Have I mentioned that sometimes I write music to pitch to film, TV, and video games? So far I have mostly pitched through Taxi, which is an independent A&R company that is kind of a go-between for songwriters and the production libraries that supply music to media production companies. 

After writing a lot of tracks that didn't get picked up (including “Lucky Breaks” which I decided to repurpose as a single), I finally did get one past the gate! My first “forward” as they say.

They were looking for an instrumental 8-bit/Chiptune track in the style of 90's video game music. The references they gave were all from Super Mario games. Mine was called “Golden Goofs” and was based on a kind of swingy jazz melody that I always used to get stuck in my head.

The library that picked it up is called Reel Note Music. They have the track hosted on a site called Bulletproof Bear, along with an album's worth of Chiptunes by other artists. 

It was really fun to write a chiptune, the first time I'd done it. Basically you have to imitate the limitations of a 90s video game console. You only get four channels of sound: two “squares” (which are the main melody) one “triangle” (which is the bass) and one noise channel (which is the drums). So at any given moment you can't have more than four sounds happening. Oh, I guess there is also a low-quality “sample” channel, so you can technically have five. Pretty different from my other stuff. 

Hm, I was trying to embed a player here but it doesn't seem to work in this blog format for some reason. So here's a link instead. 

Let me know what you think!

Lucky Breaks has been chosen by the “Unrecorded” music blog to feature on their Best New Tracks list. They share the song on their website, and for a while, on their spotify playlist as well. Check it out!

What is Unrecorded? In their own words:

“A new music blog dedicated to showcasing the best undiscovered talent around. With a healthy focus on independent artists, our writers are committed to shining a light on great music that you may not have heard yet. We’re a team of real human hands, averse to click-bait and posts that serve only to increase ad-revenue. We want Unrecorded to become your daily stop for great articles on emerging music. Whether that be in the form of reviews, interviews, or Spotify playlists.”

Golden Indie Waves is a curator playlist on Spotify, part of the “Golden Hour” collection. Lucky Breaks is now featured there, at least for the next few weeks! 

This is a playlist that includes tracks from new and up-and-coming indie rock artists alongside really huge indie names like Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead, Tame Impala, and the like; I guess the logic is that people will search up the big names and end up streaming the little names as well. 

Seems to be working so far - I am on a few curator playlists and this is the one getting played the most, at least according to my Spotify stats. 

Eba! I just learned that Lucky Breaks will be featured on the late-night "Sound Wave Therapy" show on Brazil's Radio Armazem. 

The show airs at midnight (Sao Paolo time zone) on Sunday morning, so personally I will be getting my beauty rest and will probably miss it. But if you are up, give it a listen!

They have also shared the song on their Spotify and YouTube playlists, where it should stay up for the next four weeks.

What is Radio Armazem? Here’s what they say:

“Four times finalist as the best Web Radio in Brazil by PPM (Professional Music Award), Rádio Armazém is a radio station that acts as an online broadcaster of collaborative content, sound art and cyberculture. It was created in May 2015 with the aim of amplifying, disseminating, disseminating and supporting local cultural and artistic activities (Santa Maria-RS / Brazil) and to connect regional cultural scenes from all over Brazil to the world via the web.”

Big thanks to them for sharing my song!

I just released a lyric video for “Lucky Breaks” on YouTube! The background image is the same one from the cover art for the release. It's a photo of the heat-resistant tiles on the bottom of the space shuttle Discovery (with a filter to make it look more washed out). 

Here are the full lyrics:

Some days I just want to punch the clock
Tell me when its over
Tell me how make it stop

I don’t remember
Where we thought we’d be by now
I wonder if we made it

We got everything we want
So why aren’t we having more fun?
We run from the past like shooting stars
But what we were is still what we are

We’re looking at nothing
Nothing at all
Saying here we are
All of this is ours

I hope you get some lucky breaks
Nobody notices your mistakes
Or they do and they love you anyway

We got everything we want
So why aren’t we having more fun?
We run from the past like shooting stars
But what we were is still what we are

All this is ours
All this is ours
All this is ours, Is this all?

I wonder if we made it
I wonder if we made it
Nobody knows, nobody knows

I wonder if we made it
I wonder if we made it

This is ours, is this all?
This is ours, is this all?

I used to be in an alt-folk band called Dog Legs & Feet - I've written extensively here about my 2023 project to refurbish and release our first album. 

So far, DLF hasn't had its own website, I've just had a page about them on this site. But since launching as Tallfellow, I've decided I want to move them off of this page into their own space - don't be cluttering my brand, bruh! 

So I've created a Bandcamp site for Dog Legs & Feet. It hosts the two albums we currently have out on the wires, where you can stream or download them: 

We also have an unreleased 3rd Album called “Last Night” which I haven't ever put out because it needs some post-production work. I'm thinking I'll eventually put it up on Bandcamp as well. 

