The Duende Project

On Friday night, March 18th, we’ll be back in action at Nick’s, 124 Millbury Street in Worcester, for our first live gig since early December. A night time gig, a weekend gig, starting at 9 PM.

It’s going to be a bittersweet night, as Nick’s, our primary home for the last several years, will be closing for good on April 4th. The bar’s been sold and while it will reopen and once again feature its usual mix of live music and great cocktails, we don’t honestly know what the future will hold for us in particular. So…we’re treating the night as a send off of sorts. Come on down and let’s make it good.

We’ll be back live sooner rather than later, I hope. We’ve enjoyed your support in the past, and look forward to giving you more of what you’ve been used to with these efforts.

If ANYONE out there has ideas for where we might play gigs in southern New England– a rock/jazz/funk-influenced band with a poet out front who don’t do more than a couple of twisted covers and are decidedly NOT background music — let us know. We’re open to ideas.

And don’t forget — eyes and ears open — new music coming soon!!!

A week from today, we are planning a return to the recording studio to get a couple of our tracks down for release ahead of a planned new album, our 8th.

On Friday night, March 18th, we’ll be back in action at Nick’s, 124 Millbury Street in Worcester, for our first live gig since early December. A night time gig, a weekend gig, starting at 9 PM.

We’ve enjoyed your support in the past, and look forward to giving you more of what you’ve been used to with these efforts.

If ANYONE out there has ideas for where we might play gigs in southern New England– a rock/jazz/funk-influenced band with a poet out front who don’t do more than a couple of twisted covers and are decidedly NOT background music — let us know. We’re open to ideas.

Easy 3+ hours of original material in our pockets but open to multi-band gigs.

Let’s get back to business. In the meantime…go check us out.

And thanks.

https://theduendeproject.bandcamp.com

Taking a quick moment to note that we’ve had our own troubles with Spotify in the past — remember the whole false accusation regarding us using fraudulent means to amplify our streaming income — and the recent news regarding Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, et al vs. Spotify and Joe Rogan made us take a second look at continuing our use of the streaming service.

Pulling our music from Spotify because of our personal disturbance at their business practices would seem to be an easy decision, and while we’d like to, we’ve learned that it’s actually a lot harder for a small act like us than for a well funded artist like Young. Essentially, once you’re on there any removal decision has to be made by the distribution service you used to get on there in the first place, based on their contract terms with the service.

Young and Mitchell are major artists with clout that can compel their record companies to do this.

We’re, um, not.

There’s a way of doing this that would require us to pull all our music from ALL streaming and download services and then reloading it all under new terms. That’s extremely time consuming and disruptive, and frankly would be cutting off our collective nose to spite our collective face.

At any rate, all online sources together paid us a grand total of $1.73 for all our streams on ALL services in the last three months, so…yeah. Not like they’d notice. We’d be pulling the work for our own principles. Which is fine, but as I said, would have some serious consequences for other channels we use.

We’ll continue to think about this, especially as we prepare for a new recording…

In the meantime, how about you listen and download our work from Bandcamp? Far better margin for us and you can have it in any format you want.

http://theduendeproject.bandcamp.com

We’ll keep you posted.

the band (T, S, C + C)

Hi all.

It’s been a rough couple of months for the band. Family crises, COVID (yup, one of us got the virus and while they’ve recovered now it was hardly a mild case), and gigs having to be canceled and rescheduled…yeah. Fun.

Hope you all are doing well in such fun times, yourselves.

Two things:

We are shaking up our gig schedule. Right now, we’re on hold for our bi-weekly gigs at Nick’s in Worcester as we figure that out. (We’ll still be there, just not sure of dates.) There’s also a potential new venue for us. Nothing definite yet.

We are planning a return to the studio VERY soon. Already picking out some tunes to give the full band treatment, and there MAY be a bonus project released sooner if we can figure out all the logistics…

So while it’s been a bit of a fallow period, we’re still around. Keep listening — add us on your streaming service of choice, from Spotify and Pandora to Tidal and Deezer(?) — and feel free to purchase a track or two from Apple or Amazon, or even the whole discography at a discount on Bandcamp if you so desire. It’s a challenging moment, and any support would be great.

Thanks!

the band (Tony, Steve, Chris L, and Chris OD)

Pssst…a new track on Bandcamp. Might not be around long….

What You Can Get Away With

Still gig hunting, although we’ve settled into our every-other-Sunday shows at Nick’s in Worcester nicely. Next two shows are 4-6 PM on Sunday Dec. 5th and Dec. 19th. That’s at Nick’s, 124 Millbury Street in the Canal District, Green Island, cool part of Wormtown, Worcester MA.

Don’t forget to find a way to listen to us! All the albums are available for sale via all the usual outlets, including Bandcamp. And if streaming is your thing, we’re on all of those places too — even Pandora. Tidal in particular is good (honestly, they pay us more per stream once we hit a certain volume), although Spotify is the obvious choice and still our biggest source of income.

We don’t usually bring up income but hey…during the pandemic other sources of income from live events shriveled, and while none of us make our living with this band, money does help with things like web hosting fees, gas money for gigs, etc. So…yeah. Art need sustenance to survive.

Anyway, that’s all there is to report right now. Hope to see you soon somewhere. Nick’s, maybe?

the band

Nick’s yesterday was a lot of fun. Despite the absence of Christopher G Lawton on guitar, we were fortunate enough to have Jeff Sohigian in attendance and he stepped in for some of the set, relieving the audience of the burden of listening to Tony’s playing for a change 😀. (Folks did have to listen to Tony butchering “Mustang Sally,” though…sorry, Wilson, wherever you are.)

We’ll be back to create more chaos on October 17th. Really, you should come down. It’s 4 to 6, so come early, stay a bit longer for the Listen! poetry reading, maybe catch some showtunes with Mark at 8, and go home to an early bed time…Monday is a work day, after all.

‘Nick’s,124 Millbury St, Worcester.

We’ve had a significant slowdown in income of late — pretty much since the Great Spotify Fake Listener Accusation and Unsatisfactory Resolution — so we’ll be bumping up the notices of where you can hear us in the coming days.

We have Web fees and the like to cover and every little bit helps.

We’ll start with the easiest way to get our complete work — Bandcamp.

All six released albums and the individual tracks are available through Bandcamp at low, low prices.

Don’t want to buy through Bandcamp? Try using any of the big streaming and download services; we’re everywhere.
Even Tidal. Even Napster. Even…oh, hell, any of them.

So…there you go. https://theduendeproject.bandcamp.com

And if you’re in the Worcester area? We’ll be at Nick’s, 124 Millbury St, 4-6 on Sunday afternoons, October 3 and 17. Stay tuned for more dates.

Thanks!

We are still out here, doing our every other week gigs at Nick’s, 4-6, 124 Millbury St in Worcester.

Have tried out some new work, some old tricks, and had some fun.

Come down and see what’s what on September 19th, our next gig.

In the meantime…go buy or stream our tracks on any of the digital services. We need the love….