On My Own Dime

Welcome to On My Own Dime with Jason McCormack! I’ll be talking with independent creators from various disciplines about balancing life, best practices, and personal philosophies. We’ll hear stories about what it takes to keep going when the demands are high and highlight the challenges that come with funding a creative discipline independently. Join me in celebrating my guests who fund their creative discipline on their own dime!

We’re back for part 3 with audio engineer John Michael Caldwell. In this episode we are talking about The pitfalls of social media and John shares a little about the projects he is working on right now. And we just can’t help it, there is some more tech talk about the massive scale of these film score mixing sessions that John prepares. There is so much audio data to manage they are networking multiple Mac Pros with maxed out specs just handle the playback and processing. And John leaves us with some advice.

The music video John mentions was actually an essay titled “Wear Sunscreen” published in the Chicago Tribune by Mary Schmich in 1997. It contains some of the most widely quoted lines in modern culture. It was later published as book which is still available:

https://www.amazon.com/Wear-Sunscreen-Primer-Real-Life/dp/0740777173

As a music producer, Baz Luhrmann is credited with “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, a successful spoken word song in which he reads aloud Mary Schmich’s essay with her permission. The two split the royalties according to wikipedia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI