New Verve Music Song: The Middle Class Is Dead

Inspired directly by Jay Leno's observation on the vanishing middle of the consumer market—noting that the center is dead as Porsche climbs upscale toward Ferrari territory, hotels split strictly between Motel 6 and the Four Seasons, and dining reduces to either fast food or high-end dining—this psytrance track translates that stark economic divide into relentless, driving rhythm. Built on an unyielding rolling bassline and sharp, escalating tension, the production mirrors a world where the gray has been entirely washed away, turning the widening chasm between starvation and luxury into a hypnotic, dancefloor-ready indictment of an all-or-nothing reality. 

Inspired by Jay Leno’s take on the vanishing middle—from cars to hotels—my new psytrance track “The Middle Class is Dead” turns extreme economic division into relentless, rolling basslines. No gray area left, just pure high-energy sound.

#Psytrance #EDM #TheMiddleClassIsDead #VerveMusic #OriginalMusic 

Buy and Download for only $1.50:
https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-middle-class-is-dead

Watch and Listen for FREE on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/B38p0KhEzNU

[Intro – filtered pads, rolling bass]

The middle is gone…

The middle is gone…

Nothing left between the poles…

[Verse 1]

Porsche climbed the mountain,

Now they want Ferrari blood.

No more mid-range dream machine,

Just the low and the extreme flood.

Motel 6 or Four Seasons light,

No room left for the quiet night.

Fast-food line or white-tablecloth,

Everything pushed left or right.

[Pre-drop – rising tension]

Squeeze the center till it cracks…

Watch the middle fade to black…

[Drop / Chorus]

Middle class is dead!

Middle class is dead!

Nothing in between the bread!

Nothing in between the bread!

Either starve or feast alone,

Either plastic or pure gold.

Middle class is dead!

Middle class is dead!

[Verse 2]

Cars, hotels, and dinner plates,

All the same binary fate.

No soft landing, no soft seat,

Just the top or the concrete street.

We used to live inside the gray,

Now the gray got washed away.

Everything is either or,

No more space for something more.

[Breakdown – half-time, whispered]

I see the middle disappearing…

From the showroom to the street…

From the lobby to the plate…

Nothing left to meet.

[Build / Second Drop]

Middle class is dead!

Middle class is dead!

The center couldn’t hold the weight!

The center couldn’t hold the weight!

Either Motel or the Suite,

Either drive-thru or the treat.

Middle class is dead!

Middle class is dead!

[Outro – fading echoes]

The middle is dead…

The middle is dead…

Everything is that way now…

Everything is that way now…

(Repeat “Middle class is dead” as the bass rolls out into the void)

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Watch & Listen to "Devil at the County Fair" here:
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New Folk Song: Peak Foliage

A traditional roots ballad capturing the frost-bitten fields, copper ridges, and river fog of autumn across Hampshire County and the Pioneer Valley.

#PioneerValley #FolkSong #WesternMass

Buy & Download for only $1.50:

https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/peak-foliage

Verse 1

The frost lies on the river bend,

The corn is cut and dry.

A red-tailed hawk is circling

Against the autumn sky.

Chorus

Oh, the valley turns to copper,

The ridge is burning red,

The river runs through Hampshire soil

Before the cold has spread.

Verse 2

Up high on Mount Nonotuck,

The trap rock meets the sun.

Down through the gaps of Holyoke,

The chill has just begun.

Chorus

Oh, the valley turns to copper,

The ridge is burning red,

The river runs through Hampshire soil

Before the cold has spread.

Verse 3

Along the quiet rail bed,

The leaves are drifting deep.

From Hadley down to Amherst,

The fields are laid to sleep.

Chorus

Oh, the valley turns to copper,

The ridge is burning red,

The river runs through Hampshire soil

Before the cold has spread.

Verse 4

The smoke rises from the chimney,

The dark comes on too soon.

We draw the bow across the wood

Beneath a hunter’s moon.

Chorus

Oh, the valley turns to copper,

The ridge is burning red,

The river runs through Hampshire soil

Before the cold has spread.

Tokenmaxxing, Agents, and Why Talking to a Chatbot Isn't the Same Thing

This year Silicon Valley invented a new way to look busy. It's called tokenmaxxing.

A token is the unit AI companies meter their models by, roughly four characters of text. Every question you ask and every word the machine writes back gets counted, and somebody pays for it. Sometime in late 2025, a few big tech companies started tracking how many tokens each employee burned through. Meta's internal leaderboard leaked. The New York Times ran a piece in March 2026 about engineers burning through billions of tokens to prove they were "AI-native." Google named tokenmaxxing a breakout search term, up more than 5,000 percent. Some workers reportedly left agents running in the background all day for no reason except to climb the chart.

You can guess how that ended. By late May, Fortune was calling tokenmaxxing over. A Microsoft executive put it in writing: "Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for." Counting tokens to measure work is like counting gallons of gas to measure how good a driver you are. The industry has already moved on to a new buzzword, "valuemaxxing," which mostly means: did the thing actually get done, and was it worth the bill?

Still, the fad points at something real. The reason anyone could burn a billion tokens in the first place is that we've moved from chatting with AI to handing work to agents. Those are two very different ways of working, and most people haven't noticed the switch.

Chat: You Are the Loop

When you use ChatGPT, Grok, or Claude in a chat window, it's a conversation. You ask, it answers, you read it, you decide what's next. Every step passes through you. If the answer is wrong, you catch it right away, because you're reading every word.

That makes chat good for thinking out loud, drafting, explaining, and quick questions. It also keeps the cost small. A long chat session might run a few thousand tokens. The machine never does anything on its own. It waits for you.

Agents: You Are the Manager

An agent is different. You give it a goal instead of a question: find me three repair shops that open Saturday and compare prices, or fix this bug and run the tests, or research this topic and write a report. Then it goes off and works. It plans steps, searches the web, opens pages, runs code, reads files, and sometimes spins up helper agents to split the job. It might take twenty minutes and a hundred steps before it comes back.

Every one of those steps eats tokens, and they add up fast. One writer opened a coding agent and found more than 51,000 tokens already loaded before typing a single word, just from tools and settings. That's how a person ends up at the top of a leaderboard without really trying.

What Actually Changes

1. Your job is the brief, not the conversation. With chat, you can be vague and fix it as you go. With an agent, a fuzzy request turns into twenty minutes of confident work in the wrong direction. Say what done looks like, what to avoid, and what you already know.
2. Mistakes compound. A chatbot gets one answer wrong and you see it. An agent can take a wrong turn at step three and build forty more steps on top of it. The final report looks polished either way. Check the work, not the confidence.
3. Review is the real skill. The people who get the most out of agents aren't the ones who use them the most. They're the ones who can look at a finished result and spot what's off in two minutes.
4. Cost is real now. Chat feels free because it's cheap. Agents can run up a bill, and companies are starting to notice who spends what. Send an agent when the job is worth twenty minutes of a person's time. Ask a chatbot when it isn't.
5. Parallel beats faster. The real magic of agents isn't speed on one task. It's running five at once: one checks flights, one checks hotels, one checks restaurants. That's where the hours come back.
6. Agents act, and that deserves caution. A chatbot only talks. An agent can fill out forms, send messages, and spend money if you let it. Decide ahead of time what it may do without asking you.

The Bottom Line

Tokenmaxxing was a silly metric, but it was measuring a real shift. AI went from a clever conversation partner to something closer to a junior employee you send off on errands. That's useful, but it means the human's job changes. Less typing, more deciding. Less chatting, more managing. Use a chatbot when you want to think. Use an agent when you want something done, and know exactly what done means before you send it off.

And don't measure yourself by how many tokens you burned. Measure what got finished.

The Butterfly Farewell

In 2004, I traveled to China to visit Anping, the source of 99% of the world's bow hair.  I also visited several violin factories in Heibei province and Beijing.  It was at one of those visits that I chanced to meet a middle aged violinist who shared a portion of The Butterfly Lovers song with me.  I, of course, shared Ashokan Farewell with him.  This is that song.  

#China #Anping #ButterflyLovers #AshokanFarewell #Fiddles 

Buy your own copy for only $1.50: https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-butterfly-farewell

Listen for FREE on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/3BJ4ozZDQ8s

Verse 1 I flew east on bow-hair business, a handshake down in Anping, then a week of factory floors where the white horses sing, through the workshops of Hebei where the varnish dries like rain, nine Birds'eye violas waiting for an E to make them sing again.

Verse 2 In a sales manager's office I was trying every one, and a quiet middle-aged man had come in with his own, no language between us but the four strings on the wood, so I picked one up and drew a bow across the mood.

Chorus He played the Butterfly Lovers, the tune his people know, and I answered with a Farewell from a mountain valley show, two melodies like ferries from opposite shores at dawn, and we met in the middle of a room in Beijing, gone.

Verse 3 Nobody wrote it down and nobody took a photo, just a stranger and a fiddler grinning at a note, the kind of thing you'd never plan, you couldn't even try: every fiddle in the factory stopped to see us by.

Outro Now the bow hair's from Anping and the violas came home, and there's a phrase I keep in Chinese, one I'll never say alone, for when the bow meets the string and the tune begins to climb, we were both amazed and pleased, and we both were on time.

The Empty Vine - a Verve Music original song | Download yours for only $1.50!

I read an article this morning that said that colleges are closing at a pace of one every three weeks and it reminded me of Hampshire College, my alma mater, closing for good after December 2026.  So I wrote a traditional valley folk ballad charting the empty stools, lost morning wages, and cold winter silence left behind when the hilltop campus shutters its gates for good. #ValleyFolk #LocalEconomy #PioneerValley 

Buy & Download yours for only $1.50

https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-empty-vine

Listen on YouTube for Free:
https://youtu.be/cuwg6B8zYSI

Verse 1

The morning bus runs empty past the apple orchard gate,

Where gravel roads meet pavement and the yellow buses wait.

The barns are growing quiet on the eastern side of hill,

And milkweed fills the ditches where the autumn air turns chill.

Chorus

Now the dinner rush is fading and the kitchen lights are low,

With nobody to order when the winter starts to snow.

The boarding houses darken all along the county line,

And we are left to wonder what will fill the empty vine.

Verse 2

The bookstore on the corner turns its sign against the pane,

The diner counter settles in the steady autumn rain.

Five chairs sit at the counter where a crowd once used to sit,

The cellar in the dry-goods lacks the coal to keep it lit.

Chorus

Now the dinner rush is fading and the kitchen lights are low,

With nobody to order when the winter starts to snow.

The boarding houses darken all along the county line,

And we are left to wonder what will fill the empty vine.

Bridge

The bell upon the knoll stands cold above the river plain,

No boots come through the meadow grass to walk these paths again.

The hands that drew the morning wage must pack their boxes tight,

To seek their bread on roads that stretch beyond the valley night.

Verse 3

The pasture gate swings open where the thinkers used to roam,

The orchard turns to timber and the hillside stands alone.

The ledger sheets are folded and the hardware clerk departs,

Leaving quiet in the timber and a shadow in our hearts.

Chorus

Now the dinner rush is fading and the kitchen lights are low,

With nobody to order when the winter starts to snow.

The boarding houses darken all along the county line,

And we are left to wonder what will fill the empty vine.

The Iron Valley Line - a VerveMusic original song

Massachusetts has been awarded $130 million in federal funding to modernize rail infrastructure in Springfield. , so I wrote a song about it: A lively train song celebrating the green lights, shiny iron, and westbound connection rolling straight through the Springfield hub. #BluegrassTrain #WestEastRail #PioneerValley

Buy and Download yours for only $1.50: https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-iron-valley-line

Listen on YouTube for Free:

https://youtu.be/0CbquH8X8j0

Verse 1

Well they laid out the plans down at Springfield station,

With a pocket full of silver and a brand new dream,

To clear out the switches and the tangled freight lines,

And fire up the boilers with a head full of steam.

Chorus

Roll along, high ball, hear the engine crying,

Rolling out the valley on the high iron grade,

From the salt on the harbor to the Berkshire mountains,

She’s the fastest runner that the state ever made.

Verse 2

They were stalled on the siding down along the river,

Letting heavy boxcars rumble slow on by,

Now the switches are aligned and the signals showing amber,

Turned to bright green fire up against the sky.

Chorus

Roll along, high ball, hear the engine crying,

Rolling out the valley on the high iron grade,

From the salt on the harbor to the Berkshire mountains,

She’s the fastest runner that the state ever made.

Bridge

Hear the bell ringing clear through the Union arches,

Every worker on the platform giving out a cheer,

With the double track clear straight across the commonwealth,

You can ride to the hills in the turn of a year.

Verse 3

So hitch up your fiddle, pick your fast five-stringer,

Watch the Valley Flyer hit her stride and run,

She’s hauling all the neighbors from the hills to the shoreline,

Rolling westbound easy with the morning sun.

Chorus

Roll along, high ball, hear the engine crying,

Rolling out the valley on the high iron grade,

From the salt on the harbor to the Berkshire mountains,

She’s the fastest runner that the state ever made.