Interview: Pete Pidgeon of Arcoda, part two

In part one of my interview with singer/songwriter Pete Pidgeon of Arcoda, we talked about his musical approach, his insights into the Front Range music scene, and how his career has developed, both here and on the East Coast. Part two finds us discussing his influences, some of the recognition he's received and exactly what to do (and what not to do) if you find yourself face to face with Paris Hilton or Trey Anastasio.

Enjoy part two of our conversation, which has been condensed and lightly edited.


Earlier, you mentioned that the legendary Levon Helm of The Band contributed to your upcoming album. How was it playing with him?

Pete Pidgeon: It’s still number one. It’ll probably always be number one. One of my earliest memories, my parents were big music fans. They had a huge vinyl collection, which really influenced where I came from. Randy Newman, Bonnie Raitt, Paul Simon, Billy Joel...all these great singer-songwriters. They had Big Pink and they put on “Chest Fever” and I remember this distinctly. I would crawl up on the couch and jump on the couch when they’d play music. So I remember doing that and then “Chest Fever” coming on and being completely terrified, because it was the scariest sounding organ. It was this huge, monstrous Garth Hudson organ sound. It was overwhelming how powerful this tune was. From my earliest memories of music, I’ve been exposed to The Band and Levon’s playing.

The biggest thing about Levon is that, of anybody in the last 50 years or so who cared more about music, I think he’s probably the number one dude. I don’t think anybody cared more about playing as hard as he could every single night and really giving everything he had to the music. There was this story that Larry Campbell said, if I’m not wrong. [ed: Theresa Williams mentions it in this interview on For the Country Record] In his last days, when he was playing a show, he was sitting in the corner of the room and he wasn’t even talking to anybody. He was talking to himself and talking to God, and saying, “All I ask for is just these 90 minutes on stage. That’s all I ask for. The other hours of the day? Whatever. You want to make me sick, that’s fine, but I need these 90 minutes right here to go out.” You can’t get bigger than that. So, the honor of being able to make music with him, to have him play my music? Come on. That’s just the biggest honor of all time.

Your bio includes things like the Jeff Buckley tribute, which I think exposed you to a lot of bigger named people and gave you some public visibility. I’ve also seen that you were in the running for some Grammys in 2012.

PP: Yeah, ‘11-’12. The ceremony was in 2012, but it was for the 2011 Grammys.

What categories were you considered for?

PP: It was for the EP called Growing Pains. There was a single on there called “Will” and we did a music video for it.

Oh yeah, I saw that on YouTube. Didn’t you write the storyline?

PP: I directed it. I co-wrote the story with Wes Mock, but I wrote the screenplay for it. And I did all the fieldwork for it and financed it.

That was a pretty heavy video.

PP: Thanks. It was dealing with some serious issues. I was volunteering at the time at Road Recovery, which helps children dealing with addictions. A lot of those kids were going through suicide problems and really major stuff. It was actually written about this girl, I’m sure she was suicidal, but I can’t tell you that for sure. But going through a major breakup: outside the lines of regular people breakup. Major stuff. She just had a huge impact on me and I wrote a few tunes about her and that was one of them. “I am more than the sum of my mistakes;” that’s the lyric that everyone responds to. She made these mistakes, but they weren’t really her fault, necessarily. It just had a big impact.

So, that video got nominated for Best Short Form Video, the single, “Will” was nominated for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. And then I was also up for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song.

But I’m very clear to mention that these were Grammy-recognized. That’s because a technical Grammy nomination only refers to the top five people that go to the awards ceremony. We made the second round of three, with the third round being the Top Five nominations.

I also noticed that you’re teaching guitar here, which is a good way to make ends meet as a musician. What’s your teaching philosophy?

PP: My curriculum is based on the individual student. Some kids want to learn theory, some kids don’t want to learn theory. Some kids want to learn how to play heavy metal, some kids want to play folk songs or pop tunes. When I came up, I didn’t have a teacher. My brother and my father taught me how to play guitar, but they weren’t sitting there saying, “This is how you’re supposed to do it. You need to learn these songs and do this.” It was more like coaching. So, with my students, I try to incorporate that into the lesson.

I’m glad you brought up your roots. I was wondering what your family background was with music. You mentioned your parents’ vinyl collection and now that your dad and brother both play.

PP: Yeah, my dad and my brother both play guitar. My dad was a campfire folk singer: Everly Brothers, Beach Boys, that kind of thing. Even way back in the day, when he was in high school and college, he had a couple of bands and was doing that style of music. My mom played piano and sang. My dad sang and played guitar. And my grandmother, my mother’s mother, she loved playing piano, too., She played at Christmas and I think she played at church at one point. Her husband, my mom’s father, was in the church. He played hymns and stuff on the piano. He died before I was born, but my grandma played a lot of those tunes. So there was a lot of music in the house. We had a music room in the house...My family called it the living room, but I called it the music room because it had baby grand piano, a bunch of guitars, xylophones, percussion instrument, trombone, violins, trumpet, recorders, flute. There was just all sorts of instruments, plus the record player, the reel-to-reel player. I couldn’t ask for more, you know.

Do you just have the one brother? Does he play as a hobbyist?

PP: Yes. The first live gig I ever played in public, I played bass in his progressive rock cover band. It was Yes, Rush, Triumph and maybe a couple of other groups, but that was the core of it. I was either 13 or 14. They were playing “Yours is No Disgrace” [by Yes] and the bass player couldn’t hang with the bass part. It wasn’t necessarily technically difficult, but there’s a lot of notes to memorize, and there’s a bass solo and stuff. A walking bass thing. So I just picked it up and played it. So, my brother brought me on because I could play the whole thing. They called me the Iceman, because I just stood in one place, staring at the bass, not moving, not looking at anybody.

Total shoegazer...

PP: Exactly. A shoegazer before shoegazing. So he was a shredder into progressive rock and shred: Satriani, Malmsteen, and Vai, Paul Gilbert, that kind of thing. He was a major influence. Probably the biggest influence. He had a bunch of bands. He doesn’t gig out as much now, but he definitely gave it a good go for a long time.

What other influences would you cite for your music?

PP: Oh, Man. it’s been a long road. The first exposure was the singer-songwriters that I mentioned. The first band I liked on my own was Huey Lewis and the News. There was this one live performance of "The Power of Love", where he’s playing onstage and he gets on his knees and he’s just yelling. I was like, “That’s amazing. That the coolest.” I must’ve been around 7 or 8.

I saw Robert Palmer when “Addicted to Love” came out and he had that video with all the girls dressed in black and doing their thing. I didn’t know what love was at the time or what any of the lyrics were about, which my parents found amusing, but I saw that video and I connected with it right away. I thought, “This is the greatest music I’ve ever heard.”

And there was a black and white Kiss show that I remember from when I was super young. Just the fact that I remember these things means that my brain was hardwired for music. I’m barely an infant and I recognize what’s going on.

So that was the earliest stuff. Then my brother got me into progressive rock and shred and then that graduated into jazz in high school and college. Then that graduated into jam bands: Allman Brothers, Phish, Dead, Santana, that kind of stuff, which taught me how to improvise. Coming out of progressive rock and shred, there’s no improvisation. Although there was some in Yes, I’ll give them some credit because they were an organic progressive band.

So I did the jam band thing. After that, I started getting back into my roots of songwriting, around ‘03. I’ve sort of been in that scene for the last ten years: song craft, how to write better tunes. Definitely more stripped down, trying to make it more compact. That’s one thing New York definitely taught me: you got to have a three minute tune. maybe a four minute tune if you can, but no more of this 7 or 8 minute progressive, long form stuff, That was sort of the purpose of the Growing Pains EP. How can I be concise and write a hit tune or a radio tune? And it’s still too progressive for most people, but it’s the best I could do without sacrificing my creative interests.

You brought up the jam band thing, which is a good segue, because I wanted to talk briefly with you about your book, Hampton '98: The Dephinitive Experience about the Hampton shows and Phish. I read the interview you had with Glide and I found it really intriguing. I wanted to ask you was about a teaser quote from that Glide interview. You talked about getting experience meeting the guys in Phish and that you finally learned how to meet and talk to famous people. So what’s your advice for people? What is the proper way?

PP: (laughs) It’s exactly how you and I are talking right now. That’s exactly how you do it. You’re just another dude. “Hey what’s going on? What do you have happening? How’s the road been? What’s up?” and not get overtaken. It’s easier said than done, but not get overtaken by -- there’s almost a palpable energy that comes off of people that are famous. I don’t know why. I’m theorizing that it has something to do with their influence and also how they’ve been influenced. The amount of energy that they can play in front of 100,000 people and affect 100,000 people simultaneously by playing one note on their instrument or them being influenced by those 100,000 people giving all their energy back to them. They’re very electric people.

If you can talk to your brain and say, “Just be cool, man, it’s just a normal person,” have a regular convo, keep it on the level. I think that breathing and pausing is a big part of it. Because your brain’s on fire, “Oh my God, I’m talking to this person, this is so amazing! Keep talking, keep talking!” But if you can have that natural flow of conversation, you have to consciously put that pause in between your sentences, so you’re not just blasting this poor person the whole time. That’s what makes them anxious and not want to really hang out and talk. You’re just throwing so much at them, so fast.

