http://www.livestream.com/markscudder
About
Mark Scudder is a powerful, emotional musician who is equally comfortable on stage performing for fans or behind a computer screen creating breathtaking sounds. As a child, Mark took piano lessons but angered his teacher when he told her the music for Wagner's Wedding March was wrong because he'd heard it played differently on his mother's soap operas. At age 10, after seeing a video for Rush's "The Big Money" on MTV, he decided he wanted to play drums.
As a socially-awkward teenager, he found it difficult in his artistically-depressed hometown of Binghamton, New York to find other musicians to play with. He began teaching himself guitar and bass so he was not dependent on the dedication of others to make music. Since then he has been writing and recording music that runs the gamut from simple pop to expansive, album-length soundscapes that sound like film scores in search of their visual counterparts.
After some involvement with bands that did not succeed, Mark struck out on his own in 2008 and began performing as a solo artist. In between opportunities to perform for audiences, he continued to create fully-orchestrated versions of his music using little more than a few microphones and a laptop computer. With more than a dozen releases under his belt, Mark's production is on par with professional studios, but from the comfort of his home.
In 2010 and 2011, Mark experimented with releasing individual songs in digital-only format on the Internet. This proved not to be as effective as the tried-and-true method of selling CDs at live performances. He admits he was intoxicated by the notion that this is how music works in the age of the Internet and "Music 2.0." "I think we're approaching the end of the fantasy that the Internet is a magical utopia where the cream always rises to the top, in fact the last few years have really proved the opposite," Mark says. "The mainstream music industry is very much alive and well, and is keeping its anti-capitalist fans by selling them an anti-capitalist message. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad."
In late 2011, he switched gears back to album production, keeping fans engaged with live streams of the recording process. In October and November he recorded acoustic guitar parts for more than twenty songs, beginning to stream the recording sessions live on the Internet from his home studio in Owego, New York. By June 2012 he was recording vocals over fully produced and orchestrated tracks, to a small but loyal audience. Eleven of those original songs became the album
The Solution is the Problem, which was released to critical acclaim on September 18, 2012.
The album contains the staples of Mark's live performances, some of which have been released previously, but are now, according to Mark, "definitive" versions of the work. The music and lyrics demonstrate an understanding of the world deeper than the surface-exploration of his contemporaries. "Her God" is a song about struggling with faith and being raised by a generation who was promised eternal damnation if they didn't force their kids into the religion - a yearning desire to know and love God, while not fitting into the tired stereotypes of blind devotee or trendy atheist. "Free," originally released before the history 2010 midterm elections, was a "protest song" about the overreaching iron fist of government that most musicians spend their careers trying to keep in office.
The album's first single, "I Will Love You If You Let Me," has resonated with more than one generation. Its message: people don't always do what's in their best interest, romantically, and otherwise. "Being single in my mid-30s was really tough," says Mark, who was married in 2011. "I felt like everybody, including me, was compromising their principles in a desperate attempt to get what they felt everybody else had. When I was getting my dating legs about me in the late 90s, you had this feminist revival that was teaching all the women around me that I was a predator and an abuser because I was born male. All of a sudden it's 2010 or 2011 and most of those people are divorced or in loveless, controlling marriages. I felt I needed to draw a line in the sand to keep my sanity. Like, 'these are my boundaries, and I've been alone long enough that I'll be okay if I have to walk away from you if you don't respect them.'" Not surprisingly, the anthem can be applied to a wide range of situations, since everything is "social" now. "I feel like it's the opposite of Revenge of the Nerds," Mark says of social media. "We built the infrastructure and let the old jocks and preps from our high school days move in and take over. Now, if you can't be 'snarky,' whatever that really means, in 140 characters or less, you're worthless. Even though I'm not pursuing romance with these people, in a sense I need their 'love,' because worth is measured now by 'Likes' and retweets. I've always written about relationships, which has seemed at times like a lowest-common-denomonator thing, but it seems that the world has finally stooped down to meet me."
The notion of "The Solution is the Problem" is a recurring theme in Mark's work. "I feel so much of the time that the only way to get ahead, in life and especially in music, is to be something you're not. This particular notion takes countless forms, if you get into specifics, but it all comes back to that - the problem is that everything is fake, and the solution, for so many people, is like the old saying, 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.' And the cycle repeats for another generation." While the subject seems unavoidably negative, Mark's work ranges from the dead serious to the tongue-in-cheek and funny - including comically cynical songs like "Moving to Silence," about an old girlfriend who was proud of her head-in-the-sand approach to relationship problems, and "Follow Me (The Hypocrite Song)," a politically-charged song whose chorus ends with an all-too-familiar refrain: "Don't you know the only way you'll be free is if you follow me?"
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