Photo credit: Miles Kerr
Tell us about your tour vehicle.
I drive myself around in one of the family cars! So at the moment that’s a plug-in Prius (that’s the nicer one) or a Subaru Legacy wagon (the crappy one).
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
It’s a heck of a lot easier than it used to be to be a vegetarian on tour, that’s for sure. We used to talk about “french fry-itarians”—that is, when McDonalds fries went vegan and that’s the only thing you’d eat for a month. Or bring a plastic bowl and some salad dressing and make salads from the Roy Rogers fixings bar. The first big game changer was the explosion of Subway; then when Denny’s started carrying Gardenburgers; then the happycow.com website. Now it’s a breeze.
How often have you broken the keys on your piano and keyboards? What is your process for fixing them?
The first couple keyboards I toured with—this was with World/Inferno Friendship Society—were cheap and keys would break all the time because I played really hard. Once I could afford a decent keyboard that never happened again.
Accordions, now that’s a problem. When I was really touring heavily, I had a spreadsheet of accordion repairmen in every part of the world. Certain areas were better represented: upper Midwest, along the Mexican border, certain areas of the UK. It was a particular type: almost always a man in his sixties or older, living alone, with a shop in his garage. I apprenticed with one for a year when we lived in Toronto, so I know some of the basic skills—I was also working as a low-level piano technician at the time—but I don’t really have what it takes.
I had a banjo tuning peg explode while on tour in Siberia. The repair guy carved a new one out of wood; it’s still on there.
Where do you rehearse?
Right now, my family’s in a sublet for the fall, so my “home studio” is in the basement, but I’ve been practicing in the living room. The craziest thing that happens there is spilling my seltzer on the rug.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
Gosh—I remember performing it, because I was a freshman in high school and sang it in front of a school assembly, accompanying myself on the black Ibanez electric that was my first guitar. I was wearing a ratty blue hoodie with the sleeves chopped off at the elbows and a red baseball cap. The song itself I don’t remember at all. I assume it was about being depressed and misunderstood, or whatever.
Describe your first gig.
My high school band played the cafeteria a couple of times. I played rhythm guitar. Mostly covers and one or two originals. Then when I got to NYU I put together a band that was sort of my training wheels for booking gigs and fronting a group; we would play the entry-level clubs at the time, like the Lion’s Den on Bleecker, nothing glamorous and nobody came.
I think my first solo performance in NYC was at the Sidewalk Cafe Anti-Hoot. It was basically an open mic, you got two songs, and one of my two was like eight minutes long. The host had to make an announcement afterwards that you couldn’t do that.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
My current day job is as a professor in music and written arts at Bard College, and in fiction at the Columbia University MFA program.
My favorite part of a day job I ever had was when I worked for a classical music nonprofit called the American Music Center, who were responsible for a library of scores by 20th century American composers, which they had recently transferred to the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center. Anyone who was a member of the AMC was allowed to request Xeroxes of any of the scores in their library. So about once a week I’d got over there with the stack of orders and spend the afternoon poking around in the dusty shelves of (often handwritten) scores, in quiet and solitude. Ever after that my fantasy alternate career was as a librarian/archivist. (My friends who are actual librarians tell me it’s nothing like that.)
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now? And what do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
I’m going to combine these questions. I took a lot of pride for some years—roughly 2006 to 2014—that I could support myself playing music, the old “quit your day job” dream. But it did put a lot of pressure on the music, especially once I had a kid, that leached a lot of the joy out of it.
Then I would look at someone like Erik Petersen, who had a regular carpentry gig, and could play benefits if he wanted to or not play shows he didn’t want to play, and fund a record label of music he and his partner liked, and I thought, “Maybe that’s a better option, to instead of playing 200 shows a year of which a third are good, a third are meh, and a third are actively soul-killing, just play the ones you think will be good.”
Now, it took me several years to re-invent my life so that that would be an option. It’s hard to reintegrate into the workforce after a decade as a freelance musician. So as far as my music-related income, I made a conscious choice to turn away from that. I would say I’m about 2/3 day job and 1/3 music at the moment. So I guess the thing I would tell my younger self is to try to maintain a day job? But I couldn’t have done the hardcore touring that really established my career if I’d kept one; and younger me wouldn’t have listened anyway.