One of the hardest parts is that there’s so many things that you want to tell this person and you don’t have more than probably 15 seconds to get it out and you’re probably going to screw it up and you’re probably also going to forget all those things and just say something, The first time I met Trey [Anastasio] was like that. I met him outside of his lodge at Sugarbush in 1995. I was just, “blah, blah, blah”, you know. I couldn’t really form sentences and said stupid things. I gave him a hug and he was all freaked out. Good for him, because I freaked him out. Over the years, I’ve tried to tone it down.

But battling the energy field is still difficult. Like being at the Grammys on the red carpet with Paris Hilton and Sting where you are right now. Just being cool, “Hey what’s up Paris, How are you doing?” “Oh, I’m a little cold.” “Have you got a sweater?” “No, I didn’t bring one…” Just bullshitting, but that goes a long way. Just be a normal person, you know.

Thanks for being a normal person for this interview

PP: (laughs) Hopefully, I can be one for the rest of my life.

Interview: Pete Pidgeon of Arcoda, part one

A relative newcomer to the Front Range, singer/songwriter Pete Pidgeon moved here from the busy New York music scene. In the few months he’s been here, he’s fallen into the local music community and also made strong connections on the business side. Part of what makes him fit in so well here is his earnest, engaging nature and his open stylistic approach that includes pop, Americana, jazz, and even some funk.

I had the chance to talk with Pidgeon at DazzleJazz club in Denver, before we both enjoyed listening to his Arcoda bandmate, pianist Adam Bodine, lead his jazz combo through a solid set.

This is part one of our conversation, which has been condensed and lightly edited.



How would you define your music, if you had to do it?

Pete Pidgeon: I usually say songwriting because that’s really the core of it. If you listen to Bob Marley or Paul Simon, or if you listen to Whitesnake, all of those bands are songwriting. It’s based on form and a verse-chorus and lyrics and all that kind of thing as opposed to jazz or jam band, which are mostly instrumental.

If you took Billy Joel, for example, he’s got a genre of songwriting, but his style changes from tune to tune. So, he can do a doo-wop '50s song and then he can play a straight out pop tune, and he can do piano ballads. He has these different styles within his own genre. So when you think Billy Joel, you think Billy Joel. You don’t think he’s a reggae guy and then he’s a world music guy

I think we - we meaning the band and myself; I write the tunes -- we sort of fall into that category. There’s a genre for the band, which is the umbrella of songs. I may write a song in a reggae style or an R&B style, but the genre is based on this verse-chorus type of organization.

I do hear a lot of different influences in your music. I can hear some some Phish on a few things. I can even hear a little bit of Moxy Fruvous. Certainly I get what you’re saying about songwriting because you have that kind of singer/songwriter stage presence. Listening to your songs, you tap into that to either tell a story or create a mood.

PP: No matter what the style is that you’re conveying, you can still get a similar message across. If you listen to Tesla’s albums, like their Five Man Acoustical Jam record and you break that down, it’s straight ahead songs. You think of them as a hair metal band or whatever, but really, if you strip all that stuff away, it’s just song forms. And part of the genre aspect of that was hair metal '80’s, but stylistically, they’re pretty much a songwriting band. Whether it’s disco or pop. It makes it more fun and more flexible as a musician to be able to do different stuff and keep it interesting and not be limited.

With the kind of eclectic sound that you have, do you think that’s it harder or easier for you?

PP: I think it’s 50-50, but in the long run, it’s easier. Because, for example, we could open for Leon Russel or Bonnie Raitt and do a stripped down show. We could do a straight ahead rock show because of songs like “Will” and “Whirlwind” and “She’s Right”. We could play a folk situation, like Newport Folk Festival or something like that. I could play solo acoustic. I just did that “Wharf Rat” performance for JamBase, for the GD (Grateful Dead) 50 “Songs of Their Own” series.

I saw that on YouTube.

PP: So, it gives me all these opportunities to do different things with different people and different areas of the field rather than being limited. If we were only a folk band, we can only play in that little niche. I also have so many songs at this point. I probably have 120, or 130 tunes that are completely finished, recorded, polished and everything. Within that set of a hundred or so tunes, say we do thirty on a gig, that gives me almost four or five complete sets of music that we can play in these different venues. If we did a show at Dazzle, I’ve got a jazz instrumental set. If we did a show at Cervantes or at OneUp, we have enough jam band style material that we can make that show a success and get people off.

You said that it was 50-50, though. What’s the downside?

PP: The downside is probably just when you book shows or when you’re asked to define yourself in very limited circumstances, you have to come up with a thing. Like with ReverbNation: they ask you to come up with your genre. I think currently our genre is Americana. That’s what the new record is for the most part. So, if we’re focusing on what’s one thing we are right now, I have to come up with a response and coming up with that response is sometimes difficult if I don’t have a defined situation. I think Americana is what we’re doing in 2015 and where we’re headed with the new record and everything, so it’s a little bit of an easier answer, but if you had asked me three years ago…we’re rock. I guess, because there’s no songwriting genre. Coming up with that definitive answer can be difficult at times.

Talking about the different kinds of gigs you say you can do, though, doesn't it make it harder to have an identity that you fans can connect to? Your fans have to work a little bit to figure out what is it that makes you their thing.

PP: I think that’s what is so great about Denver that’s not really present in a lot of other areas of the country is that the fans here will go to an EDM show one night, the next night they’ll go to a country show, then they’ll go to a folk show, they’ll go to a rock show, They’re almost tuned into accepting the eclecticism of these bands. So, here we’ve been very successful. We can do different styles of music and people aren’t going to say, “Oh, this isn’t what I thought you were.” And they’re not only accepting of it, but they like seeing that diversity. It makes it an interesting show. We’re not going to come out and play the same show every time. It’s always a different setlist, depending on who’s on the bill or what room we’re playing in. I think that’s probably our biggest asset. Because if you’re a hard rock band and you end up playing a rockabilly club, you’re kind of in trouble. But if we play Little Bear in Evergreen, for example, we’ll play rockabilly for two sets and people will love it.

So, what brought you to Colorado? You’re pretty much an East Coast guy -- New York and Connecticut.

PP: Yeah, I was born in Connecticut and then I spent a few years in New Jersey at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. Then I moved to New Paltz, NY, about an hour and a half north of Manhattan. It’s out in the woods. It was the hippie town of hippie towns in America when I was there, anyway, between ‘95 and 2000. I lived in a house called the cloud house, which was yellow when I lived there, but it used to have clouds and sky painted all over it like a Peter Max painting. It was like the San Francisco of the East Coast, but in very small, subtle town.

That’s where Arcoda started. I sort of made this band thing and tried to sort of congeal all of these ideas to one name and one direction. The lineup continually changed, but just having that idea of a band that’s a repository for all these songs that I’m writing. No matter who’s in the group, we’re going to do these songs and play out.

I graduated SUNY New Paltz with a Jazz Studies degree and then moved to Boston until the end of ‘07. That was a great time. From 2000 to ‘02, '03, there were a lot of great bands on the scene: The Slip, and Percy Hill, and Madison Project, and Uncle Sammy. There was this great vibe but then the dynamic of the town and the clubs changed and a lot of the bands broke up and the clubs started shutting down or being bought out by corporate companies and stuff. Then I moved to New York City, I lived in Brooklyn for three and a half years and that was great because it was the kick in the ass I wanted about just learning the hardcore business aspect of everything and getting to meet some of the big names and work with bigger people.

Unfortunately, the skyrocketing rent and ability to live in that town became impossible. So, I moved back home for a little while and back to Connecticut to sort of figure out what I was doing. I bounced between Millerton, NY and Canton, CT, and Boston for a couple of years, just trying to make some money and save up, figure out where I wanted to go. I did a lot of research. I had come to Denver in 1996 for the Phish concerts at Red Rocks. I thought it was amazing. It was just the coolest town and a great buzz. I knew I always wanted to get back here. Then I was the lighting director for The Slip in 2000 and we played the Gothic and the Fox on that run. Just incredible people, great vibe, great music scene. So, I knew some people out here. Eric Imbrosciano, who was one of the drummers in Arcoda back in the day, he ran the funk jam at the Armoury on Wednesdays. So, he brought me down there and introduced me to a bunch of people during the Phish concerts at Dick’s in 2014, Labor Day. So, I hung out here for a week and I loved it and I came out and it‘s been...It was the right move, it’s been amazing.

You mentioned the changing lineup for Arcoda. Did you come here alone and then build the current version?

PP: Right. The band I was playing with in North Hampton, Mass, they were some of the most talented young players in central Mass. Really, really good players and good people. The trouble was that there aren’t any paying gigs in central Mass. That whole scene is very difficult to get paid as a musician. We did a few gigs, but they weren’t paying much money, if any money, and they were getting a little frustrated that the bread wasn’t there, and I was getting frustrated because I was paying out of pocket and losing a whole bunch of money. So, I knew I had to get out of there and make a change and move. I just came out here and with Eric’s help, he introduced me a lot to the scene and I got my feet on the ground. Slowly but surely, I met all the musicians and found out the ones that would work.

I’ve seen you open for Atomga’s CD release party for Black Belt at the Bluebird [review] and then I saw your recent show headlining at the Fox [review]. I think you’re getting out and about well in the area. Does this feel like where you want to settle in for the duration?