If you're a DLF fan, give us a follow over there and tell your friends!

OK people! I'm releasing my first single on Dec. 6. It's called “Lucky Breaks.” Actually, a nuance: it's releasing on all the big streaming services that day, but actually, I've already made it available on my website and you can stream or download it from the main page. You came to the right place!

This song grew out of my work on writing music to pitch for TV and film. I wrote it to submit to a brief asking for songs that would fit on a playlist with artists like Wilco and Slow Pulp and Dope Lemon; all of the songs given as references had this sort of semi-charming, self-deprecating bleakness about them. I wanted to try to capture my own version of that emotion.

So I wrote “Lucky Breaks” about the feeling of impostor syndrome that comes with being an adult. How did I get here, and how it it possible that I'm the person in charge of my own life? I was asking myself, "what would my teenage self think of my life today"? 

There are a lot of things about my life so far that would have really impressed teenage me. I've traveled all over the world, eaten ramen on the top of mount fuji, gotten my picture taken at the south pole, etc etc. 

There are some other things that teenage me assumed I would have done - skydive, write a novel, get a Ph.D. - that I never have gotten around to. 

So have I exceeded my own expectations? Have I let my younger self down? And how much do I care what a long-ago teenager thinks of my life right now? So this song lives in that place of self-reflection.

Oh: This song didn't get chosen for the TV/film brief. But I was still proud of it and I thought I should share it with the world. In particular I felt like this was the first song I've made that really sounded polished enough to be considered “radio ready.” When I decided on Tallfellow as my artist name, I needed to release a song to claim my profile on Spotify and Apple Music, etc, and this one was naturally on top of the pile. 

A note about the cover art. This is a photo of the heat-resistant tiles on the underside of the space shuttle Discovery. I took this on a visit to the Udvar-Hazy air and space museum outside Washington, DC. There was something about these tiles that I felt really connected with the voice in the song. They are scarred by their incredible circumstance of having survived re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere from space, but also they were still intact, just hanging out and doing their kinda boring job of absorbing heat, and now not even doing that really.  

Okay, it's official! I'm now creating music under the artist name Tallfellow. Nice to meet you!

I renamed my website to www.tallfellowmusic.com and updated my YouTube channel, SoundCloud, Disco, and social media to the name Tallfellow. 

I'm also claiming this name on the big music streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc. And that means I'll be releasing a single under that name in the coming weeks - more to come on that!

So, why Tallfellow? 

I could probably nerd out about this for way longer than anyone wants. Ok, sure. I will!

So, thinking of band/artist names is kind of like a hobby-within-a-hobby for me. Like a lot of singer-songwriters, over the years I have built up a long list of things that might be good band/artist names (or album names, or song names, or maybe just lyrics). 

But choosing an artist name has turned out to be super hard. How the heck do you pick one and marry yourself to it? 

How the heck, indeed

One of the main things an artist name needs is to be as unique as possible (and specifically, google-able) while also being easy to remember. This is why I never wanted to just use “Jeremy Edwards” as an artist name. There are lots of people out there with the same name, including many who have already used it to release music. 

I've always felt a little envious when I look around at artists who made it big with names that have that magical mix of seeming almost chosen at random, yet resonant with imagery, meaning, coolness, etc. Artists I would love just for the name, even if I didn't know their music: Tame Impala, beabadoobee, Big Thief, Clairo, LCD Soundsystem, MF Doom, The Strokes, Sylvan Esso, Arcade Fire, The 1975.  (This is just pulled from one playlist… the list goes on forever.)

So in coming up with my own artist name, I wanted one that was unique enough that nobody else had already used to it release music (at least on the big platforms) and that would probably show up on the first page if you googled it (possibly adding “music” if needed).  

Lots of my cleverest ideas died on that particular hill.  Unironic Unicorn? Taken. Champions of Breakfast? Taken. Turns out I am not the only clever one!

Apart from that, I wanted something that had some kind of personal connection to me, and ideally something with more than one meaning. If it was funny or clever, all the better, but not essential. 

And it should fit in with the universe of artists in my genre - really the most important thing if I were using my marketing brain first. Part of my struggle in previous years, I think, was that I didn't feel confident about what my genre was. I'm now reasonably sure that I belong in the indie rock singer-songwriter world, so I needed a name that would fit that vibe. Which is to say, something quirky and middle class and possibly self-deprecating, not sounding like someone who thinks they're a superstar. 

And one other criterion: easy to spell! I want to be able to say it, including over the phone, and not have to subsequently spell it every time. Which ruled out a lot of ideas that were very clever indeed, but so be it. 

Where I truly nerded out

So I had this long list. I put it into a spreadsheet, with different columns where I rated each idea on uh, hold on let me count… twelve different dimensions.  

