Intro To Unsigned Bands: Chris Hanson cool

Who do I think I am?

Every band I've ever been in could be described as: At best, offensively bad; At worst, potentially harmful to one's external auditory canal. (We were acquitted of four out of five charges. Two lawsuits are still pending.)

I can play about seven and a half songs on guitar (not including the four songs I know by Everclear, which pretty much just count as one song).

And I can't seem to write a song that doesn't feature the word "Larceny" in the title (not including "P.I.M.P.," which in retrospect, turned out to be a 50 Cent song.)

However, if you're in an unsigned band, and you send your CD to AP for coverage, I'm the guy who's gonna listen to it.

It's true.

In some circles, that makes me more powerful than several members of Congress.

Unfortunately, none of my circles intersect with those circles.

Still, while spending part of yet another holiday weekend at the office, I began sifting through some of the 76-story-high stack of demos I have, and I opened a submission with the following letter:

To the Alternative Presses,

We started a band a few weeks ago and we started building a lot of buzz in my home town and we already have 432 MySpace friends and my friend Steve says we sound a lot like Alltimelow. We think we deserve an interview and a maybe a cover! Here are some songs.

So, as I sit here before the pale blue glow of my computer, contemplating what I could possibly find to blog about that would be of any interest to anyone else, I decided to talk a little about submitting your unsigned band to AP. I could tell you about attempting to wash my cat yesterday and the unspeakable reign of fury she unleashed upon me, but I get the feeling you wouldn't really care (and, mostly, it's traumatic for me to even really start to think about.)

Forgive me if this is all horribly Pettigrewian. But I spent my Fourth Of July alone watching a To Catch A Predator marathon on MSNBC, so I'm feeling a little surly and a little like I should have a seat right over there.

• DO: Be in a band that has existed for longer than the latest season of Shear Genius on Bravo. I'm sure you guys are awesome. I'm sure your guitars are shined so immaculately that they reflect all of the mistakes of a flawed humanity. But unless you're name starts with "Bob" and ends with "Nanna," I think you could probably use a couple more months of practice. Besides, a year from now, you'll thank me when you look back on the first three-chord song you almost submitted to me called, "Why Don't You Text Me Back, Madison (I Know You Made Out With Tyler Parker At Brad's Graduation Party): Part I"

• DON'T: Be in a band that has existed for longer than Saturday Night Live. Hey, man. I love the ponytail. What? No, I'm serious. It works for you. I strive to have one myself one day. However, if you've got a weekly gig playing mostly Extreme (or even Candlebox) covers across the street from where my uncle got arrested for indecent exposure (to be fair, he can't help it his pants fell off. He was passed out.), you should probably just enjoy the sweet arrangement you've got going.

• DO: Send me your contact info, even if it's just your e-mail address scribbled on a napkin. Actually, the simpler the better. (See next bullet point.)

• DON'T: Send me 43 local press clippings and 17 pages of the inspiration and meaning behind each of your songs. True, if one day you end up being My Chemical Romance, I'll consider selling all this on eBay. But right now, I can't quite give your glowing write-up in the Decatur Register the time it deserves.

• DO: Send the best recording you've got. Look. You don't have to wait until you have a Matt Bayles produce your debut EP. But you should probably have more than two songs your friend Tyler recorded with his SideKick and then played it into a 1993 cassette boom box and then transferred to a CD-R. Unless that all sounds really sick. In which case, do it up, champ.

• DON'T: Brag to me about your MySpace friends. I went to high school with this kid named Stewart who once got kicked out of a bowling alley for rolling two balls in the opposite direction of his lane, then poured a pitcher of Labatt Blue all over the lady next to him before kicking a Yorkshire Terrier on the way out. My point? He's got 3,219 MySpace friends.

• DO: Try to have your own sound. This one's tricky. Basically, I have three piles for unsigned bands nowadays: Those who sound like New Found Glory, those who sound like Underoath and everybody else. Although occasionally good bands come from the first two piles, when I'm looking for bands, I tend to reach for that third pile. (And by the way, that first pile is about 73 times the size of the other two. Just sayin'.)

• DON'T: Send me a picture of you with We The Kings. Those guys were in 64 percent of all photographs taken in the continental United States last year.

• DO: Give it a shot. I don't know how other magazines do it. I'm sure they probably have about six layers of interns who weed through submissions before they make it to an editor's desk (if they even look at unsigned bands at all). But at AP, seriously, your CD or e-mail is gonna (eventually) make it to someone who'll give it a listen. And, for the foreseeable future, that person is gonna be me. It can take a while to hear back from us, though. Since we get dozens of submissions every day (and some days, I'm a little frustrated and kinda just wanna listen to Jawbox), it's not like we'll get back to you the next day. But, seriously, send us your stuff. The only way to retain any element of coolness in today's world is to get in on a band before they make it. Imagine how exponentially cool I'll be if I'm the guy who actually discovers that band. We're talking about Chris Hanson cool.