PP: It blows my mind. A lot it has to do with the talent buyers here being human beings. Like Chris Peck and Jake Nixon for example, who do Z2 [Entertainment]. They had faith in the band and in myself. I’m not used to people either taking a chance or having faith in us. I have a great bio, of course, but in New York City, everyone has a great bio. So, I was used to this sort of brick wall mentality. Where I’m just beating this wall until my hands are bleeding. I’d say, “Look I’m good, I’m really good. I’ve played with these famous people and I’ve been at the Grammy Awards and I’ve done these great things.” They’re like, “So is everyone else who’s trying to apply here. So why are you any different?” Being out here, where people are actually receptive, that’s been the biggest difference. It makes me work harder as a performer to live up to their expectations. If they’re going to believe in me, then I’m going to work hard for them and try to make sure that they’re going to get their money’s worth out of it. It’s a great symbiotic relationship. I’ll definitely stick around for that.

It’s interesting to me to hear about a musician coming to our market with intention. Coming from a hothouse scene like New York, and then seeing your performance of “Just Like a Woman” at the Jeff Buckley tribute show - your cover of his version is just fantastic…

PP: Thanks.

Your phrasing and the emotion you brought to it was really sharp. It was his version, but you made it your own. I respect that.

But you were in that sort of crowded environment, where people can get discovered, so moving to Denver is surprising. There are a few bands out of Colorado that have moved up, but I’m not used to people coming here to do that.

PP: In general, if you have money in New York, you’ve got a great shot. If you can get a publicist that can hype every one of your shows and get you into big time media, then you’re probably going to do well, if you’re a good artist. But the hustle on the ground to get the gigs, to get paid for playing your gig, and then retain that audience for your next performance in a city where you have people playing at Madison Square Garden… You’re going up against Billy Joel, you’re going up against Phil Lesh and Friends, you’re going up against these major artists that are playing for tens of thousands of people. And it’s not just one venue, you have Barclays Center, all these huge spots. So, no matter what you’re doing, your competition is so enormous, it’s so hard to draw in New York.

By coming out here, you don’t have that overarching pressure where you have to be in the New York Times tomorrow in order to get anywhere. or if you’re not spending $4000 on a publicist, you can’t play and get gigs. There’s enough of a grassroots scene here. If you do hustle and work hard, you can get the fanbase energized and get people out to your show and get people out to the next show, which is the biggest hurdle. No matter how many people came out to that first show, if they can bring a friend to the next show, and you keep growing on it, that’s the whole point. I think that’s possible out here.

Also the venue sizes are manageable. There’s a ladder here that didn’t exist in Boston. In Boston, there are very few mid-range venues.  You skip right up to 4000 at House of Blues and even, the Paradise, which I think is 600 people, is a generously sized room, but it’s considered a lower tier room in that town. Getting from ground one to the Paradise, you might have Church, which I think is a couple of hundred people, a couple of venues. Two or three venues, literally, and then you skip right up to 600, then after that, you skip to 4000. The ladder’s all messed up. Out here, you can play the Walnut Room for a hundred and something people or the Armoury for one hundred, two hundred people. All these clubs, there’s so many options where you can get on at a certain level to get up to the next rung of two or three hundred people, and then you’re at the Bluebird for 500 people. and then 800 at the Boulder Theater, 1000 people at the Gothic.

It makes the business much easier. And it’s not as expensive a town, so I can pay my band, which I couldn’t really do out East, unless I was really taking a hit. Also, literally the fans. What blew me away on day one, was that the fanbase in Denver is so energized. They go out to shows on a Monday at midnight. You can go to a show and there’ll be 100 people there. Meadowlark jam on Tuesday night or the funk jam that I do at the Armoury every Wednesday, we get people out at midnight in the middle of the week and that does not happen in Boston. Because the fans here love going out, they love supporting music, seeing music, being part of the scene. That’s the number one reason I moved here. It’s got an energy to it.

How do you see this playing out? In your dreams, how do you want things to go from here?

PP: Considering that the Arcoda launch party was at the Walnut Room in February -- in a little more than four months, I’ve already done more than I expected to do in four or five years. I’ve played the Fillmore, I’ve played the Boulder Theater, Bluebird, headlined the Fox., I’ve worked with a bunch of great musicians in town. So, my expectations have not only been met, but exceeded through this period of four months.

I mentioned those recent shows, but I know you have also some busy weekends lined up. By the time this interview has posted, you’ll have played the Colorado Brewer’s Festival in Ft. Collins and Crested Butte later that same day.

PP: Yeah, the Brewer’s Festival, there will be 20,000 people. We’re playing the mainstage. We got offered to headline that festival, but because we’re playing Crested Butte, we have to play an earlier slot, but still, it’s a great opportunity.

And you’ve already got things lined up in July, too, right?

PP: We have the Bluebird District Music Festival. Going back to what I was saying about the talent buyers, Tony Mason and Drew Gottlieb have been really supportive of our band and believed in what we’re doing. they put us on the inaugural Bluebird District Music Festival, which a huge honor and we can’t appreciate that enough. We’ll work really hard for that. And we just got the direct support spot for Anders Osborne at the Breckenridge Brewery Hootenanny after-party at Cervantes. And we’re co-headlining the Rialto Theatre July 17 with Miles Lee Band. He’s a really good friend.

As far as goals go, though,  the next big goal that I want to do is play at Red Rocks. I’m trying to get into the Film on the Rocks clique and hopefully we can get a call on that someday. We have an album coming out, called All the Little Things, probably in October, which has Levon Helm from the Band on it and Chris Pandolfi from the [Infamous] Stringdusters, and Ryan Zoidis from Lettuce, who just sold out Red Rocks

We finish our conversation in part two of my interview with Pete Pidgeon of Arcoda

Interview - Ray Shulman of Gentle Giant

Ray Shulman played bass and a list of other instruments in the progressive rock band Gentle Giant. The band’s 1974 release, The Power and the Glory has been recently reissued (review), with remastering by Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson. I spoke with Ray about the remastered package and Gentle Giant’s past.

Jester Jay: Hi, Ray. I’m very excited to talk with you about the reissue of The Power and the Glory. I know that you’ve had some interaction with Steven Wilson over the years. For example, you were credited with DVD authoring on his album, The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories).

Ray Shulman: I’ve worked with him for quite a while now on a few of his Blu-rays and DVDs. So, we got to know each other quite well.

JJ: Did that have anything to do with him getting involved in this project?

RS: A little bit. Actually, I found out that he was a fan of Gentle Giant and he’d been dying to do the remixes for a long time. It just became an opportunity. The timing was right. We were ready. We’d had offers from other people who wanted to mix it in surround (sound) before and we weren’t very enthusiastic. But because I knew Steven and I really like his work, I like what he does – I like him as an engineer, as a producer and he’s a great musician – the time was definitely right.

JJ: I would agree. He’s done a wonderful job with the King Crimson back catalog and his other projects. What did he bring to The Power and the Glory?

RS: We were happy with him. What we said was, “Do whatever you want. Do it how you feel. Don’t be dictated to by our mix, by the original mix. Just go ahead and do it.” But on the other hand, he’s so respectful of the past. He won’t do anything alien. Like, for instance, he wouldn’t use modern reverb or anything like that. He definitely has a reverence and respect for what we did back then. But what he brought… obviously, the technology has moved on enormously since we recorded the album and, in a way, I think that his philosophy is, “mix it how you would mix it if you were working today, bring that technology to bear, but don’t let it dominate.” To me, it sounds more open and a bit deeper. I think our original mix is really good, but he definitely brought a depth to it and an openness to it that I really like. Also, just the fact that when he mixed it in surround sound, he mixed it in 5.1 and that opened it up a lot for me. I really enjoyed his mixes.

JJ: In contrast to the 35th Anniversary reissue that Derek (Shulman) put together, I noticed that Wilson included the instrumental outtake from “Aspirations” instead of the live version of “Proclamation”.

RS: Steven just found that on the multi-track and I think he really enjoyed it. What it was, we did a couple of versions on that track, “Aspirations”. It’s more or less a jam in the studio; it’s basically one take and we’d just overdub a vocal, I believe. But we did it and we just couldn’t get the feel right. I think we went to the pub and after we came back from the pub, we decided to take a last try. That’s how it was. I think Steven found the outtake on the multi-tracks and he wanted to include it.

JJ: The regular album version is great, but this one really lets you focus on the smooth integration of all the musicians coming together on it. It has a very immediate sound. 

I had another question about the track list for the remaster. In the past, members of the band have expressed unhappiness with the title single, saying that it was an afterthought, that the record label came at the end, looking for a single. Do you still feel unhappy with that piece?

RS: In a way, you’re right. It wasn’t really part of the album. The record company at the time was definitely looking for a single, something they could take to radio. So, I think we recorded about three different tracks. We can never find the other two tracks. I think we had three goes at writing a short piece, a three minute piece and “The Power and the Glory” is ultimately what we were happiest with, but it was never going to be included on the album. Nowadays, it just has historic value, as opposed to any kind of intrinsic album value. It’s kind of a rarity, in a way.

JJ: I agree that it doesn’t quite fit the album, but it also doesn’t seem to be that bad a piece.

RS: No, exactly. And also, I think that, with time, you kind of mellow. Things you were kind of militant about at the time… time passes and you can see some kind of value in it.

JJ: Can you tell me about the DVD and Blu-ray?

