The Last Free Weekend

It has been another busy month! This weekend though I am! I won't be having fun or playing golf or anything. I will be cleaning the office and garage, mowing the lawn, and if I'm lucky taking my kids to the fair. They supposedly have a ferris wheel and everything. Could make for some nice pictures. Next week begins the summertime craziness! I will be working at Wednesday Night Wags at the factory in franklin this Wed, Doing a remote at the Peanut Shop at the arcade next Friday, DJing the Catfish Rodeo at Centennial Park Saturday, Heading to Bonnaroo Wed-Mon, Working at Wednesday Night Wags, Flying to Illinois Thur-Mon for a wedding, Working at Wednesday Night Wags, and doing all that I normally do on top of everything else. It will be a month before I get another free weekend. So there is lots to do!

My Grandma had surgery yesterday. She is 82 and went to the hospital with a stomach ache. They found cancer and hoped to be able to remove it. They did a gastric bypass and left the cancer inside her because it was in her liver. They could tell it was in her gallbladder and pancreas, but hoped it was not in her liver. He said he could tell it had been there for two years and gave her at least 6 more months. I want to get out to see her in California as soon as possible and July seems like the most likely month to try and do it. As you may have just noticed June is going to be quite the busy month for me. It would be nice to bring my wife and kids but it will cost us at least $2,000 if we all go. Might be able to reduce that cost by shopping around, but it is still a lot of money. We have another kid coming in September and have been trying to save as much as possible. Not sure even if the doctor will want her to travel when she is that far along.

Anyhow, just glad that this weekend I don't have to DJ a wedding, Party, or event! I'm sure there will be plenty of that to come though. We are running an ad in the Wedding Issue of Nashville Lifestyles Magazine and on Lightning 100. Got to pay for all these kids we are having!

May 2008 Update: Augustana in the studio

May has been another busy month for your good friend Lt. Dan! I've been busy at work, home, and with my DJ business Buckley Productions. Today at the radio station the band Augustana stopped by. They we're really great and very gracious. It's fun when a band sincerely appreciates getting to come by for an interview. I think they all shook my hand three times. We chatted about their new record, how one of the members in the band (Chris) is from Nashville, and the show at City Hall. They performed three acoustic songs in the studio including their hit song Boston. I really enjoyed their harmonies and might actually prefer that version of the new single, "Sweet and Low". It wasn't quite as polished and certainly wasn't overproduced. I would have liked to go to the show tonight but just got home from work and need the rest. We had a three day weekend because of memorial day and I had a lot of catching up to do.

I started my day off checking email and trying not to worry about the five-hundred unread messages I have. I left the important one's flagged as unread and went to check the production room email account. That was when Jayne Rogovin showed up to tape an episode of Tuned In. It's our new public service show named after our parent company Tuned In Broadcasting. She was early and I had forgotten she was coming. We cranked out the promo for the week while we waited for her guest Tammy, who is the CEO of the CMA. Tammy was running late, so we finally made the John Guider episode public. I put it on archive.org which is a really cool public ftp server. They have a lot of great content there. One of the cool things they do is called the wayback machine. Where you can look at historical pages of a website.

The show was great and I need to get it edited and posted online. Tammy is awesome and has been in the business a long time. We definitely need to get her on an episode of Music Business Radio soon. I think we will send the show out the Music Business Radio podcast shoot. Tuned In with Jayne Rogovin airs Sunday morning at 6am central on 100.1 fm and Lightning100.com Since the show is so early on Sunday morning making it available online is really important. It also makes it easier to book guests. Not only can we build an online audience, we can provide guests with a copy of their interviews easier. I still have to find the time to convert and upload the files though!

After we finished with taping Tuned In I started thinking about my interview with Augustana. I needed to come up with some good questions to ask the band. I had met them before and new one of them had attended Belmont. So that seemed like an easy subject. I also knew the lineup between the first and last record was different. That question turned out to be tricky though and I probably should have avoided it. I really didn't have as much time to prep as I normally would like to and hadn't even listened to the whole cd yet. I did enjoy finding Dan from Augustana's blog and got a question or two from that. He mentioned liking record stores and how his mom took away one of his Nirvana records once.

After the band left I jumped into the production room to help record an episode of Music Business Radio. My assistant Justin Hammel had been covering for me and he needed some help setting up for our guests to perform. I ended up giving him some relief and engineered the rest of the show.

I'll have to continue again later because I am running out of steam. Please leave a comment if you are enjoying my blog.

Thanks!

Dan Buckley
Tuned In Broadcasting Inc.
Production Director
On Air Weekdays at 12pm-3pm
100.1 fm WRLT Lightning100.com

My new Lightning 100 blog!

Looks like I will be blogging here and it will be linked to Lightning100.com which is pretty exciting to tell you the truth. I have been blogging (when I get a chance) for quite sometime on my myspace page and enjoy the personal connection it creates between me and my listeners. I have a pretty busy life, so I won't blog daily, but I will do my best to keep up with it. Let me tell you a little about myself and why my life is so busy.

I am the Production Director for Tuned In Broadcasting. I make the commercials that run on Lightning 100. I've held this position for about 7 years now. Which actually seems like a really long time as I think about it. Everything I record into the computer has start dates and end dates and I was just looking at something today that was recorded in 06 that seemed like forever ago. 2006 Doesn't really seem like forever ago but I guess it is all about perspective.

I am one of the DJ's at Lightning 100 and am on air weekdays at noon on 100.1 fm and Lightning100.com I am on until 3pm when our Program Director David Hall takes over. He has been at the station much longer than I have and has been on the air in Nashville even longer. He use to be on WKDF back when they played Rock in the 80's. He was at Lightning 100 when I started as an intern back in 1997. I was actually interning for our Alternative rock station Thunder 94. The station that preceded 93.7 The Phoenix. When I was originally hired it was as an Audio Engineering Assistant for Lightning 100. I was setting up for their live broadcast from the Hard Rock friday mornings. They started training me to be the audio engineer for Nashville Sunday Night, when my on air desire started becoming a conflict. I had to pick being on air or being an engineer. At the time it was a no brainer decision to be on air. Something I actually regretted for many years afterward when I was still part time. I really just wanted to work full time in the industry and finally had that opportunity in the spring of 2001 when our Production Director Wes Shainline left for a job with XM and recommended me. I had been helping him with Dubbing commercials while I worked Sunday nights at the station on air and as a board op. When I asked for the job I was actually turned down. They said I could do it temporarily until they found someone. I kind of knew right away though that the job was really mine. Still it was an awkward position to be in. Wes sat with me for one day of training and told me he had to leave to get a haircut before catching a plane the next day. I worked 7 days a week for 6 months straight, commuting from Murfreesboro to Nashville, all the while feeling like I was in over my head. It was an important opportunity for me though and one I could not let pass me by. I will say that I know I would have given up and quite if it was for my then future wife Corinne. She really gave me the support I needed to get through it. My story is somewhat common for people who decide to get into the Music Business. You have to have a passion for it and be willing to work your way up. The best entrance in is doing the jobs no one else wants to do. I hear about it all the time when I am engineering Music Business Radio.

One of my duties as Production Director for Tuned In Broadcasting is producing a show called Music Business Radio. It's an hour long talk show with people in the Music Business. We talk to someone in the biz, find out how they got started, what they did along the way, listen to stories they have to tell, find out what they are currently involved in, and then let them listen to and critique CD's sent in from around the world from our listeners on a segment of the show we call Dave's Demo Derby. It's a cool show and has a ton of podcast listeners. You can catch it Sunday Night at 7pm on 100.1 fm or Lightning100.com with a reply Monday night at 11pm. It is definitely something I am proud of and look forward to seeing it's success in the future. We just got a commitment from our first affiliate and I hope it is the first of many!

I'm sure I will talk more about Music Business Radio in the future. It is getting late and I am glad I finally got my first real blog entry done. Our newest employee and former intern Brian Waters is setting everything up and helping us improve the website. He is fresh out of college and in touch with all this cool technology. It's amazing how quickly things seem to be happening these days. Just when I think I am caught up, there seems to be exponential growth and progress occurring. I am on facebook, myspace, and Linkedin. So look me up and lets connect. I'm also always interested in hearing from you. Let me know what you are into. It's always nice to hear about new music or sites, especially when the people telling you about them are fans and don't have an agenda. That is another topic for a future blog though....

I will also be sure to have lots to say about Bonnaroo 08

Here is a photo of me and Ben Harper last year