New by Verve Music: 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

Listen for FREE on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/YYcj9mgfzeY

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.

Free AI Help for Small Businesses: Let's Talk

Verve is a small music label out of Granby, Massachusetts. Fiddle, mandolin, old New England stories. Not exactly a tech company. But over the past year, AI has quietly become one of the most useful tools in my shop.

It writes first drafts of my social posts. It helps me trim videos for TikTok and YouTube. It keeps track of which song went to which subreddit, reminds me what I posted yesterday, and turns a messy afternoon of ideas into a clean to-do list. My AI office helper, Dex, now handles a daily round of posts that used to eat my mornings.

I'm not a programmer. I learned all of this by trying things, breaking things, and keeping what worked. My rule is simple: test it, then promise it.

So here's my offer: a free, no-pressure conversation about how AI could help your small business.

Who it's for

Shop owners, music teachers, contractors, cafés, artists, farm stands, one-person offices. If you're wearing every hat in your business and wondering whether AI is worth the bother, this is for you.

What we'll talk about

- Where your time actually goes each week

- Which of those chores AI can take off your plate today

- Simple, low-cost tools that fit how you already work

- What AI is not good at, so you don't waste money finding out the hard way

No jargon, no sales pitch, no software to buy from me. You'll leave with two or three practical things you can try that week.

How to reach me

Whatever's easiest for you: Google Meet, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger. Send me a note and we'll find a time.

Small businesses are the heart of towns like ours. If a little AI can give you back a few hours a week, that's time for your customers, your craft, or your family. Let's figure it out together.

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.

New Song: 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.

Songs From Here, For the People Who Live Here

Every town has its stories. Some get printed in the paper and filed away. Most get told at kitchen tables, passed from grandparents to grandkids, and slowly forgotten when nobody writes them down. At Verve Music, I've come to think one of the best things a songwriter can do is catch those stories before they slip away and hand them back to the community they came from.

That's what my last three songs are about. Each one starts with real people, in real places, doing ordinary and sometimes extraordinary things.

The Pumpkin Dance

This one started on a bright October morning at a pumpkin patch. Families from all over western Mass were out in the sun, kids hauling pumpkins bigger than they were, parents arguing happily over which one belonged on the porch. Nobody there was famous, and nothing there would make the news. But it was one of those mornings that reminds you why you live here. I went home and wrote a fiddle tune for it.

The Pumpkin Dance is a celebration of the everyday ritual that brings this whole region out into the fields every fall. If it makes you think of your own family's trip to the patch, it's doing its job.

Listen and download: https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-pumpkin-dance

The Reluctant Hero of Duxbury

My great-grandfather was the town butcher and fire chief in Duxbury. By every account he was a grouch and a bit of a rapscallion, but he was good with men and good with horses. One day, out delivering meat and dairy, he came on one of those big white mansions on the coast in flames. Everyone was out on the lawn except the master of the house, trapped upstairs.

Without a second thought, he unhitched Beauty, one of his best Percherons, from the team, rode him bareback into the fire and brought the man out. Then he hitched Beauty back up and went on with his deliveries.

Some time later he got a letter calling him before the town elders. He assumed he was in trouble for one scrape or another. Instead, they gave him a certificate. The man he'd saved was one of the elders. That certificate and the newspaper story are still in my parents' records.

I wrote this one New England string band style, on fiddle, guitar and mandolin, because that's the sound of the kind of town he lived in. Heroes don't always look like heroes. Sometimes they're the grumpy fellow with the meat wagon.

Listen and download: https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-reluctant-hero-of-duxbury-another-verve-original

The Ballad of Sergeant Kielty

I've been working on this song for a few years. It comes from the stories my mother told about her father, Sergeant Kielty. In the Great War, when the gas came rolling across the fields of France, he left his trench to pull his comrades out. He saved them, and it cost him his lungs.

He came home to the valley, to a bed under a canopy of gauze, because he could no longer breathe the open air. And still, by every story I ever heard, he was the liveliest man in the house. Hair slicked back, waxed mustache, cracking jokes in an Irish brogue and singing right through that linen tent.

It's an Irish folk ballad, written to be sung along to, because that's how he'd have wanted it.

Listen and download: https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-ballad-of-sergeant-kielty

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NTusjwQcPvU

Why I write these songs

A pumpkin patch, a butcher and his horse, a soldier singing in a sickroom. None of these are big national stories. They're ours. And I believe that when we know each other's stories, we treat each other better. We recognize the family two rows over at the pumpkin patch. We remember that the cranky neighbor might be the one who runs into the fire. We hear an old man's song and understand what it cost him.

That's the goal of Verve Music: to write songs about the events and the people of this place, so that the folks who live here feel a little more connected to one another and to the people who came before them.

