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Singer-songwriter Mike Sanchez is currently on tour with Chris Daughtry. In March 2012, Mike released a 3-track MP3 album, Grove and Third Sessions, on his own record label (Dirty University) and plans to hit the studio following the tour. Before every show, Mike uploads a Backstage Tailgate video. Check them out, and be sure to follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

By Chris Borchert

Just before Mike Sanchez finishes his set, he whips out his iPhone and snaps a picture of the crowd. “Follow me on Twitter because I’m going to take a picture of the audience and I want you to try and find yourself!”

Mike Sanchez gets it.

HEY, WHO’S THE OPENER TONIGHT?

“From industry standards, you can’t try and out perform the main act. You’re playing there for a reason; you’re opening the show. I’m happy and humbled to be there, so I’m going to set up the best show possible.”

“I’m also going to make sure everyone knows who I am. I’m going to play my tunes, I’m going to tell you where to get them, I’m going to do my Twitter and do my Facebook, I’m going to tell you that I’ll be at the merch table, I’m going to play a couple covers, you know. I have 20-25 minutes to connect. I’m the new kid. People come to the shows and they’re like ‘Who is this guy?’ I have to connect. It’s not like Oh I’m going to see Mike Sanchez, he plays the one song I love, it’s not at that point yet. I’ve got to find connections. So my whole thing is about connecting with the audience.”

I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS MY WHOLE LIFE… SO YEAH, I’M READY.

Mike spent virtually his entire life trying to make it in music, and right now he’s knocking on the door.

“My dream was to always be the singer of the band. I knew I wasn’t that great of a guitar player, wasn’t the best drummer. I could play bass, but singing I had a little more control of. I wanted to be David Lee Roth.”

Mike got his break like so many before him: with a bit of luck, and a whole lot of talent.

“I met Chris [Daughtry] in California and we became buddies. So when he would come to town he’d call me up and say “Hey man, want to open for us with your band?”

“One night he was playing in St. Petersburg and at that time I didn’t have a band. He called me up and said, ‘Hey man I need an opener for the show, do you want to come and hang and have a good time and open the show?’ And I said ‘Well, it’s literally just me, it’s become just me and a guitar. He said, ‘Well do you still want to do it?’ And I said yeah.

“So I showed up and he’s like you weren’t kidding, its just you and a guitar. And he watched the show and said THAT’s what’s going to pop. Just you on stage with a guitar, that’s your starting point, and we’re going to write songs and make this happen. I had tons of songs but you know, you get your foot in the door and you collaborate with different people and things can really start to happen.”

“It took awhile after that. They had a crazy schedule playing and writing. Then one day Chris called me out of the blue and said ‘OK: you, guitar, let’s go to L.A. and write some songs and see what happens. No promises, let’s just see what happens.’

“So we go, and the rest is history. First night we were there, we got a couple beers, wrote a couple good songs, started recording them in L.A. Then I flew back home. Before you know it, we had about 4 or 5 songs, we did some really solid recordings. And I was like wow that’s awesome.”

“Then he said ‘We’re thinking about taking you on the road with us,’ and I said ‘Well that would be great.’ Of course it’s just talk and you never know. Then I got the call and he’s says: ‘Alright let’s do this. You ready?’ And it’s like, uhh I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, so yeah. (laughs)

IT’S KIND OF LIKE WE’RE SITTING ON THE TAILGATE OF A CAR, JAMMING AND HAVING A BEER

Before every show, Mike grabs his iPhone and records a Backstage Tailgate video. Then he immediately uploads it to YouTube.

“I started right off the bat. First show in Buffalo I took a picture of the audience – I’m like boom follow me on Twitter. I had the record on iTunes at the time, but that’s all I really had. I tried to meet as many people as I could but after the second show, they’re like OK we’re turning people away at the merch table. People want your music but they also want something to sign after the show. Cool. So what else could I do, especially for people who maybe didn’t buy the CD, maybe don’t know the music or follow me on Twitter?”

“Well, with YouTube I can just be like ‘Hey, my name’s Mike’ and post to YouTube and send out a link. So everyday I’m going to set up a camera backstage, usually in my dressing room, you know somewhere special. I wanted to keep it away from the front of the house, where people are all the time, and keep it in the back of the house. I really wanted to let people in to a world they don’t normally see. Most times I’ve been doing covers, sometimes I’ll do one of my own, and I’m just going to do something laid back and chill, kind of like if we were sitting on the tailgate of a car, jamming and having a beer.”

“After I did the first one, people thought it was really cool, because they would see the video, then see the show, then come hang out and talk to me after the gig. It’s relatable to everybody. Sometimes people request a tune and I’ll try to do it. So basically that’s the deal.”

HEY @THEMIKESANCHEZ: DON’T EVER WEAR THAT SHIRT AGAIN

“People love the audience shot. They can’t believe there’s a picture of them out there raising their hands, doing something crazy and fun. People love it because it allows them to become a part of it. And I think people say OK, I’ll follow this guy and find this picture, then they tweet at me telling me they found themselves, and I really try my best to get back to each and every person who tweets at me. And that’s the great thing about Twitter, you know, Facebook, yeah, but Twitter gives you a direct connection, and I think that’s pretty amazing. I think it’s helped me more than anything.”

“For example, someone can say to me ‘Hey @TheMikeSanchez, don’t ever wear that shirt again.’ And I can say ‘Yeah, I agree.’ Or I can say, ‘Hey man, whatever.’ Everything is so instant and at your fingertips. A lot of people come up to me at shows and say Ohh my name is @so and so and you said this to me the other day and it was so cool, so I had to come and see you. It’s that kind of connection that just works for me, and at this point I need it. And if this continues to goes further, which I hope and pray it will, I would be honored to continue to do that. That’s my thing and I’m going to go on and on and on with it.”

Catch Mike on tour with Chris Daughtry and Safetysuit this summer.

***

Kickshuffle is an online news source dedicated to covering the impact of new media on music and music business. Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter.

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Tim Westergren founded Pandora in January 2000 and now serves as its Chief Strategy Officer. Tim is an award-winning composer, an accomplished musician and a record producer with 20 years of music industry experience. He works extensively with technology partners, distribution partners, advertisers and investors to help shape the future of Pandora and personalized radio, and in 2010 he was listed by Time Magazine as one among the top 100 most influential people in the world.

By Chris Borchert

Last month at SXSW, you gave a presentation called “The Evolving Role of Radio.” What did you talk about and where does Pandora fit in?

So the headline is: radio is changing dramatically, and for the first time in a long, long time. The way I characterize the evolution is that we’re going from broadcast radio to personalized uni-cast radio, going from a single playlist to a mode where you can get your own music personalized and curated. That transition is accelerating, and its being driven by technology.

Smart phones have been a huge catalyst for it, allowing people to get personalized radio everywhere, including in the car. The implications of this transition are enormous for everyone in and around the music industry. Its of course huge for consumers who get a much more satisfying listening experience, and its huge for musicians as well. Thousands of musicians are getting played now who have never been played on radio before because you can accommodate a much greater catalog. And performers are also getting paid for their music where they are not on broadcast radio. It’s really a momentous transition in the industry.

You revealed the Song DNA for the first time at SXSW. How was that? What was the response like?

Well, we didn’t reveal the whole thing! (laughs) It was really fun, there were a lot of musicians in the audience so we did kind of a live analysis in a way, we played some songs and asked people to call things out and identify the melodic and harmonic elements. I think people were geeking out a little bit on the musicology. But it was really fun.

And you hosted live performances through the Pandora Discovery Den. What was that like?

We did it for four days and we had different genres each night. We had a DJ one night, we had indie rock one night, an acoustic night and we brought in a whole bunch of artists.

It’s fitting that you incorporated the live experience because, right now, everyone is talking about how live music is increasingly becoming such an important part of music business – especially with regard to monetization.

I think that is absolutely true. I think that live performance for the average working artist, actually for all artists, is becoming increasingly important. And those who have the ability and stamina to really do that are well-placed for the future. And we’re also hoping that we can potentially encourage that because Pandora has a lot of information about listeners. We know what people like, the kind of bands and songs they’ve thumbed up – and we have their locations, we know their zip code. So we have the ability to support local performances in a really compelling way across our entire audience.

We’ve actually done some experiments where we’ve taken an upcoming show and, using thumb history, found people who have thumbed up the band in a given geography and invited them to the show via email. We did it with Aimee Mann in LA, we did it with Dawes in Portland, we did it with Portugal. The Man in New York. We invite people within driving distance of the club and we’re filling these clubs one after the other.

It’s a really interesting solution for what is, I think most musicians would agree, one of the hardest problems to solve: how do you get people to come see you play?

Do you see Pandora playing an integral role in concert locations and turnout, and maybe even getting involved with festivals down the road?

That is certainly something we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Before Pandora, I was in a band for many years; I lived out of a van, I toured, I was kind of part of that sea of artists. I remember putting flyers up on telephone polls. For me, it’s particularly exciting to contemplate what’s possible when you have this intelligence about listeners and the ability to communicate with them.

You mention that music listeners are increasingly enjoying personalized radio in the car. A recent study revealed that 59% of car buyers between the ages of 19-31 consider in-car connectivity to be the most important aspect of a car’s interior, and 72% want to use their smartphone apps in their cars. What is Pandora doing to capitalize on this rapidly expanding market?

Of course, we’re certainly aware of that phenomenon, how in-car connected experiences and services are becoming key. There are now numerous advertising campaigns for car companies where they feature Pandora, which is incredibly telling. We’ve spent years now developing Pandora to be embedded in cars. We have a total of 25 car companies and after-market stereo companies that are now Pandora enabled. So we’re planting the seed and looking forward to seeing that adoption just take off.

In addition to cars, I read the other day about a Samsung refrigerator that offers wi-fi enabled apps including Pandora, which took me by surprise. Can we expect Pandora to hit any other consumer electronic devices that are generally unrelated to digital media?

It took us by surprise, too! (laughs) Anything that you have in your home that is connected to the internet and has an audio output of any kind can stream Pandora – and our goal is to make Pandora as easy to access and as ubiquitous as radio has been and even more so. We’re on over 500 consumer electronic devices now and I expect that number to keep on growing, so absolutely there will be more and more of this.

So any specific examples of something we normally wouldn’t expect?

Well we don’t pre-announce new products before they come out – but I will say that the home stereo system that connects to TV that connects to Blu ray – that’s a huge growth area for us.

You’ve mentioned that Pandora’s massive listener base – over 125 million users in the U.S. – brings with it unprecedented opportunity for thousands for artists, many of whom have never spun on radio before. How can a band that is just starting out or just starting to catch on get on Pandora?

It’s very simple: you submit online at Pandora. If you’re creating good music you’ll go into Pandora. There are no prerequisites for inclusion. There’s no secret, all you have to do is be commercially available in the U.S. and you’re good to go.

In terms of commercial availability, I’ve heard Joe Kennedy, CEO of Pandora, speak at length about the divide in the music listening market between radio (80%) and everything else (20%). He explains that Pandora is unlike other streaming services because it is radio-only, and therefore subject to Federal regulatory statutes and Federally-administered arbitration. This means Pandora can bypass the headaches and turmoils of corporate licensing negotiations and avoid the increasingly problematic issue of artists “opting out.” Does this give Pandora an advantage in the music listening market?

So there are certainly some significant advantages to having a statutory license as we have; you listed one of them, that bands cant opt out. I think also, most importantly, it’s a single license, so the permission that we have to play all of our music emanates from a single license, a statutory internet radio license, and that’s hugely beneficial and efficient for business. It would be impossible for us to really do this if we had to license directly because we have over 90 thousand artists on Pandora and over 70% of them are independent. So getting to all of them is a herculean task.

On the one hand, Pandora does a great job of encouraging listener feedback to enhance the personalized-nature of the listening experience. On the other hand, Pandora Community Managers do great work in sparking listener to listener discussions. Which of these two types of commentary do you think is more important to the company’s growth going forward?

It’s hard for me to pick one of those because they have different benefits. The feedback from listeners and the opportunity for Pandora to speak individually to listeners is invaluable to us – it gives us great information on how to refine the products and understand what users like and don’t like about it. And it also gives us a chance to establish a relationship with them, a mutual relationship which I think is a pretty important part. You take that away and we’d be very different service.

On the other hand, the person to person communications, I mean Pandora has grown entirely by word of mouth – we’ve never advertised the service. It’s fundamentally a social phenomenon, and we certainly recognize the value of that and how pivotal its been in our growth. It’s hard for me to pick one of those because they are both so essential.

