Photo credit: Cara Trotman
Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
We don’t have a touring vehicle as we haven’t toured since the 90’s, but we are renting an SUV for our tour this summer. Hopefully no break downs will ensue!
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Supermarkets are good.Lou likes to eat salmon and berries, both of which I like too. I use the Happy Cow app to help find good vegetarian stuff. We both like RX bars from convenience stores in a pinch for snacks.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
About two or three. I’ve been using these expensive strings that are like 25$ a pop that are a combination of flats and regular, Pyramid Fusion Flats from Germany. If one breaks on tour, I usually just replace it with a regular cheaper string but they don’t break often and they last a long time.
Where do you rehearse?
We both rehearse at our homes. I moved to North Carolina in part because I could buy a house here that has enough space to rehearse in, which I couldn’t have done in Boston where I am from. It’s in a semi-rural part of Durham and I don’t get noise complaints because it’s sparsely populated. We rehearse in Lou’s music room or attic when in Massachusetts – the attic is uninsulated which makes temperature a major problem. We only go up there when I need to play a drum kit. It’s like being a sweat lodge in the summer or an igloo in the winter, which leads to a certain spirit of discipline. I wouldn’t want to expose my guitars to those temperatures personally! But we wrote most of the hooks for our new record up there.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
“Eternal Party” – “digging for the veggies makes me feel ok.” We wanted to a video of us on jet skis but funding was unavailable at that time.
Describe your first gig.
Our first show was at a Chinese restaurant called Hong Kong that was always open late nights in Cambridge. It was a bit of a mess but it led us to keep going!
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
I teach 4th grade in the Durham Public Schools and work as an organizer for the teacher’s union. The easiest day job I had to make music from was when I worked cataloging manuscripts at the Rare Books Department of Harvard Medical School when the band was first starting. It was kind of a dead letter office, not very demanding, and I wrote a lot songs on the clock there. I only worked there 2 and half days a week and got full benefits which helped me get off the ground starting out, I was there from 1994-1997.
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?
Streaming has caused a lot of problems for this industry. We really like the convenience and musical access of streaming services but they need to be regulated to distribute the wealth they generate more fairly to artists. It’s really sad how technofeudalism is being used to create exponential profits by forcing people to devalue their work in order to participate in the platforms most people access content on. It hits journalists, photographers, cab drivers, and on and on.? People are talking a lot about AI and I don’t yet fear that so much, though I think it is going to hurt producers and engineers, and the quality of music generally, especially the music marketed through the major labels. I think that playing shows for your fans and having a loyal base that cares about it will remain the centerpiece of musical income until the monopoly rents Spotify, etc, extract is broken.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
That it is possible to age in music with more grace than it used to be when I was growing up. I think a lot has been learned from the disasters of the past in terms of rock and roll casualties – you are seeing more people doing good work into their later years because people have more tools available to take care of themselves.