Which were: My gut feeling, uniqueness on spotify, googleability, meaning, modern-ness, personal connection to me, cleverness, fun, brand appropriateness, genre appropriateness, ease of spelling, and freedom from unwanted connotations. 

I gave each one a +1 for yes, -1 for no, and 0 for meh/not sure. Then I averaged them all into a score and sorted highest to least.

This wasn't a perfect system. Some of the ones that bubbled to the top I didn't actually like that much. What it did do, though, was filter out some ideas that I kinda liked but that would never make it in the real world.

How did Tallfellow rank? 

• I had a good gut feeling. 
• Surprisingly (to me at least), nobody else has released music under that name.
• It's googleable. There is a publishing house called Tallfellow, and also a D&D wiki that describes Tallfellows as a type of halfling, but not much else. And importantly, no musicians!
• The meaning is twofold. First of all, yes I'm literally tall. Secondly, “tall fellow” is a phrase used in Shakespeare to mean someone who is handsome, brave, etc. And I guess it's threefold if you count the D&D connotation!
• Modern? Sure I guess. It doesn't necessarily sound like it's from the 60s or 80s, which some of my other ideas did. 
• Personal connection, yes. In addition to my own tallness, I also have a background in community-theatre Shakespeare. I had a friend who used to always quote The Winter's Tale at me: “Thou'rt a tall fellow.” And hey, I love D&D too. 
• Clever? Not that clever but I do give it a zero for having multiple meanings.
• Fun? It sounds likeable but doesn't necessarily make me break out in a smile, so zero.
• On-brand? Check.
• Genre-appropriate? I think so!
• Easy to spell? Check, although I guess making it one word might trip some people up. We'll see!
• Connotations… I couldn't think of any that bothered me. 

The final test

But science could only take me so far. At the end of the day, artist names live and die based on the wisdom of the crowd. 

So I asked my kid (the one who is into indie rock). They immediately struck down most of the things on the list, but they liked Tallfellow a lot. They also liked Merryweather, which, however, has been used a couple times already by other bands.

Then, the true boss battle: I asked my wife what she thought. She said Tallfellow was not bad! 

That was all I needed. It's honestly kind of a relief to have made a decision. Now comes the hard work of actually making it mean something. 

Hi there! My name is Jeremy Edwards. For the past three years or so, I have been making music under the name Jerome Freely (or Jerome Freely Band), but I think I'm going to shift away from that. At least for the moment, I am just going to be Jeremy Edwards, and I am rebranding this site to be called “Jeremy Edwards Music.”

Why? Since I'm mostly focusing on music for TV and film right now, it's just easier to use my own name than a stage name.  And I have never quite felt like “Jerome Freely” does a good job of capturing what I want my artistic identity to be.

BuI do think, eventually, I will probably land on a different artist name.  Jeremy Edwards is a fine name for a person, but it's not a great name for a musical artist. It's just not very unique. If you google “Jeremy Edwards” you will see a lot of other Jeremy Edwardses before you get to me - and there are also several other Jeremy Edwardses who have released music under that name. 

It's the same reason why, a lot of years ago, I tried using the artist name “Jeremy Goodking.”  I didn't really like that name either.  When I joined up with a bassist and a drummer we ended up being “The Goodkings,” and I liked that way better. 

I think, on reflection, I prefer a name that's more like a producer tag than a stage name. Something where I can say “Hi I'm Jeremy Edwards and I make music under the name v-jer” as opposed to “Hi I'm Jerome Freely.”

So I have some branding to figure out. I don't know where I'm going to end up - who knows, maybe I'll go back to Jerome Freely one day! But now's a moment of recalibration. 

I wrote "Gritty City Strut" in March 2024. I was going for a pitch opportunity that was looking for funky vintage 70s Afrobeat-style instrumental jazz like Fela Kuti and Hugh Masekela. I used to listen to a lot of that kind of music so I thought, why not give it a shot?  The piece didn't ultimately get used for the pitch, but I still like it so I'm sharing it here.

I usually try to teach myself something new when I'm producing a piece like this, and in this case the main thing I was working on was the horns. I really like music with big horn sections, but I'm not a horn player and I am not in the position to hire a half-dozen horn players every time I want horns on a song.

So I wanted to try to create a virtual horn section using sampled instruments. This is not an uncommon thing to do, but it's a lot harder than you might suppose. Even really good horn samples can sound fake and funny if you don't apply a lot of processing to them.

I had to watch a lot of youtube videos to figure out how to steer myself toward a realistic / vintage live horn sound, and then I spent a long time messing with it to get it passable.

I also asked one of my kids, who plays trombone, for a critique. They said I had made some of the staccato hits *too* staccato,  and it didn't sound realistic. So I adjusted until they were satisfied. I think it sounds pretty good now.

I created the cover art using an AI tool.