What is Pandora doing to bring its product overseas? And how will international development affect user interaction here in the United States, if at all?

We’ve had many spoiled plans to go over seas. (laughs)We’ve been trying for awhile. To be honest, it’s been a very frustrating experience. In order for us to launch overseas we need licenses and they need to be country by country. Today those licenses either don’t exist or the demand is just not workable economically. So we’ve struggled, and for many years of trying, we’ve still not been able to break open a market outside the U.S. We’re trying and hopeful but it’s hard to know when it’ll happen.

I would add to that too, I think its a massive disservice to artists. The fact that Pandora is not streaming around the world is only hurting artists. It obviously hurts us and frustrates us and our business, but I think that it’s a huge lost opportunity – and lost revenue for musicians.

I heard you say something not too long ago that really stuck with me. You said, “I want someone to tell their parents that they are joining a band, and I want their parents to say ‘OK, that’s a respectable middle-class job.’ Pandora can make that happen.” Can you speak a little bit about what Pandora is doing to create that monetary opportunity for up-and-coming musicians?

The basic idea is that, historically, promotion in music has been confined to a very, very small number of artists. Only a few can get on radio or get the backing of big record companies that really push an artist out and give them exposure to a mass audience. The potential with a service like ours, a personalized radio, is to give thousands of artists maybe not quite that level per artist, but still a big enough push that maybe they can kick it over the top and turn it in to a career. We try to think of it as ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ and we see an opportunity to make that kind of change.

Just to give you an idea, we have over 900,000 songs in our collection from those 90,000 artists and over 95% of those songs play every month. So it’s really a long-tail product.

Can you talk a little bit about user customization – and what we can expect down the road? Will there be more options for customization?

We obviously like to enhance and expand the capability of the site, but we’re also really married to simplicity. In all these years, the actual basic experience of Pandora has not changed that much. Principally, it’s become available in a lot more ways on a lot more devices, but the basic functionality – type in a song or artist and create a station – we don’t see that changing too much. Part of our basic premise is, as you quoted earlier, 80% of listening is on radio and part of the reason for that is that radio is just very simple. You hit a button and music comes out. Music is mostly a passive experience that you do while you’re doing something else. Only a small percentage of listening is the kind when you want to fiddle with stuff and administer your listening experience. We view  ourselves as fundamentally driven by simplicity.

I think its incredibly hard to make something simple and work well. I think the actual product is tremendously complex, but the consumer experience is very easy and that’s the key for us.

To what extent does lyrical content play a role in the algorithm. For example, does a song with a certain political message produce others with similar political messages?

Lyrical content does play a role. But, you know, we’re talking about hundreds of attributes and no single attribute is going to swamp the others. So if you type in a song that has a strong political lyric, that’s not enough to create a bunch of songs afterwards that have strong political lyrics. It’ll have an influence but its part of a much bigger puzzle.

Can you talk a little bit about Pandora for Business?

People have been using Pandora indoors in retail locations for a long time without a license to do it, and our license that we have doesn’t provide license for commercial use. And for a long time, a lot of people would want to have it. But the deal that we have doesn’t provide a Pandora that you can legally stream in a coffee house or a retail mall or a clothing store or whatnot and be fully legal at a very reasonable price. We’re essentially targeting every commercial setting, and those can be anything from a funeral home to a workout gym to a coffee shop.

That would be most effective I would think if coupled with some element of policing. Does Pandora get involved in that at all, or does anyone do any sort of policing?

We don’t really do that. Publishing companies generally have monitors that go out and chase down folks who stream music without a license, but we don’t do it.

Everyone has their favorite bands, but I’ve found that oftentimes people’s favorite bands don’t necessarily translate into their favorite Pandora stations. So what are your favorite Pandora stations?

That’s an interesting observation and I’ve never heard that before. It doesn’t entirely surprise me. I’m not surprised that people who create a station with their favorite bands aren’t always happy because I think sometimes you love that band so much, anyone who sounds kind of like them is never going make you happy. I can definitely imagine that dynamic.

So my top stations – I listen to Ben Folds pretty regularly. I have a classical Brahms station. And another go-to for me would be my Coldplay station. Those are a few of them at least.

***

Kickshuffle is an online news source dedicated to covering the impact of new media on music and music business. Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter.

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Ian Williams plays guitar and keyboards in the band Battles, whose second album, Gloss Drop, was released last year to much critical acclaim. He has previously played with Don Caballero and Storm & Stress, and lives in Brooklyn.

By Scott Borchert

From a musical perspective Battles can be challenging and provocative — how do you want people to respond to the music?

Some people want to put us in the art music context, or use the big E word, “experimental.” But I still see Battles, in the overall picture, as pop music. And because I think it’s pop music, I want all the classic responses. I want teenagers on the back of the bus to cry. Parents to tell their children they were conceived to Battles, and so on. Now what actually happens is that people tell me they were on a cross country bike ride and Battles really helped them to keep going when their energy got low.  Or, “When there’s a lot of work to get done at the office, I put on Battles. It really boosts the productivity!” So it’s music for assembly lines. That and parents tell me their young children love battles. Maybe those two aspects could be combined.

What’s your philosophy when it comes to writing music for Battles? Is anything fair game, or is there a particular sound you’re going for?

I usually push things to their breaking point, or explore what the limits of something are. As I’ve gone on, I think a degree of subtlety has encroached. Some people call that growing up, I think. I’ve started to wonder about substituting “occupying an extreme” for “moving towards a middle ground.” There’s a great, grand middle that is out there and I wonder, what is so good about it? I want to find out.

I don’t mean selling out or making the music sound more accessible. It’s more about making do with less. Not using three different lines at once, but maybe just two, or even one. Letting things become a little bit clearer. I think that’s what happened with Gloss Drop. It involves trading off a little bit of novelty for craftsmanship, which is something that “songwriters” worry about. Yes, we know we can do beats and riffs until the sun goes down, but can we make music that’s actually enjoyable to listen to?

What we go for comes less from an idea first. It’s a sound that comes out of playing with sounds. I like to be playful, but you need to make the call when it goes too far. It’s just a value judgment of what something’s natural range is. Some things can get stretched too far. So you have to know where to pull back and re-focus.

The problem with a lot of “creative music” is that it comes across as too frivolous to me. Like the commitment is thin, and it’s hard to believe in it. I think Battles is based in a lot of traditions, both from electronic music, rock, but then, so what? A million bands will tell you that sort of thing these days. Easy cross referencing is today’s blessing and curse.

Then there’s the whole “happy sounding” thing, which I don’t really think we do, but people have commented on. There’s a weird value put on “dark things,” whatever that means, as being more profound. I wouldn’t say I prefer “happy things,” but I actually prefer neutral things that don’t necessarily tell you how to think or feel. There’s a lot more of life to explore in those kinds of emotions than the stylings of empty rebellion.

What’s the writing process like, individually for you and collectively as a band?

With Battles, each song starts with a loop. I used to make loops on an Akai Headrush pedal, which was a pretty simple 90’s era digital sampler. Then, in Battles, we started out using a Gibson Echoplex that was a little more sophisticated. But generally we did the same layered loop process. Most recently I’ve started using Ableton, which moves the loop making to the inside of a computer, and there things get really slippery in terms of infinite possibility, which means you better know what you want to accomplish, or else you get lost in a sea of anything and everything. For me it’s about playing around with some kind of instrument. And when I say instrument, I don’t just mean a guitar or keyboard, which I do play, but some kind of loop making tool. They way different pedals or computer programs capture the sound you’re making really becomes a character in the overall sound. The technology starts to become just as much of a player as you are.

I always wanted to unstack the sounds in a loop pedal and distribute them. Delayer them and have different people in the band play different lines from the loop. On the last record I made with Don Caballero, American Don, I played the guitar onto a loop pedal and then recorded it coming out of one guitar cabinet. But instead of sounding like a lot of guitars playing at once, it just sound like seven guitars crammed into the sound space of one guitar. So when I started Battles my original idea was to take what would be inside of a loop pedal (which for me were usually interlocking lines in a vaguely African guitar style, doing call-response) and spreading it out among a bunch of people. So when you hear the original EPs we’ve made, there are a lot of interlocking lines being shared by the guitar, bass, and keys.

