The Game Plan

I feel sheepish even talking about what I am planning to do, and the reason is simple. I have failed far more than I have succeeded in my life. To whatever extent people know me, most of the public sees an older gentleman dressed in a fedora who may be speaking poetry or playing his cello and sometimes he is riding his bike with his cello on it. That is a large part of the public image of Daniel Austin Sperry. How he makes all this magic, nobody knows. They just like it. And that is great.

I feel happy about that. 

It was partly this goodwill which had built up over the years that made the starting of a nonprofit in late 2022 such a winning proposition. Over two years, I carried the message about bringing more good musicians - I like to call them “extraordinary” musicians - into the park as a community project. And there truly was an outpouring of support for that proposition. Was it that it was a community project, a nonprofit, that I am well-liked, that people can see the beauty of the idea? I’m not sure. I am sure that it was incredible fun - I know that much! - to see other musicians I admire have the chance to create the same kind of experience I have created, to sit and listen to them as thousands of people have sat and listened to me. That was deeply satisfying.

As a business model, though, it was not a winning proposition for me personally, and if you have learned anything so far from reading about my life, you may have come to the conclusion that this man - eccentric, productive, strong-willed, free-minded, creatively aspirational as he is - needs a winning proposition. Because how many ways has he been able to feather his own nest? Not many. A few. I am long on deeply satisfying life experiences, a rich and focused daily routine and very short on consequential results of all my efforts. 

This all means that my nonprofit running days are over. Within a few weeks it will be legally dissolved, a matter of history. And now it is time to unveil the rambling totality of my plans for somehow creating a new and better life out of the various skills and resources I have been able to gather as I enter the year in which I will turn seventy. 

What we already know is that in this coming year of 2025, I will have some medical issues to take care of. I will have some transportation issues to take care of. I will be facing the same or similar financial issues that I do every year at this time and I will be stretching and breathing and meditating and moving weight and cold plunging right through it all. I’ll be composing because I already have that work in place. I have two commissioned pieces to finish right now.

What we don’t really know is how the whole thing is going to work, how the whole thing is going to grow into a powerful stream of interest and demand such that somehow maybe something like $2000 a month comes in on the regular and I don’t have to depend for my life’s sustenance on playing cello in the park five days a week in the warm season. Because although I expect to be back in March or April, I would really like to cut my time down to four days a week and even then I’m going to have to see how it goes. 

The real core of this question comes down for me to something I have been preparing for and desiring for almost the whole time I have been back in Ashland. It is to make some kind of content, some kind of story for the public, out of my life. I’m not sure why it is natural for me to think of doing this. Maybe it is because I am viewing content on the web all the time, cultural content, sometimes political content, often historical or philosophical content, often educational content related to music, composing, songwriting, creative writing, and so on. 

Maybe it is because I have set out now, time after time, on a quest to produce some movies. In maybe 2016, I had a site called “All Kinds of Beings - How Do We Bless”, where I wanted to share about people I knew who I consider to be a blessing to life, to our community and to the world as whole.

Later after that, I had a site called Making A Beautiful Now, where I made a different video every day and posted it. Later still I started another different nonprofit called Courageous Phenomena Music and Film where I wanted to document in film the stories of what I call “ordinary courage” in little biographical sketches.

In late 2023, I got a grant from the Haines Foundation to produce a documentary movie about music in the park. I worked with a director and a videographer for a good solid six months doing interviews, gathering footage, getting ready to turn that into a 20 minute documentary. The woman I hired to be the director was not able to come up with something that looked like I was hoping for and I took over the project. I have a hard drive full of footage and a great working relationship with the young videographer we used for most of the shooting, an SOU graduate named Marvin. Marvin has edited some really wonderful videos for me. He is fast and intuitive and gets what I am trying to do. I am very confident we can complete this documentary but I do have a need for a new, better, more powerful video-editing computer that will make it possible for us to pass the footage back and forth and get the job done. 

So what does this all mean? Am I going to be a filmmaker? Is that my big money-making proposition? 

Not exactly. I think I can best explain what I have in mind by writing out my story as I am doing just now. 

I am making videos, almost every day, that I post on YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook. On Facebook, I have almost 5000 friends. Even in a couple of weeks I have gained followers on Tik Tok. My followers on Instagram are going up. What I am doing is not super focused yet, but I am mostly trying to improve my ability to create content that I actually like. I came across a content creator whose name is Landon Parrot who has been making YouTube videos since he was in his early teens. His videos have gotten millions of views but he has learned a lot in that process, a lot about what he doesn’t want to do. He is convinced that the future for YouTube creators is to be what he calls a “mindful artist”, a creator who is basically telling the stories they want to tell, in the way they want to tell them. I have heard the things he has said before, said by other successful artists. For example, the one thing that creators tend to neglect to do is to simply hit “publish” every day. It is actually making content and seeing what works that helps you refine what you want to do and develop an audience for it. 

So here is how my plan looks on paper, right now, in late December of 2024. 

I will continue to publish posts on this site that narrate my continuing story. I likely won’t leave much of anything out, because there will be tremendous hurdles I will have to overcome, and that is a part of any good story. 

I will also continue to make content every day and post it on the platforms I have been using just to see what people are responding to, who is responding, what I might be able to do better to develop an audience for the kind of artistry I want to offer. 

I will begin to populate the membership area of my website with content that is exclusive for those folks who subscribe, who are my patrons. This will take time, but I have all kinds of ideas for how to do this.

I will promote to my list, folks who have been donors to the nonprofit, who are on my mailing list. I am making a special discount offering on my musical portraits which at this point is at $700 and that is an incredible price for something that can turn out to be a gift that will last forever. 

And, I will create a campaign on Donorbox that will allow people to make one time contributions in support of my work, the acquisition of a new computer, the acquisition of a new electric bike, whatever motivates them to make a contribution. 

This is a plan that depends on a lot of focus, trial and error, all the savvy I have with connecting to people who love what I do, and a certain turn of luck. I have no idea, truly, how it will turn out. But in the next post, I am going to take up the issue of patronage, because I believe strongly that it is a tradition that is worthy in general and worthy in my case and I want to explain why I feel that way.