RS: Yes, what happened was that when I knew that Steven was going to mix it, I thought, “What’s the best quality audio you can put out there?” At the moment, it’s really Blu-ray for uncompressed surround sound and 96/24 stereo and it’s DVD, which is somewhat lower quality, but it’s still high end audio. When we decided to do that, for the visual side, you can do captions for each song: just the title of the song appears on screen. But because I work in graphics as part of my day job – I do some motion graphics – I thought I’d have a go at doing something. I started off…I think the first track I did was “Cogs in Cogs”. I made up some motion graphics for it and I sent that to Derek (Shulman) and Kerry (Minnear) and they were really encouraging. They said, “This is great. Carry on and do it.” Any kind of spare time, I’d try to do something for each track. In the end, we ended up with an album full of visuals. It’s not a strict interpretation of the lyrics really; it’s more an interpretation of the music. Derek wrote the lyrics and, obviously, every listener can interpret them in different ways, but I just wanted to give something just to accompany it. Hopefully, the people who buy it will appreciate that.

JJ: Looking back at when Gentle Giant originally made this album, how did you develop your arrangements? You guys were all multi-instrumentalists, so how did you decide on the roles and textures for a particular piece?

RS: Well, myself and Kerry were the main music writers and Derek was the main lyricist. In the early days, we used to collaborate more: one section would be my section and one section would be Kerry’s. As time developed, we wrote whole pieces on our own. Kerry’s pieces, he’s a classically trained musician, so he’d almost write them orchestrally and even if you learned the parts by ear, they could be on manuscript. He’d share out his arrangement as he demoed it. Then later, in rehearsal, you’d add your own touches to it. Likewise, with mine, I’d write on guitar and when it came to giving Kerry a keyboard part, it made the keyboard part kind of unconventional because Kerry would play a guitar line on the keyboard and then embellish it with different implementations. In the studio, we’d always record a basic track, with just a bass, drums, basic keyboard and guitar. Then after that, we’d really experiment and try all these newfangled instruments, just to have a go on. Or even older instruments; we’d bring a pipe organ into the studio, just to see if it added any kind of textural thing to any particular song. There were also new, electronic instruments coming in at that time, as well. So, you’d want to just bring them in, even if you hadn’t worked out a fixed idea. If the texture fit, Kerry would always come up with a part that worked. It was like that, really.

JJ: Listening to a piece like “So Sincere”, it’s like a roller coaster ride. It runs through a host of musical ideas.

RS: That one is particularly well written. That’s one of Kerry’s tracks and it’s a fine piece of writing, I think. On any level, you could transcribe that as a score.

JJ: That’s part of what stands out about Gentle Giant’s music. The interesting rhythmic complexity has a well-crafted sound.

RS: It’s good you said that, because, at the time, it was hard to get a mass audience into that kind of sophisticated arrangement.

JJ: I know that some of your later material tried to find a wider audience and cross over. Bands like Yes and Genesis transitioned into a more popular sound. Was this a conscious attempt to move towards a more mainstream sound?

RS: It was, in a way. In order to continue, we always wanted to grow the audience. We were very aware that our early stuff was quite sophisticated. In a certain way, you almost needed to be a musician to understand it. As you say, a lot of our contemporaries were crossing over to a more mainstream audience. That must have been on our minds at the time, but there was always something holding us back. We could never quite fully do it. Even though on surface, we’d write a kind of commercial song, we’d always have to throw in something weird to entertain ourselves. But unfortunately, that also alienated the mass audience. It was never meant to be a mass audience kind of music. It should have just remained part of the underground, really.

JJ: Before I close, I’d like to hear about your more recent work. I know that you’ve worked a lot as a producer and as a composer. Can you tell me about some of these projects?

RS: I’ve done so much. Since the band, since 1980, I’ve done all kinds of things, always to do with music. When the band first broke up, I wrote music for advertising over here. It was very well-paid and I developed a knack for writing to order. I did that for quite a while, but I got bored with that. Then I went into production. In the late ‘80s throughout the ‘90s, I was in the studio all the time recording bands like the Sugarcubes, a band called the Sundays and lots of more independent bands. I enjoyed that for a while. After that, it was enough of the studio. I was spending so long in the studio, hours and hours, I really didn’t have any kind of home life. So, I decided to retire from production and the next thing I did was write music for computer games. I got into computers early on and loved them. I got into games and I started writing some soundtracks. And then, when DVDs came, I thought I’d learn how to do some graphics and I could work from home and make my living that way. And that’s what I’ve kept doing, really. I’ve had quite a diverse career, but it’s always about music and that’s where I am today.

JJ: It’s been a pleasure to talk with you and it’s been great to reacquaint myself with The Power and the Glory.

RS: Thank you ever so much.

(This interview first appeared on Spectrum Culture)

Interview - Mashup Artist Summit

This is a mashup interview. I conducted separate interviews with five of my favorite mashup artists, some by phone and others by email. Afterwards, mirroring their creative approach, I created this collage interview as a Mashup Artist Summit. None of these artists were aware of how their interviews would be combined, but rather than warp their words for surprise or humorous effect, I've attempted to keep their ideas intact while recognizing their related perspectives on mashups.

For those interested in getting all the context behind these quotes and learning more about these five artists, please browse the source interviews.
Tom Compagnoni (Wax Audio) – interview
Bob Cronin (dj BC) – interview
Eric Kleptone (The Kleptones) – interview
Max Tannone – interview
Mark Vidler (Go Home Productions) – interview

Jester Jay: Thanks for virtually joining me. How did you all get started?

Eric Kleptone: I've always made music. I played in bands when I was in school. I kind of fell into doing sound engineering and lighting and I got the bug and learned how to DJ.

Max Tannone: I deejayed for a while growing up in middle school and high school.

EK: I wanted to do live shows, so I taught myself how to DJ.

Bob Cronin: I made mix tapes in high school. In college, I made sort of pre-DJ music. I would play a tape and flip the tape over after 45 minutes. Doing those gigs made me always want to have something that was new, that somebody hadn't heard before.

Tom Compagnoni: I created my first digital “Cut & Paste” project in 2004, a 5 track EP called WMD …and Other Distractions. I cut up speeches from politicians of the time and mixed them with various beats and multi-track components.

Mark Vidler: I had been doing similar experiments on a Tascam Porta One 4-track recorder back in the mid-‘80s by overdubbing a cappella tracks from 12″ vinyl with instrumental sections from songs.

When I first started, I played in a band called Chicane between 1987 and 1995. I left the band in 1995, but by 2002, I was missing the action. The whole bootleg scene suddenly rose up overnight, and really pulled me back in. We called them bootlegs in the UK back then, “mashups” as a description came a couple of years later. I was convinced that I could use bootlegs or mashups as a vehicle to getting back into the music business. I set about doing my own bootlegs and knocked up Eminem’s “Without Me” vs. Wings’ “Silly Love Songs” (called "Slim McShady").

TC: It wasn't until about 2007 that I did my first mashup, Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”, called “Whole Lotta Sabbath”.

BC: I started making my own music and doing hip hop and electronic music in the studio with a four track. I went online and I found this website called GYBO – Get Your Bootleg On. At that time, it was mashup oriented. I was a lurker there for a long time before I posted anything. I needed to start doing it. It was like I had come home. It was a totally natural medium for me. I made some tracks and people seemed to like them and it was really hip hop based.

EK: The mashup thing… I've always been totally into samples. I used to make pause button edit tapes, just trying to get things to juxtapose, to make really good mix tapes. If somebody asked me for a mix tape, they didn't just get a bunch of tunes thrown on a tape; they got little interludes, little bits and pieces. The whole mashup thing, when it exploded, which was like 2001/2002, immediately I knew, “That’s exactly the sort of thing that I've been waiting for.” The first tune I did, the mashup happened in my head, which rarely happens. It was a mashup of “Ray of Light” by Madonna and “Cannonball” by the Breeders.

MT: I knew what a mashup was. I was familiar with The Grey Album, but I never tried it.

EK: Dangermouse’s Grey Album is okay, but it was very hip hop. It’s very American.

MT: One night, I don’t even know why, I just looped the Radiohead song, “I Might Be Wrong” from Amnesiac. A few years later I was listening to Jay Z’s American Gangster album and those a cappellas had come out. They were easy to find on the internet. So I just grabbed the a cappella to his song, “Pray”, and put them together because they had the same vibe going. It was just called “Wrong Prayer Remix”. A few weeks later, I did another Jaydiohead track, what became Jaydiohead, called “Ignorant Swan”. I chopped [Thom Yorke’s] “Black Swan” up and looped some pieces from that and put on another Jay Z vocal.

BC: There have been so many Jay-Z mashup albums, with lots of Jay-Z a capellas available.

MT: There’s a lot of rap a cappellas, so there’s a lot of source material to work with.

BC: I did a record with Phillip Glass and different hip hop artists and I was like, “All right, I want to do a mashup album.” A friend of mine posted a YouTube clip of the song, “Another Day on Earth” by Brian Eno and I had never heard that specific record. I really liked the progressions and the sound quality and the rhythmic sense of it. And I thought I could use this.

So that’s how you came up with Another Jay on Earth?

BC: It was so natural and fit so well and so easily. The cool thing about Another Jay on Earth is that Jay-Z’s vocals sound almost plaintive. The bluster sounds a little bit thinner. The music might have sort of a melancholy or sad vibe to it and it makes it sound like Jay-Z’s being introspective about his situation, about what it’s like to be a black male in America and getting mistreated and those sorts of concepts. Or when he’s doing the bragging thing, you’re kind of like, “Well I can see that this is a device he’s using to protect himself.”

MV: The best tracks are the ones that the choice of tracks is so disparate that you are not expecting them to work. I’m not a fan of ‘rap’ vocals being placed over a hip-hop track because you’d expect them to work without little or no additional creativity being needed by the remixer in question. The best mashups are the ones that contain a big surprise element in the choice of tracks used and the way in which they are put together.

EK: I like the big ideas. That’s the thing that inspires me. It takes quite a lot of effort to make a mashup that can grab people’s attention because people like novelty. There was a band about 20 years ago or so, Dread Zeppelin. I saw them. We were like, “Can they actually do this live?” “Heartbreaker Hotel” — there’s a mashup — a bit of “Heartbreaker” and a bit of “Heartbreak Hotel”. They were fucking unreal.

MT: I was super into an album of Bob Marley and Mobb Deep mashups that was hosted by Swindle [note: it was Jon Moskowitz and DJ Swindle]. There’s a lot of extra stuff happening and I really like that project. Anything that makes you thing “Wow, I never heard this song in this context.”

BC: “Call Me A Hole” is a perfect example of that.

TC: By Pom Deter. I thought it was a brilliant mash.

BC: You can say he’s making fun of Carly Rae Jepsen by playing Trent Reznor’s vocal over it, but it’s so much more than that. It sounds like its own song. It makes you say, “Maybe I was wrong about Carly Rae Jepsen.”

TC: A former member of Nine Inch Nails called “Call Me A Hole” an insult.

MT: Everyone likes what they like. It’s cool if some people don’t like it

TC: I've not had any negative feedback from any of the artists I've mashed so far.

MV: I tackle the mixes with a healthy dose of respect for the artists. On several occasions, my unsanctioned mashups led to the artists getting in contact with me to set about having them officially released.

EK: I put out A Night At The Hip-Hopera. I found a double Japanese CD of Queen karaoke. It took on a life of its own — all this stuff about copyright, it was self referential to the whole mashup thing. Brian May, from Queen, notoriously hated it, because he didn't get any money for it.

I think he’d argue that you and other mashup artists are taking advantage of his art instead of making something new.

EK: It’s based on other people’s music, so you’re never going to get away from people saying that. It’s just collage and appropriation and a means of expression, as much as picking up a guitar and playing the same three chords that 80% of guitarists play when they pick up a guitar.

BC: Fine, it may be a lesser, derivative art. You know what? That’s been said about so many forms of art over the years that it’s not even worth worrying about those folks.

MT: I see the argument, but sampling can be really interesting and inspiring.

TC: Most people are dismissive of lots of styles of music and art; it doesn't bother me at all.

MT: To invalidate it just because it goes against your viewpoint, that’s like saying anyone who plays guitar isn't a real musician. It’s the same argument in a new era.

MV: I used to staunchly defend mashups and what they represented in interviews 10 years ago. Saying it was the new punk in terms of attitude. It felt like mashup culture or attitude was at the forefront of something new.

BC: You can say that punk rock was the same way. It was primitive and used basic structures and therefore it was a lesser form of music. People said that about the blues and African music.

MV: All music or art borrows from the past, whether it be using a few blues licks or Beatles chords to create a new song. Hip-hop was the first to physically borrow little bits of other people’s works.

MT: I think that if John Lennon or Jimi Hendrix were alive today, they would be super into sampling and remix culture.

MV: There was a period of years when artists and labels were more than happy to have mashup remixers plunder their material; the mixes were free viral promos for their back catalog!

EK: I've got to remind myself that Brian May is plenty rich. You can see the different ways that artists handle their legacy. For example, the way that the Beastie Boys just put their a cappellas on their website: “Here they are, have some fun with them. You can’t possibly duplicate what we did. But you might come up something really cool.” Queen would only do that if there was a financial gain involved.

BC: It’s not like anybody can get rich off it.

That’s a good point. So, maybe you have to focus more on artistic success. Each of you has created some distinctive work. Can you give us an inside look at your creative process?

EK: I’m really proud of 24 Hours. I can’t remember exactly where the sort of eureka, moment hit, but I kind of sketched out the day, the 24 hours. Put it on a massive piece of paper, a flip chart on the wall: so this is the wakeup bit, this is the going-to-work bit. I’m going to come home from work, go to the pub, go to the club. I had a folder with 50 tunes in and I’d work a little bit on each tune. I think it took me about six months, but it nearly sent me insane doing it. I got so locked into the idea that I thought that, even if nobody else likes this, I've created something I’m proud of.

TC: I decide in advance what the grand vision is, usually a concept for a complete work like an album. The piece that I’m proudest of is 9 Countries. It’s an album I produced by taking the skills I developed as a mashup artist and applying them to a huge archive of sounds I recorded whilst traveling across Asia. A single looped beat would comprise sounds from a procession in Indonesia, temple drumming in India, the bell hanging around a goat’s neck in Tibet, monks chanting in a monastery in Laos, street hawkers in Myanmar, etc. The whole project took me about 4 years to produce. It’s probably the least heard work that I've created, but the few people who have taken the time to listen have told me how much they like it

BC: It’s much more than sticking A over B. There’s a lot of thought that goes into it, tweaking, and additional elements brought in and fragmenting the sound source. I did one that used a lot of new avant-garde electronic, early electronic performers and composers. That was kind of like using something more abstract and being able to use them as samples, with a beat, to create something really groovy out of something a little more far out.

EK: The challenge now is to come up with something that I think is artistically viable, that’s a good idea. But a good idea now, as opposed to what would have been a good idea ten years ago. Ideas are now the most valuable currency. It makes artistic judgment more important.

MT: I start the projects from an idea coming from sounds. So, I want to do a project with… then insert some kind of music: “punk”. That [note: Mic Check 1234!] was definitely the most challenging of any of the mixes that I've done. The main issue is that you have all these songs that are 120 or 130 beats per minute. Obviously, you have to worry about tempo.

TC: The vast majority of mashups posted on YouTube and elsewhere are poorly produced and amateurish. If rhythm and pitch are not perfectly synched, it makes the result sound painful to listen to.

MT: Yeah, I had to find fast rap songs to use or a slower punk song. That really narrows your scope of a cappellas that you can use.

TC: The only clash I want to hear is a clash of genres.

MV: Splice Captain Beefheart with Abba and I’d definitely give it a listen!

BC: The humor makes it healing to people and makes them smile or pay attention for a second. But in the end, the track has to be good.

EK: I find it really hard to listen to other people’s mashups because I can’t help but pick them apart technically. Particularly if you've got two whole songs and one goes up into a chorus and the other one doesn't change. To me, that’s a killer. I want the changes to kind of work perfectly.

BC: I like stuff that’s really structurally coherent: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus or intro-verse-chorus. It sounds right to me to attend that sort of a structure.

EK: I like that structure. If you have two tunes and they both go into the chorus at the same time and the change in key and the change in pitch is perfect, you just sit there and listen to it and go, “That doesn't need anything done to it, does it?”

MV: I like to think that I've always delivered mashups with a healthy dose of humor. A big smile-factor…

EK: I’d like to see Mark do an album. I know he’s got a real love of psychedelia and I’d love to see him really cut loose and make something really quite extreme with his style. I would love that.

MV: I have a fairly wide-ranging taste to be honest, but my main focus & love has to be psychedelia. I just loved the extreme experimentation at the time from these bands who were obviously dropping acid or pretending to drop acid!

Thank you all for your time and for being good sports about letting me mix you.

(This mashup first appeared on Spectrum Culture)

Interview with Eric Kleptone (The Kleptones)

Producer “Eric Kleptone” has released numerous album length mashup collections over the years. Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots was his first salvo, building on The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots with a dazzling number of rap acapellas and other sound samples. His concept album release 24 Hours served as “a day in the life,” matching sounds to the turning of the clock. His thoughtful, artistic approach creates mixes that can be appreciated on a number of levels.

This is part of a Mashup Artist Summit. Highlighted sections were mixed with other interview segments to create a conversation between several producers.

Jester Jay: The first thing of yours I came across was Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots.

Eric Kleptone: That was pretty much the first thing that came out. That was nearly ten years ago now. I thought it would date really badly but it seems to have kept a little bit of momentum. I see people on Twitter that discovered it. They’re listening to it and it’s new to their ears, so it’s kind of pleasing when they don’t say, “Oh man, that sounds so ten years ago.” It’s kind of as timeless as the components, really. Although, I listen to it and I hear technical crap, basically, because I was learning when I was doing that one. It was kind of an educational period for me.

JJ: If that was your first project, how did you get into it?

EK: I’ve always made music. I played in bands when I was in school. I played bass and played guitar badly and I used to work as a sound engineer. When I went to University, I did a degree, but at the same time, I was moonlighting. I kind of fell into doing sound engineering and lighting, initially just to get into the gigs for free. One club, I used to go there so often, eventually they said, “If you turn up a bit early and help the band in with their gear, you can get into the show for nothing.” I was happy for that. And that developed. They showed me how to mic up a band, how to mic a drum kit, how to operate a mixing desk. When I finished my degree, I went and worked there full time for about three or four years.

Then I started doing sound for local bands and stuff like that. At the same time, I was seeing people do one-man electronic shows and that was the sort of thing I was interested in. The bands I was in were falling apart, so I kind of thought I should buy a sampler. It was something I always wanted to do. I really loved things like Art of Noise or Negativland and the whole kind of dance culture, rave culture that had developed here in England gave a me bit of opportunity to kind of pursue that. I put out a few singles under names that don’t matter now and we sold a few thousand copies. I started traveling and I got the bug and learned how to DJ, which I had never really thought about doing before. But that was how you promoted yourself. I wanted to do live shows, but it was a lot easier to go and DJ, so I taught myself how to DJ.