The current lineup is a power trio tackling some pretty complex music — what’s that like, and how would you describe your working relationship with the other guys?

Each of us sees their own version of things in the music and there’s no agreed-upon formula. For one thing, I can tell you that two extreme poles which exist in our music are minimal techno and prog music. How to reconcile those things is anybody’s guess. And somehow in the middle of it all there’s a punk ethos, which is probably a contradiction with both the prog and techno thing. There’s a direct simpleness from John [Stanier, drums] that’s really effective against the more “longly routed path” that I seem to take. And Dave [Konopka, guitar and bass] is somewhere in the middle, and has pretty good judgment about the poles and how to use them.

You have a drummer, John Stanier, playing the sort of beats that many other artists create on a computer. What’s different about having a live drummer?

A live drummer makes the sound three-dimensional. I want the whole process to be as visceral as possible and not just an ear experience. And anything that takes it beyond sonic manipulations inside of pedals and computers, and lays out something you can feel, balances everything.

How much of a challenge is it to integrate computers into your live show? 

That can be hard. This past year, I had two laptops on stage, and then I controlled a third for the video stream. The main glitch is that we’re also a loud, live rock band. Those kinds of volumes create vibrations that a spinning hard drive doesn’t respond well to. I should get solid state drives, which I haven’t done yet.

At this point I look with envy upon the old days of plugging a guitar directly into an amplifier. The more complicated things are, the more something can go wrong.

Onstage I always have two sides of my brain working. There’s a part that has to remember to have a knob turned or a fader up, sample loaded, or something synced before or after another event happens.

It’s the tech side, which isn’t that conducive to the musical side. When I feel fluid up there, both sides are able to co-exist. The challenge is to not get trapped and feel overwhelmed by shepherding all of these events that have to happen for the show to continue and forget that I’m playing music as well.

The video for “My Machines” is one of the most striking videos I’ve ever seen. What was it like to create that video, and how important are videos to what you do as a band?

The Daniels [directing duo] made that video. The last album, Mirrored, had a bit of a future feeling to it and going there again felt boring. I remember all of the video proposals coming in felt like they were from Wallpaper magazine with that “It’s the year 2077!!” thing going on. Future shtick. We wanted to move not forward but sideways; we wanted to step back into current day reality. So when we got their submission that just said, “A guy will fall down an escalator for the whole song,” that felt really liberating.

You’re releasing a series of four vinyl remixes based on your second album, Gloss Drop. Why a series of remixes? 

Seeing something be translated from one kind of music (rock) to another (dance) is pretty interesting. Everything is resizable. But talking about remixes that others did is kind of hard to do. I don’t have much to say besides the fact that we’re really happy with them.

You’ve been playing in bands since the early 90s, so you’ve been in the scene long enough to watch the internet and digital media change the entire landscape of music. How do you feel about digital music replacing the physical artifacts, like vinyl and CDs? 

Things are mostly better now, I guess. But because things used to be harder, that brought more of a sense of specialness. I’m glad knowledge about all forms of music is so much more accessible for people, but at the same time it cheapens things. When people can so easily read a webpage and think they know everything there is to know about a band or musician and their scene, it creates an echo chamber of easy impressions that aren’t necessarily gleaned from people’s own experience. People understand well enough that top ten filter lists create bubbles, and so things get distorted, because you just click on the most popular list and end up reinforcing what everybody already reinforced because they just wanted an answer of “what’s good or hot or whatever,” and then the next guy comes along and jumps down the same rabbit hole in part because you had just done the same thing and drove something’s popularity up. I’ve had a lot of 21 year olds come up and lay things out in a very factual manner about things that went down in my world eight to ten years ago, when they probably didn’t even have pubic hair. It’s an ease of knowledge that masks not really knowing anything that annoys me.

I think a lot of bands in our position think the internet has been good for them. It has been good for the fact that it knocked out the hierarchy from before, where major label distribution controlled shelf space and tended to squeeze out the odd and more interesting music. It makes things a lot more confusing in a way. There’s so much more music, but then I have to realize that “so much more” includes me, really. Sometimes bands like mine think, well the changed circumstances of the internet mean that my band gets a better chance. But then if I think of things in terms of the fact that I’ve been making records since 1993, and if I put twenty years into a career that was based on the old system, maybe I would have gotten to the point where I would have been able to sell more records than I can this way. It’s a “what-if” history novel.

