Ann Arbor and the guy we were talking to thought I had some new AI-generated mid-sized American city downtown backdrop. Pretty funny. Excellent coffee.
***
A Book
I caught the fly fishing bug last weekend and just picked up David Coggins’ The Optimist. Need to buy a rod and reel now. My new hobby has the opportunity to make this small business newsletter approximately 27% more niche.
***
A Recipe
I was very intimidated by baking for a very long time. Cooking? I can adjust on the fly. If something goes wrong, I can probably fix it with some acid or garlic or olive oil. But baking? It’s a science. Mix it all together, put it in the oven, and pray. I have slowly been honing my baking skills lately and this New York Times pie recipe is the most straightforward and user friendly pie dough I’ve found. (You can use it for any pie or galette, not just this peach pie.) I made a peach pie last weekend and though I totally freaked out when I was rolling out the second disc of dough for the top and ended up with this extremely rustic looking pie as a result, it still tasted great. Now I have to work on (a) remaining calm and (b) making pies look good.
***
A Bike Ride
This is a cycling newsletter now. August and September is my favorite time of year to ride in Ann Arbor. I prefer to ride the gravel roads, which have lots of corn and way less car traffic than paved roads. The picture above was from a ride last Tuesday on a route locals call Dirt Hammer. We finished the ride with gin and tonics and grilled salmon—soaking in these last long days of summer.
***
See you in September.