Maybe The Songs Just Stay Hidden
So way back, in 2018, the food prices that are crushing us now and the fuel issues were all there. They just weren’t peaking yet.
Combine that with the apps coming in and trying to take 20% of every food order. Pretty crazy.
Then COVID normalized delivery of every kind of food, and everything being expensive. And to this day, no one has given back all those COVID prices.
So whether it’s restaurants or guitars, anything new—which I hope the food you’re buying is new—is a serious price increase.
And I think we’re now at the point where people are not willing to pay for it.
In dining, this means not going out, and in guitars, this means buying your shit off Marketplace.
I bought a $350 Squier Bullet from the early ’80s—a bass—and it is now easily my favorite. I put new strings on it and a few other parts. Really nice strings.
My theory is putting expensive strings on cheap instruments works, and it does. Way better than the inverse, anyway.
And I just love this bass.
If I went and bought a new Squier, it’d be more expensive, and it would have been made in Indonesia. Mine was made in Japan when Fender first started having instruments made over there. The quality is crazy high, and it feels great. 40-some-odd years old.
Also sounds wonderful. Very pokey through a mix, which is exactly what I was looking for.
One thing I hope happens is people won’t have rooms full of guitars anymore. Although prices haven’t completely crashed, it is taking much longer to sell anything. So you can’t just go buy it then sell it.
I’ve kind of sold a bunch of stuff and have tested this store-it-on-Marketplace theory of: if you’re not using it, sell it. If you need it, go buy it back. Off Marketplace.
Works beautifully.
You just can’t unload stuff quickly.
My whole point is this. When you’ve got huge companies like Fender suing everybody, not only are people not going to buy Fender guitars anymore, they’re just not going to buy a guitar right now. Because it’s an extra expense.
Back when things were cheaper, you could have a few.
And I think we all really, ideally, wish we just had one guitar, even though we’ve got too many laying around.
It will be really interesting to see what happens over the next few years with the war economy only sending all riches upward. Even if you could be considered pretty well off before, you’re a bit squeezed now.
I’ve never heard it talked about so much.
There’s not really cheap places to live, and if there are, food’s still expensive. You still can’t fill your car up with gas without breaking the bank. And everybody’s making the same money they were five years ago. Although prices have, in a lot of cases, doubled.
It’s a really weird world we’re living in.
Doesn’t keep you from making music, though.
But if there are truly songs locked in guitars and stuff like that, which I believe there are, maybe there’re less songs?
Or maybe they’re not less songs.
They’re just staying hidden for a little longer.