You grew up in western PA and were based in Pittsburgh for a while, but now are based in New York. What’s that transition been like for you, in terms of the music scene and otherwise? 

I learned a lot of how I see music from a small community of people in Pittsburgh, so it was influential on me. Two college radio stations there played good music, which helped me learn about a lot of stuff.

And it was the classic, “there are fifty to one-hundred cool people here and the rest of the world is oblivious to what we do.” That’s an orientation that stays with me, even after the internet changed the accessibility of that world. In hindsight, it’s hard to understand that the circle of only one-hundred was there because we were just freaks that had nowhere else to go, not out of any elitist aspirations.

I left Pittsburgh for personal reasons, not out of any sense of having to go to a bigger city to make it. I always liked the idea of doing what you need to do wherever you are. But the house I lived in was being torn down, the job I had as a technical writer at an internet company was being moved to California, and I was dating somebody in Chicago, and it was the exact moment a Storm & Stress record and Don Caballero record were coming out, so I decided to make the jump and admit that I didn’t have a day job anymore (which I found really hard to accept) and become a professional musician. I moved to Chicago where I lived from 1997 to 2000.

Pittsburgh was a half-way point between Chicago and New York, geographically and musically. You have to remember that in the 90s, Chicago was cooler than New York on a musical level, with the exception maybe of hip hop. I remember the week I moved to New York in 2000, a musician here said, “Why did you move to New York? The scene here sucks,” and I was like, “Ya, I don’t care about that.” And suddenly, within six months, there were a million new bands releasing records in New York and all the media suddenly ordained Brooklyn as the new coolest place. Which wasn’t what I was looking for, but it’s funny how that worked out.

But my New York has been the New York of the new millennium. It’s kind of hard to believe that, in the 90s, what is now the HiFi Bar on Avenue A used to be Brownies, and that was the main venue moderately successful indie bands aspired to play, that and the Mercury Lounge. A tour would be to go to the Mercury and then to Brownies. Those places are the size of shoeboxes. But they weren’t back then! As an example of how funny it is, I saw Spoon play Radio City Music Hall, a few years ago, and the onstage banter was, “We are the band that have played Brownies more than any other band and then have gone on to play Radio City Music Hall.” New York is sprawling with venues. It’s a long way from that time in Pittsburgh when Kurt Cobain slept on my friend’s couch after the Nirvana show.

What are you listening to these days — new or old, what’s caught your interest recently?

Isao Tomita, Gershon Kingsley, Steve Hillage, Fred Neil, Jackson Frank.

Scott Borchert is a staff writer for Kickshuffle. You can read his other essays and interviews here.

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Kickshuffle is an online news source dedicated to covering the impact of new media on music and music business. Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter.

Check out our feature on NYC pop/rock trio Beecher’s Fault here

By Chris Borchert

When the guys from Robbin’ Pain agreed to let a few friends shoot some footage for a senior thesis project, they thought they were just doing them a favor. I had the opportunity to sit in on the session, and the guys had a blast doing interviews and laying down some tracks for the cameras. Oh yeah, and they were also handed professional-quality promotional videos ripe for posting to YouTube, Facebook, Bandcamp and all the others. For free.

In this case it was the film/tech majors who reached out to the band, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been the other way around. So here’s the point: If you’re in a college band, why not reach out to the folks behind your college TV station? Chances are they are in need of some ideas. And after all, people love to plug homegrown talent.

Robbin’ Pain drummer Scott Borchert shared with me his thoughts on the potential for collaboration between the DIY music industry and the DIY video production industry: “There’s a whole world of web broadcasting out there that parallels what we’re doing with our music — producing it and distributing it ourselves over the internet, and maintaining control over the process. Those broadcasters are looking for content, stuff to cover, and we’re looking for coverage. So it makes sense for bands to take advantage of that, and the fact that we got to help out a buddy of ours in the process just makes it better.”

“We’re excited about it,” said guitarist Ricky DalCortivo. “We get to help out our friends and our friends get to help out us. It’s called synergy or something.”

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Stay tuned to the Robbin’ Pain Facebook Page as more videos will be available within the coming weeks

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