But the mashup thing, it comes from sampling. I’ve always been totally into samples. I used to make pause button edit tapes – not necessarily like beats and stuff like that, but just trying to get things to juxtapose, to make really good mix tapes. When I was a kid, I really prided myself on this. If somebody asked me for a mix tape, they didn’t just get a bunch of tunes thrown on a tape, they got little interludes, little bits and pieces.

JJ: Mix tapes were your gateway into mashups?

EK: Well, it was just moving towards doing it. It’s really fun to mix things together. It’s like I was waiting for the technology to develop so I could actually do it without having thousands of pounds of equipment. The whole mashup thing, when it exploded, which was like 2001/2002, immediately I knew, “That’s exactly the sort of thing that I’ve been waiting for.” The first tune I did, the mashup happened in my head, which rarely happens. It was a mashup of “Ray of Light” by Madonna and “Cannonball” by the Breeders. I could sing one over the top of the other in my head. And I wondered if those two were in the same key. They were, but I needed to speed one up. So, I gave it a try and it worked. I put it online and I didn’t get stoned for it.

About the same time, I found the instrumental copy of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I was a massive Flaming Lips fan from way back to their first couple of albums. As soon as I got hold of the instrumental for the Yoshimi album, I thought, “This could be a project. This could be turned into an album.” I’d heard Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which is okay, but it was very hip hop. It’s very American. There’s an English perspective on mashups vs. an American perspective – English mashups always tend have a lot more humor and there are more weird, oddball elements thrown in. American mashups like The Grey Album kind of weld something into a hip hop formula. He’s used The Beatles, but it could have been any source material. Guys have done the same with the Beach Boys, with Pavement, with loads of different artists. When I hear it, I can always tell it’s an American album because they kind of weld it to a hip hop beat.

That’s one way of doing it, but that’s not really where I’m coming from. Whereas I was using The Flaming Lips as the music and not sampling them to make it a hip hop version of The Flaming Lips. There’s something and I think that a lot of mashup producers would agree, there’s something quite magical about getting two pieces to align perfectly without getting the welder out. You can cut things up to fit. But it’s better if you don’t have to cut them up, if they fit perfectly. For instance, if you have two tunes and they both go into the chorus at the same time and the change in key and the change in pitch is perfect, you just sit there and listen to it and go, “That doesn’t need anything done to it, does it?”That is a source of magical moments. The sum is greater than the parts, if you know what I mean.

It’s long-winded and kind of roundabout, but that’s the background for how I ended up doing this sort of a thing.

JJ: That goes a long way towards describing your definition of an ideal mashup.

EK: Yeah, it’s that. But it’s one thing creating it and another thing listening to it. I find it really hard to listen to other people’s mashups because I can’t help but pick them apart technically. If there’s something in there that I would have tweaked or I would have changed, particularly if you’ve got two whole songs and one goes up into a chorus and the other one doesn’t change. To me, that’s a killer. I want the changes to kind of work perfectly. A lot of people do sort of a dance mashup, where they have a dance track that just hits one note all the way through. But the vocal is a song, so it has verses and choruses and a bridge. They don’t try to carve the backing track to match the song.

JJ: You want that structure…

EK: Well, I like that structure. Bear in mind, what I think is a good mashup is not necessarily what anybody else thinks is a good mashup.

I have no interest or pleasure in mashing up 95% of modern chart pop music. It doesn’t really do anything for me. Also, there’s stuff that I won’t really touch. Like I don’t use The Beatles very much because it’s a little overused and you’re not really going to come up with anything that is a fraction as good as the original. Although I’m sure that someone who a massive fan of anything could say that about a mashup. I always try to feel like I add an artistically viable slant on something, if you know what I mean.

JJ: I know it takes a lot of work to make it come together, but how do you reply to the criticism that dismisses mashups as a derivative thing?

EK: Well, “derivative” – it’s based on other people’s music, so you’re never going to get away from people saying that. The reason I mentioned my background is that I don’t really see it as different. The only difference between mashups and any other kind of sample-based or appropriation-based music is that finally we have the kind of technology to be able to use a four or five minute chunk of music. Mashups came because people could use an entire acapella. They could use four minutes of a tune and four minutes of another tune and still add more drums and bass or other bits and pieces. I don’t know that it answers your question, but I think it was an already an artform before it was known as a mashup. It’s just collage and appropriation and a means of expression, as much as picking up a guitar and playing the same three chords that 80% of guitarist play when they pick up a guitar.

JJ: So, mashups as an extreme form of sampling. I can hear what you mean, like the Beastie Boys sampling David Bromberg’s “Sharon” for “Johnny Ryall” on Paul’s Boutique.

EK: Or like Prince Paul on Three Feet High and Rising. Apart from the few sort of pop hits, I didn’t really get into hip hop. I didn’t get into hip hop at all until I heard Straight Out Of Compton by N.W.A.  and Three Feet High and Rising, both came out the same year. They completely blew me away musically because Straight Out of Compton had the attitude, but Three Feet High and Rising was such a perfect blend, such an awesome record, and it had everything on it from sampling Otis Redding, Steely Dan, and Multiplication Rock and all of the little spoken word bits and skits. They were funny. They were fucking hilarious guys.

That related for me to stuff I liked, like Negativland. I found that stuff by accident when I was about 17. John Peel played a couple of tracks by Negativland and I used to do all the things that nerdy kids do. I sat up on a school night, under the covers, with a finger on the pause button on the tape deck and if he played something that sounded vaguely good, I would just whip the pause button off and tape it and end up with these compilation tapes. And a lot of the weird things that he played ended up on Kleptones albums as well because I never throw anything away. I digitized all those tapes. So, he played Negativland and I went and bought Escape From Noise which I still think is an absolute masterpiece. But it had the humor, it was radical, it was sampling conservative preachers and all sorts of stuff, but cutting up the words in a way that we find now with Cassetteboy. But 25 years ago, you had to sit there with a pair of scissors and some tape and actually cut the stuff up, word by word to make the sentence.

JJ: That’s like Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. It’s the same idea.

EK: That’s it. If they wanted a section, they would play it long form, record it from one cassette to another. A lot of that stuff, David Byrne had on cassette. So he would find a section, and he would play the cassette over the top of what they jammed as a band and try and find a section that worked well. Then they’d copy it onto the multi-track. It was sampling in its rawest form. He didn’t have the ability to do what we do now. I can put a spoken-word sentence into Ableton and move the syllables so they line up a little bit closer to the beat. Maybe I don’t want them to fall exactly on the beat, I still want to keep the cadence of the real speaker, but I can make it fit in four beats and make it hit one or two of the beats, or one of the beats and an off beat. So, even though it’s spoken word, it falls into the rhythmic pattern of the track underneath it. Little things like that are so cool to be able to do.

It’s very easy to get blasé nowadays; you can do anything to anything. But I’ve got to remind myself that, at the end of the day, you still need a good idea. You can have some amazing technology at your disposal, but if you don’t have a reason to use it… The problem nowadays is that we can do absolutely anything. It makes artistic judgment for me more important. That’s why I haven’t really put quite as much out in the last couple of years. I’ve got maybe a couple of hundred demos of tunes. I came very close to putting out an album last year, but it didn’t sound any different to the last one. I kind of like to feel that I’m progressing with what I‘m doing, to feel that I’ve  learned something with everything I’ve made. I don’t know if that matters to other mashup guys but it does to me.

JJ: I’ve noticed that you’ve always focused on releasing whole albums.

EK: I spit out little individual tunes and they’re kind of cute, but everyday you have maybe 20 YouTube clips, a couple of hundred links that you click on. I didn’t really feel comfortable putting out tracks that would just get watched once or listened to once and then get consigned to the dustbin of history. Partially because I spend a little bit too long making them. Making albums gave me an opportunity to make a body of work. To make something that had some flow to it so I could use it show some of my personality, basically. When {Hip-Hopera} came out, it really blew me away because I got it just about right. At that time, it was a little bit of a novelty for someone to give away a whole CD’s worth of music and people would listen to it without fast-forwarding. When I first put out A Night At The Hip-Hopera, it came as one long MP3. I resented splitting it for quite a long time, which was pretty belligerent on my part. But I really wanted people to listen to the whole thing. I wanted to tell a little bit of a story.

The same thing happened with Hip-Hopera [as Yohimi]. I found a double Japanese CD of Queen karaoke, which took three months to arrive from Japan. When it turned up, I thought, “this will be fun, I’ll do something,” Because I love Queen: the second record I bought was “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was like, even if this doesn’t work for anybody else, I’m going to enjoy listening to it. But it developed into a story; it took on a life of its own. Throwing in all this stuff about copyright, it was self referential to the whole mashup thing. But it blew me away that people actually listened to the whole thing. And it still does. So, that’s why I kind of pursue the albums. It’s the best chance I’ve got really. 24 Hours is the same. Again it goes over the top; it’s like maybe three hours long. But it’s like an audio film.

JJ: The idea behind 24 Hours is really cool, tagging the tracks to the time of day.