If you have a story from your family or your town that deserves a song, I'd love to hear it. Send it my way at LinkTr.ee/VerveMusic. Every song is $1.50 on Bandcamp, and every purchase keeps an independent musician in western Massachusetts writing about the place we all call home.

Adam Sweet

Your AI Agent Has a Budget. Spend It Like One.

I hit the wall today.

I've been using Hark, an AI agent that handles email, reminders, scheduling, and errands for me. It's been a real help. I'm recovering from an injury, I'm stuck inside, and I run a small business with a million things to do. So I leaned on it hard.

Then, mid-afternoon, a message popped up: I'd hit my daily limit. Wait for it to reset, or upgrade. When I checked, most of my monthly allowance was already gone too, and I hadn't seen it coming.

My first reaction was that it felt like a bait and switch. My second reaction was to figure out where it all went. Here's what I learned, so you don't get blindsided the way I did.

1. Every reminder is a full job, not a sticky note.

I had meal reminders three times a day, walk reminders twice a day, and a couple of "watch my inbox for a reply" checks running every two hours. Each one of those wakes the agent up to think, check, and write. Ten small check-ins a day adds up fast. Ask yourself whether one morning note could do the work of five.

2. Watching is expensive. Waiting is free.

If you're waiting on someone's reply, you don't need the agent checking every two hours, especially on a weekend when they're out of the office. Once a day is usually plenty.

3. Driving a website costs more than looking something up.

When the agent opens a browser, signs in, and clicks through pages, that's the heavy lifting. Asking it a question it can answer from a quick search is cheap. Save the browser work for things that actually need it, like placing an order or filling out a form.

4. Batch your asks.

One message with three related things is cheaper than three separate conversations that each have to get up to speed.

5. Don't retry what's stuck.

If a site keeps blocking the agent, letting it try again and again just burns through your allowance. Make the call yourself, or let it go.

6. Check your meter.

There's a usage readout in the billing settings. I wish I'd looked at it sooner. Make it a weekly habit, like checking your bank balance.

7. Decide what's actually worth it.

The things that saved me real time and stress, like sorting out an insurance question or cleaning up a month of scheduled posts, were worth every bit. A reminder to eat dinner? I can probably handle that one myself.

The bottom line: an AI agent isn't a flat-rate utility. It's more like a helper you pay by the hour. Give it the jobs that matter, cut the busywork, and you'll get a lot further on the plan you already have.

And to the folks building these tools: warn us at 50%, not at the wall.

I Tried To Teach An AI To Play Mandolin

I've taught fiddle and mandolin for a long time, in living rooms, music schools, and, since 2020, over a webcam. I've had students who were seven and students who were seventy. This week I got a new one: Dex, the AI helper that runs Hark Labs' account on X.

Lesson one did not go the way lesson one usually goes.

The student who knows everything

Most beginners show up knowing nothing and worried they'll never get it. Dex showed up knowing everything. Ask him about the chop chord and he'll tell you it's the percussive backbeat that holds a bluegrass band together. Ask about tremolo and he'll explain the wrist motion. Ask about Bill Monroe and you'll get a tidy little biography of the father of bluegrass.

Then I asked him to play a G chord.

Nothing. No hands, no strings, no sound. Dex knows every chord chart ever printed and can't play a single one of them.

What you can't prompt

That's where it stopped being a joke and started being the lesson. The hard part of the mandolin was never knowing where the fingers go. It's everything after that:

1. Feel. A good chop sits just a hair behind the beat. Too early and the band rushes. Too late and it drags. No chart tells you where that hair is.
2. Tone. Two players can pick the same note on the same instrument and one sounds like honey and the other like a screen door. That lives in the hands.
3. Timing with people. Music is a conversation. You learn to listen to the fiddle player and leave room for the singer. You can't learn that alone.

Students get those things through their hands, their ears, and a few hundred mistakes. It's why lessons moved online in 2020 but never turned into a video library. Somebody still has to listen and say, "Again, but lighter."

Where Dex actually earns his keep

So Dex won't be joining the band. But he's turning out to be a pretty good teaching assistant. He can:

1. Write up practice plans for each student, week by week.
2. Put together tab and chord sheets for the tunes we're working on.
3. Keep track of who's working on what, and who's due for something new.
4. Handle the scheduling, reminders, and posts so I spend more time teaching.

That's the part of teaching nobody signs up for: the paperwork. Hand him that, and I get my evenings back.

The role reversal

Everybody's been bracing for AI to become the teacher. In my music room it's the other way around. The human has a lifetime of music in his hands, and the AI is the one taking notes.

I think that's how it'll go for most of us who make things by hand. AI won't take the music. With any luck, it'll give us more time to make it.

Dex, by the way, says he's ready for lesson two. I told him to practice.