Jody Whitesides

Category: Fit To Print

  • Fresh Animated Cover Art Drop! ‘Do You Want to Play Dallas Wings’ is Here!

    Fresh Animated Cover Art Drop! ‘Do You Want to Play Dallas Wings’ is Here!

    The updates are still continuing. Another song released: Do You Want to Play Dallas Wings. The WNBA is taking flight with yet another team.

    If you’re coming to my site for the first time, at the point of this post – then you wouldn’t know that my site was getting stale. And that even though last week I had mentioned that my site was essentially 99% done with the update I launched a few weeks back.

    This one is fun. I have been doing animated covers for Apple Music. As more and more of the releases come out, there will be more of them coming. As you may have noticed on the front page, the cover is animated. Several others of recent release that have the animated covers have now been updated as well.

    Doing the animated covers is a nice subtle way to make something interesting. Having started it, my determination is that my background video for music pages is horrendously way too busy looking. Which means, by the next posted update (in a week) there will be yet another change. This one will be getting planned out and executed this weekend. It will be less busy, but interesting to watch.

    I’m doing the animated covers because it’s fun to make little tweaks that keep me thinking – what is coming next?

    Sadly, I’ve been learning that some android phones can’t see the animated covers. Then if I put the type of video that google is pushing, it causes Safari for iOS to crash. We’re in 2025 and these stupid device platforms still can’t come together for a 20 second video?!? Enough to make one scream. I have heard that some androids can see it, so all is not lost.

    Here’s the thing: I like tweaking things. Woodshedding them. Getting bit refined. Working better and looking better. As a creatively driven human – that is my jam.

    Stay tuned for more refinements, most of which you may never notice.

  • Next Steps

    Next Steps

    What a wild rush. I’ve been working on so many things in the past month that it’s a literal whirlwind of musical mess.

    My weekly releases are well underway. So far they’re scheduled all the way out into June at this point. Hard to imagine based on the number of years I’ve been in this journey. Once upon a time you spent time creating a full album. Spent even more time working on the marketing, the release, a tour, etc. Now it’s more like constant creation. Which is fuckin hard.

    The largest recent change has been the website. I had roughly 95% of it done when I wrote the last update. As of Monday night 2025/03/10, I got another major bit solved. That bit… being able to load lyrics and song information with a click on the title on any music page.

    Places like Genius, MusixMatch or Lyricfind are awesome resources and I do attempt to keep my lyrics passed along to them. However, what better place to get the actual words I sang on something than right here on my website.

    Beyond the lyrics, for those nerds like myself, there is a plethora of additional information for my songs (not necessarily for any covers I may have released). You can find running time, copyright information, ISRCs, ISWCs, registration codes, etc. It’s the super geeky shit.

    On the underside of the music pages there’s going to be a rotating video background. It’s harder to see on a phone which is fine because it’s probably a bit more distracting than it should be. However, on a desktop or possibly an iPad you get the fuller experience. I will be changing them fairly regularly going forward.

    Still working on the storefront / shop area, but it is in working order.

    Musically speaking, I’m about to be getting full on into 360RA mixes. Those along with all the Dolby mixes I’ve finished will be releasing in the future. Likely towards the end of the year. Immersive music is really damn cool and starting to get really good even for headphones.

    More good things coming…

  • Gaining peer acceptance is intoxicating

    When your peers start to recognize you, it’s an intoxicating experience. Especially when those peers are much further up the ladder of success than you are.

    When I started getting better performance slots it was a kick in the pants. I did some shows at a place called Martini Blues. Several were styled after songwriter in the round style setups. Where they put 3 to 4 songwriters in a row on a stage and they take turns playing songs they’ve written and talking a little bit about the stories behind the song and it’s creation.

    Particularly this is about the 2nd time I got invited to do this. I was on stage center left, to my left was Dee Biggs, to my right was Warren Sellars, to his right was James Grey. All these guys had been working with bigger artists as songwriters – I was the “odd” man out.

    It started with James, then went to Warren and then to me. Because of the songs James & Warren had chosen, I opted to kick off with a song called Falling In. [if you’re paying attention to my emails, you know some history about that one].

    I proceed to play the song and as the last note is ringing out Warren immediately said (I’m paraphrasing a bit because it was a bit more swearing than this) “Holy shit, did you see the way he was playing that?!? Not only is that an amazing song, but damn his fingers!”

    Mind you, he blurted this out in front of an audience.

    I may have blushed a bit at that statement. Because now the spotlight is on me and someone the audience is familiar with has exclaimed something to another of the more famous songwriters on stage in front of them.

    Of course it made me feel amazing inside. Aside from the blushing I was feeling really energized as well. These are the kinds of things that give me a huge boost to perform even better.

    For the 3rd time I was invited back, it was a similar situation but it was Warren, James, and instead of Dee it was another writer by the name of Kevin Fisher. You’ve likely heard music that Kevin has written – he’s had cuts by some very popular artists.

    This time around, no one made massive exclamations from the stage, but then Kevin was on the opposite of the stage from me. What did happen is that when we finished the set, Kevin came over to me and asked for my phone number so that he and I could get together and do some writing.

    That right there was a really amazing shot in the arm to me.

    Yes, we did get to write together. I look forward to writing with any one of them again in the future.

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