EK: That’s the thing. After the Yoshimi thing and Hip-Hopera, I wanted an idea. I didn’t want to tie it to one band, because I got really lucky with finding Yoshimi and lucky again finding the Queen stuff. There wasn’t a source of instrumental music and vocal acapella music of another band that fit the bill. But I was building up a collection of other stuff. And I thought I’d like a structure. I’d like to find something I can hang all this stuff on that isn’t just a collection of tunes. I can’t remember exactly where the sort of eureka, bingo moment hit, but I kind of sketched out the day, the 24 hours. Put it on a massive piece of paper, a flip chart on the wall. I carved it into sections: so this is the wakeup bit, this is the going-to-work bit. I’m going to come home from work, go to the pub, go to the club. Then, floaty-floaty. And we’ll see what happens if I can get that far. I had about six or seven tunes that I’d already written and it was like, “That could be the morning tune. That’s kind of about work. That’s sort of about drugs.” I could see it in that sort of context. The tunes would get tailored so that they fit the time frame a little bit closer every time. I would just go ‘round. I had a folder with 50 tunes in and I’d work a little bit on each tune, then go to the next one and work a little bit on that one. Some tunes got thrown away. Until, by the end, there were two or three gaps. Then I really put the nose to the grindstone and just wrote two or three things that were very specific, which was the hardest bit: to just do the slog, to get it all to lock together.

I’m really proud of 24 Hours. I think it took me about 6 months, but it nearly sent me insane doing it. I’m quite lucky. I was still doing a full time job at the same time, but I didn’t do anything else. I didn’t have a relationship or anything, I would just get up in the morning, go to work, come home, work on 24 hours for six or seven or eight hours until two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning. Then I’d get five hours sleep and get up the next morning and go back to work. I got so locked into the idea that I thought that even if nobody else likes this, I’ve created something I’m proud of. One of the things that keeps me going about the stuff I’ve done, is that every single album has its fans. I have Yoshimi fans, I have Hip-Hopera fans, I have Uptime/Downtime fans, and 24 Hours fans. And even some From Detroit to J.A. fans.

I like the big ideas, that’s the thing that inspires me to make something. We are surrounded, more so than ever. The internet is chock full of stuff. Ideas are now the most valuable currency. If you’ve got a really strong idea, you can attach things to it that, maybe on their own, may not have such good strength. It’s like hearing a really good song in a film. It augments it. If you just heard that bit of music in its own right, it may not have the same impression on you, but in combination with a narrative… So, the album structure, the narrative, the concept – they’re a way to try to enhance, put fairy dust on what in effect is quite basic. A mashup is a pretty basic thing at the end of the day, but so is paint on a piece of paper or whatever.

JJ: Have you ever been contacted by the artists whose material that you’ve used? Not necessarily threats, but…

EK: We got lawsuits for Hip-Hopera. I didn’t, but Andy Baio who runs Waxy.org mirrored it because my poor, old feeble website died when it got popular. He put it up and he got the “Cease and Desists” and stuff like that. I’ve never actually been personally contacted by anybody. Flaming Lips, I know were kind of cool with Yoshimi but they wouldn’t go on the record. A friend of mine used to work with other bands on the same label. He was in America, talking to Warner Brothers and they were listening to it in the office. So, that’s The Flaming Lips’ record label.

Brian May, from Queen, notoriously hated it, because he didn’t get any money for it. He made a big point about it, that someone sampled him and he made a comment about how he didn’t get paid for this one and this was just at the point where Hip-Hopera was reaching its notorious peak.

The man is plenty rich enough. You can see the different ways that artists handle their legacy. For example, the way that The Beastie Boys just put their acapellas on their website: “Don’t feel the need to rip them off from whatever source. Here they are, have some fun with them. We’ve had some fun with them. You can’t possibly duplicate what we did. But you might come up something really cool.” It’s a way of connecting to the artists. Queen would only do that if there was a financial gain involved. Despite the fact they’re pretty rich, they’re still very greedy.

JJ: Related to the idea of mashups, what do you think of cross genre cover bands?

EK: Yeah, there was a band about 20 years ago or so, Dread Zeppelin

JJ: I remember them. Their lead singer was Tortelvis.

EK: Exactly. I saw them. They came and played at a club that I used to work in. They were fucking unreal. We’d already heard bits of the album, but we were like, “Can they actually do this live?” And they rocked. Some of their tunes… there was like “Heartbreaker Hotel”, a bit of “Heartbreaker” and a bit of “Heartbreak Hotel”. There’s a mashup.

JJ: To wrap up, where do you see yourself going from here? What do have in the works? What are you looking to head to?

EK: I don’t know. It’s a big question for me at the moment. I’m doing far more non-music related work right now. But taking it on limits the amount of time I have to dig into making more music. I think the problem at the moment is that what we were doing maybe seven or eight years ago is now far more commonplace. It’s like a button on Photo Shop. The mashup button, you know? And in the Photo Shop of music, you’ve got the punk button, the distorted guitar palette, the psychedelic button, the rave button. A bunch of guys have created this thing, the mashup button. But now, there’s far more acapella material and instrumental material out there. Now, mashups are really mainstream. It takes quite a lot of effort to make a mashup that can shock people or grab people’s attention because they’ve pretty much heard it all before. And people like novelty, which is fine. I’m not saying, “Boo hoo. Our five seconds of fame are over,” but the challenge now is to come up with something that I think is artistically viable, that’s a good idea. But a good idea now, as opposed to what would have been a good idea ten years ago. In the same kind of way that film or videos developed, sound has to develop as well. So, I have no idea. I’m kind of looking for the idea. If I find it, I’ll do something with it. If I don’t find it, I’m not going to do anything in the meantime. I have more fun making mix tapes at the moment, more than anything else, to be honest.

JJ: I’ll close out by saying that I really have enjoyed your work and thanks for your time. You and the other people I’ve interviewed have come at this from a number of different directions.

EK: That’s cool; who else are you talking to?

JJ: So far, I’m talking to Mark Vidler from Go Home Productions and Tom Compagnoni from Wax Audio,

EK: I’ve met Mark once or twice. The Wax Audio guy, I’d love to meet. He’s Australian, isn’t he?

JJ: Yes.

EK: He’s been traveling around, doing a thing. He does stuff in the similar vein to me and he’s also got an equivalent sense of humor. I wish more people would do albums. I’d like to see Mark Vidler do an album. He kind of sticks out little EPs and little tunes. But I know he’s got a real love of psychedelia and I’d love to see him really cut loose and make something really quite extreme with his style. I would love that.

Interview with Max Tannone

Max Tannone used to release his mashups under the name Minty Fresh Beats, but has now switched over to his own name for his projects. Most recently, he’s been moving more towards remixes and music production, but his mashup catalog stands out for using unexpected music samples like punk, dub and reggae. He’s tended to release whole albums of related material, like his Jamaican take on Mos Def, Mos Dub, or his earliest release, Jaydiohead, mashing Jay Z with Radiohead. We talked for almost 40 minutes on the phone for this interview.

This is part of a Mashup Artist Summit. Highlighted sections were mixed with other interview segments to create a conversation between several producers.

Jester Jay: Hi, Max. My introduction to your work was Mos Dub, but I later came back to listen to Jaydiohead. I really enjoyed that. Your mashups seem to be very fluid and natural sounding.

Max Tannone: Thanks a lot!

JJ: Listening to Mos Dub in particular, when I compare Mos Def’s original to your mix, it sounds like you’re fine-tuning the phrasing to fit the beat better.

MT: Yeah, definitely things are slid around a little bit to make it fit better or to make it sound for effects. I cut the vocals apart, and then I can take a certain word or phrase and have the effect on that portion of the audio. The end goal obviously is to make it on-beat with the music behind it.

JJ: On “In My Math,” the rhythm on that and the flow of the lyrics sound cleaner on your version than the original. It was sweet.

MT: Thanks. It wasn’t a conscious decision to make it that way. I never thought that the original wasn’t quite on beat; it was just that I make the backdrop, the music track, first and then I fit the block vocals in and then go back and tweak the music. I’m glad it sounded good.

JJ: On that track, the original beat is a little stuttered, so there’s more syncopation, where that rhythm doesn’t always mesh with his flow. It’s not bad, but yours is a thing of beauty. With the reggae groove, the vocals sit right in the pocket. 

MT: The original track was done by DJ Premier, one of my all-time favorite producers. I believe I read that that original track actually had a different beat and they couldn’t get sample clearance. So, that he made that one for the final version. I could be totally wrong on that, because I know that’s happened with a lot of songs, but I do think I read that somewhere.

I love the original and I love DJ Premier. DJ Premier and Mos Def together is a dream team for me. I was just happy to put my spin on it.

JJ: I listened to your latest project, Mic Check 1234!, and, once again, the meshing of flow to beats was natural. “Definition of Blitzkreig” made me wonder why no one has mashed up “Blitzkreig Bop” by the Ramones before. 

MT: That was a fun project. That was definitely the most challenging of any of the mixes that I’ve done. Generally a punk song is really fast, so the main issue is that you have all these songs that are 120 or 130 beats per minute. That really narrows your scope of acapellas that you can use over the track. I had to find fast rap songs to use or a slower punk song. Of course, there are fast rap songs and slow punk songs, but in general for those genres, it’s a fast punk song and a medium to slower tempo rap song.

JJ: I know you’ve covered this in other interviews, but our readers might not know. Could you tell us how you got started making mashups?

