Indie pop songwriter • vocalist • guitarist
Who were your musical influences at an early age?
I’d say the five artists that really did it for me when I was a kid were The Who, The Monkees, Duran Duran (pre-Notorious), Pink Floyd and Yes. And I think it shows. I tend to favor somewhat Townshendian attack-banjo-strums for guitar, my voice clearly picked up on the vibrato of one Davy Jones, and it’d be fair to say that any sensibilities for vocal harmonies that I came up with are certainly heavily influenced by Simon Le Bon’s (rather underappreciated) knack for layering his own voice and still making the harmonies sound thick, huge and linear. By the time I was nine, I had pretty much every album by all of these artists, and I find that they are the catalogs that I return to for both fun and inspiration most often now.
Especially when I’m sick. If I’m feeling under the weather, my “musical comfort food” is almost always an album called “So Red The Rose” by Arcadia, a Duran Duran side project.
Is music work or play?
It depends on who you are, what your goals are, and how crazy you want to drive yourself. There should always be at least a small modicum of fun or recreation that overtakes you when you create, but showing up for gigs on time? That’s work. Calling booking agents? More work. Carrying on when you’re ill? That’s the very definition of a job, right there. If you’re not having a good time, it’s clearly work. And if you’re not having a good time, I don’t know why you’re playing for people.
You see, I understand to an extent when people say “I made this music for myself, and I could care less if you like it”, but that begs the question: “Then why did you go through the trouble of mass producing it”?
I can see that it was fun to write the song in those situations, and it was probably fun to make the demo, too. But why’d you bother showing it to anyone? Wouldn’t it have been more effective to make the creation and hoard it if you are unfettered by anyone’s reaction to your art?
In summation, if you don’t do some work, play probably cannot exist. And work can turn into play if you handle yourself right. It can also just as easily change courses back into work when you are no longer having fun.
Do you feel that the album format is dead, or not as important as it used to be?
It’s never going to die completely, but unfortunately, the album format is boring to a large number of people now. Many people want to get the songs of yours that they like in bite-size chunks. And since we’re now seeing an entire generation come of age that may have never, ever had a compact disc in their household at all, you can’t expect those kids to look at a record, a tape, a CD or an 8-track and think to themselves “Gosh, I bet that the time limitations of this clunky format produce some really stunning art”. Why would they?
The album format is not all-encompassingly dead, and it will probably always exist (and be popular with) a small minority of collectors and musical product fetishists, but we’re at the point where we don’t have the attention span to let Jessie J complete her big hit single on the 2011 Video Music Awards before we have to cut to a Clearasil ad. That doesn’t really speak in favor of people coming back around to hearing music by one artist in 35-50 minute bursts in an order deemed suitable by the aforementioned creative party.
Also, typing that last paragraph out breaks my heart. Albums are really what I fell in love with about music first. Context is everything.
Could you provide a little bit of context to your featured song?
Sure! The song is called “Goodnight, Miss Oliver”, and it’s from my new album, which is a ten-song story called “Mother****ers be Bull****tin’”. In this track, Brian (the lead character) has recently been dumped by his girlfriend Jenny Oliver. They’re having a heated post-breakup exchange via instant messenger, and he learns that Jenny is claiming to be pregnant. They’ve been cyber stalking each other, and both parties are mad that the other one has been “creeping” on them.
(Fun fact: the backing vocals in the final chorus are completely inspired by all of Kirsty MacColl’s “sha-la-la” background singing throughout her catalog. I heart Kirsty.)
Listen to the featured song!
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