MT: Originally, I started just making music on my computer, just for fun. I was doing beats and putting sounds together, having a good time. Then I deejayed for a while growing up in middle school and high school, doing whatever parties, school dances, stuff like that and continued to make beats. I knew what a mashup was, I was familiar with The Grey Album [Danger Mouse], but I never tried it. Then, one night, I don’t even know why, I just looped the Radiohead song, “I Might Be Wrong” from Amnesiac. I looped that up and then,  a few years later I was listening to Jay Z’s American Gangster album and those acapellas had come out. They were easy to find on the internet. So I just grabbed the acapella to his song “Pray” and put them together because they had the same vibe going. Lyrically and musically, it just made it. Everybody was on MySpace at the time, so I put that on MySpace and people liked it. I didn’t have the name Jaydiohead yet, it was just called “Wrong Prayer Remix.” A few weeks later, I did another Jaydiohead, what became Jaydiohead, track called “Ignorant Swan.” I was listening to the Thom Yorke solo album, The Eraser and I really liked “Black Swan.” So, I thought “Let me play with that.” I chopped that up and looped some pieces from that and put on another Jay Z vocal. I had those two songs, but they just sat for a long time, a year or nine months. Then, one day I was driving and I thought, “I have those two tracks. It might be fun to do a whole project of these.” I was listening to a lot of Radiohead at the time and I just came up with the name “Jaydiohead.” I thought it was really funny and catchy, too. I did 10 songs and everyone seemed to like it and I had a lot of fun doing it. So, I just kept going from there, seeing if I could do a few more of these projects. I’ve done a couple of them since then.

JJ: So, a one-off or a couple of fun things motivated you to dive in all the way. It looks like most of your mashup projects have been full, album-length collections. Is that what you enjoy doing the most?

MT: Yeah. I like to do groups of songs to really get into a theme. I like to explore a certain theme. Mos Dub and Dub Kweli [based on Talib Kweli] were probably my favorites because I really enjoy that type of music and it was an excuse to watch hours of crazy soundsystem videos on YouTube from the early ‘80s, under the guise of research. But throughout this time, I’ve been also been making beats and doing remixes for other people that might have sampled elements or not. It wouldn’t be considered mashup music. This is actually what I want to focus on, going forward.

JJ: Your site has a Nora Jones track and a number of other remix tracks that you’ve done. Are those authorized remixes? If you don’t mind me using that word…

MT: The Nora Jones is kind of an in-between thing, but it boils down to “no.” They were never released officially. The Nora Jones is, essentially, a bootleg remix, but I don’t think too many other people actually got the acapella. That wasn’t sanctioned by her or at least it wasn’t released by her. Whatever other mixes are on there…Well, there are a few that I did with an artist. I have a remix for Duncan Sheik, the singer/songwriter. That was an official remix that was on his album of remixes. But everything else is pretty much a case where I liked the song and I found the acapella or I knew a friend who’s in the band of the person that I’m remixing. Or I find someone online and reach out to them or sometimes people reach out to me on the internet. Usually it’s an artist and, if I have the time and I’m interested, I’ll just do it to do it.

JJ: So, you’re doing more remixes than mashups these days?

MT: Definitely. I want to put more focus on that and also on original production in general. I just finished a project with a rapper in New York City, his name is Champagne Jerry. We just finished his album and we’re still trying to figure out how we’re going to release it. I did like 12 or 13 songs on that, making beats. It’s not a mashup.

The lines get a little blurred, too, because even when I was making all these quote unquote mashup projects, at some point I’d wonder if it was a mashup or just a beat that heavily samples a dub song. You know what I mean? The same sort of track released by someone else might not be called a mashup, especially if it had original lyrics. It might just be an album heavily sampling dub. So, I was trying to blur the line. I wasn’t just taking a song and putting lyrics over it. I was really interested in adding more elements and doing all kinds of stuff to it.

JJ: Your work stands out, because your production is not just a simple beat and a vocal track. Like on “History Town” from Mos Dub, you’re getting some scratchy effects by chopping and sampling the source material. That focus on production seems to be key to your style.

MT: It’s gratifying that other people pick up on that. I was intentionally trying to make it sound cool. If something is simple, just putting the two tracks together and matching up the tempo… if I really thought that sounded the best it could be and that adding stuff just detracted from the overall feel of it, then I would leave it simple. But it’s all about the end goal. I was just trying to make it interesting and put my own style onto it. There’s so many mashups because it’s easy to do. Just because it’s easy to do doesn’t necessarily take anything away from it. On the contrary, that’s one of the cool things about it. But I just thought it was fun to take it to a new level.

JJ: I know it’s a matter of taste, but what qualities do you think define the perfect mashup?

MT: I don’t like things that are super crazy necessarily. Not to take anything away from artists like Girl Talk, I think he’s incredibly talented and obviously, the guy has a lot of skill. Personally, I don’t listen to that type of music, with tons of samples flying in and out from different songs. It might be fun at a party I guess, but it’s not really my thing. I stick to a simple idea that’s executed consistently and makes sense.

I don’t listen to a lot of mashups by other artists, but there’s an album of Bob Marley and Mobb Deep mashups. I was super into that. But again, they’re really similar to what I try to accomplish. There’s a lot of extra stuff happening and I really like that project. Anything that makes you think, “Wow, I never heard this song in this context…” It makes sense, it’s really cool and it makes the person want to go and explore the catalogs of the source material being used. That comes into play, especially when you’re using obscure music that you’re sampling from, which I’ve done several times.

I know I’m rambling a bit. It’s something that doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, but it makes you realize that it’s a new context and it’s not necessarily trying to do too many things at once. That’s just me. Some people might like the sort of more frenetic style, which is cool.

JJ: Part of the joy of listening to Girl Talk is trying to identify the track before it goes away in the mix. It’s more about flow than it is about a simple idea.

MT: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I can see why that would be cool. And it brings me back to Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys. The lyrics were obviously new, but that’s essentially a mashup record. We get into these technicalities of is it a mashup or what, but it’s just sampled music that samples are flying in and out. That being said, it’s one of my favorite albums. I guess in certain contexts, it can be great.

JJ: How would you respond to critics that dismiss mashups or even remixes?

MT – Everyone likes what they like. I can’t speak for how other people see it. I see the argument that, in some instances, sampling can be really “lazy”. But it can be really interesting and inspiring. I would point to artists that sample incredibly, like Four Tet. He’s an electronic musician that does incredible work with samples. He’s an electronic guy, but definitely hip hop influenced. He’s really amazing. He’s not strictly sampling; he plays a lot of instruments. Or take Beck for example; listen to Odelay. Or go back to Paul’s Boutique or De La Soul. To me it’s really interesting, seeing how different elements are put together. It’s cool if some people don’t like it or want to deride it.

There are a lot of examples that can support the use of sampling. I think that if John Lennon or Jimi Hendrix were alive today, they would be super into sampling and all of this crazy computer manipulation and remix culture. They wouldn’t have to because they can play instruments really well and write songs, but I feel like they would be into it because it’s a new twist and it allows you to do things you couldn’t otherwise do. I could be wrong, it’s pure speculation. But to invalidate it just because it goes against your viewpoint. – it’s kind of a blanket statement, “Sampling is bad, anyone who does it has no talent.” That’s like saying anyone who plays guitar isn’t a real musician. It’s the same argument in a new era.

JJ: Another factor could be that a lot of mashups are seen as novelties; the idea is often humorous or ironic. But you seem to take a more artistic approach rather than using humor.

MT – I don’t strive to. I guess because I start the projects from an idea coming from sounds. So, I want to do a project with… then insert some kind of music. For example, I want to do a project with African funk music from the ‘70s because I think it sounds amazing. Wouldn’t it be cool to have somebody rap over this if it were done a certain way? It’s coming from that. If I were trying to be intentionally funny, like an album of Kanye West and Taylor Swift together, I guess it would be cool, but it’s just not…I have to be interested in whatever I’m working on. Otherwise, I’d never finish it. I probably would never be able to start it. There’s nothing wrong with going for humor, I think that’s great. It’s just not what I’ve done thus far.

JJ: Your mashups are all hip hop focused. Have you considered doing stepping outside of that?

MT: I’ve thought about it but most of my experience has been within the hip hop world, and it seems like it’s easier to find rap acapellas. Maybe it’s because I’ve only really been looking for them. There’s a lot of rap acapellas, so there’s a lot of source material to work with.  Also, it’s easier to use a rap acapella compared to someone singing because you don’t have to worry about melody so much. You don’t have to worry about the key of the music that you’re sampling, for the most part.

JJ: But even on Mos Dub, you have some lines that Mos Def is half singing and you made that fit with the tune.

MT: That was a conscious effort to make sure that would sound like that. He had some melody there. Obviously, you have to worry about tempo, but now you have the additional complexity of pitch. You have to fit the key of both elements.

JJ: What’s your favorite project out of your own collection? What are you most proud of?

MT – If I had to choose one, I’d choose Mos Dub. Not because of the way it turned out, but because of the process when I was making it. It was the most enjoyable and I learned the most from it. Which I guess is not really, “Which one do you like the best?” But I can’t really separate the creation process from the end product. I really enjoy how that project got me into that kind of music super heavy because I ended up doing a follow up with Talib Kweli’s lyrics. And still, to this day, I listen to it all the time.

JJ: Aside from that Bob Marley/Mobb Deep mashup, are there other producers you really respect?

 MT: I’m trying to think. Off the top of my head, I can’t really think of anyone. I don’t listen to that type of music a lot. I wish I had more. I’ve checked out stuff over the years. Not a lot, but here and there you hear about something. That one example is the only thing that comes into my head and I still listen to that today. That was hosted by Swindle, I guess that’s a DJ, but I don’t know if that DJ put it together. [note: it was Jon Moskowitz and DJ Swindle]  I wish I had more interesting recommendations.

JJ: Thanks for talking to me, I really appreciate your time.

MT: Thank you for the opportunity