This interview was conducted in person in Evanston, IL on 6/25/08.

Jeff Moehlis: What were you like as a kid?

Justin Roberts: Two of my earliest musical memories are being in preschool and listening to this record player – a vinyl record player – all day long. I remember the teacher took my mom aside and said, “We’re a little worried about Justin. He doesn’t talk to anyone else. He just listens to music.”

Later on my parents took me to some event where there was a band playing. I was about three years old, and I just stood up with the band and played air guitar for an entire set. They took a break and I did too, and then I got up with them again and played more.

I was shy in terms of sitting with the record player, and then again I would get on stage and play music. It’s probably similar to who I am now.

JM: Did you take music lessons when you were a kid or play any instruments?

JR: My parents were very supportive of whatever I wanted to do, but they were also not at all pushy. I would start and stop instruments regularly, and they were supportive. If I was practicing and into it they would let me have lessons, and if I decided I didn’t want to do it, there was no, “You have to play this instrument through high school.” All my friends who had parents like that often quit their instruments when they got to college.

JM: Did you do the standard piano lessons?

JR: I did piano lessons and clarinet in elementary school orchestra. I sang in a lot of youth choruses and things like that. I did a little bit of musical theater up until about 7th or 8th grade. Then I had some friends who were starting a band around that time that was like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix covers, and things like that. They wanted someone to sing, and they knew that I sang in choruses, so I started singing with them.

JM: This was junior high?

JR: Yeah, junior high into high school. Then I picked up the guitar and a friend taught me chords, and I started learning the guitar.

JM: Was your first song “Smoke on the Water”?

JR: Yeah, I think it was. [laughs]

JM: Did you ever play “Battle of the Bands” in high school?

JR: We didn’t do that. That band kind of morphed into an original group. I started writing songs at the time, you know, just a complete REM ripoff. Early REM. I realized you could mumble lyrics that didn’t mean anything, and that made it a lot easier to write songs. So we had a band called Septic Spring, which didn’t sound at all like the name. We were very clean, but we would play with all the hardcore punk bands in town. We would be there with the jangly, Twin Reverb Rickenbacker sound. We played at a lot of political events in town like Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Unitarian Church for some reason would have a lot of punk rock shows in Des Moines, so we would play those. It was an kind of an interesting mix, because it would be a whole bunch of mosh pit, high speed thrash stuff, and then we would get up there. But they let us play with them, so that was nice.

JM: Is that when you actually first started writing songs?

JR: Yeah, at the beginning of high school. We went to studios and recorded some of the songs, and we made a bunch of cassette tapes. At the high school reunion I met some people who still had them.

JM: Do you remember what your first song was called, or anything about it?

JR: I don’t.

JM: Backtracking slightly, when you were a kid, what sort of music did you listen to?

JR: My brother was a big Beatles fan, and had a huge record collection. So he was very influential in what I listened to. But along the way – as big brothers often do, they don’t like you being into what they are into – so my brother was like, “You have to find your own group, you can’t listen to the Beatles.” So I went to the record store, and I was in the “Bea” section, and I found the Beach Boys and so I picked up a Beach Boys record and started listening to that. And Cheap Trick at the time, that was one of my early concerts. I was probably 10 or so. Really early on I had the Fantasia record. I remember listening to that a lot – classical music that I liked quite a bit.

In terms of kid’s music, the only real memory I have is the School House Rock stuff that was on television. I returned to it in college, and found it to be really beautifully recorded, complex songs, just gorgeous stuff. That’s certainly an influence in terms of quality.

JM: Then you went to Kenyon College. What did you study there?

JR: I did a degree in Philosophy of Religion. Because I was traveling to school I just brought an acoustic guitar. I didn’t want to bring an amp. One of the first days I was there on my dorm hall I heard a guy playing guitar, and I didn’t have a pick with me so I borrowed a pick from him. His name was Mike Merz and he and I started a band together in college that continued after college.

Kenyon was 1200 students, a small liberal arts students in the middle of nowhere. It’s kind of an interesting place. People either ran screaming from it or loved it, as I did.

JM: You started a band there called Pimentos for Gus. According to the website for the band the name came from a b-side from the Kingston Trio. I don’t know if I believe that. Is that really true?

JR: I think with Google you can probably figure this stuff out a lot easier than it used to be.

JM: Do you want to come clean?

JR: We have a lot of different stories of where the name came from, because it wasn’t really that exciting of a story. “It was a vegetarian restaurant in St. Louis” was one of them. It was all over the map. Before the internet people would be like, “Oh really” and they reprinted the article. I think it’s better as a mystery. Sometimes stories are better than truth.

JM: How would you describe the music of Pimentos for Gus?

JR: I think it was a combination of Mike and I as very different songwriters coming together. Then Tracy Spuehler joined us the second year, and she plays violin. We all loved Camper van Beethoven and the Pixies and groups like that. Mike tended to write the more political, a little bit more punk-rock type songs. I did a lot of ballads. Together we did some sort of faux world music type stuff, that was just sort of silly. We had a lot of fun performing and making music together. He had a real gravely voice, and I have a kind of horn-like voice. If you heard them separately it wouldn’t make much sense, but sometimes it worked really well, the combination of the voices. Very eclectic, all over the map. We liked to change gears really quickly in concert.

JM: The band started at Kenyon College, and then you moved to Minneapolis. What was the music scene like in Minneapolis at that time?

JR: We were drawn to Minneapolis by what was happening there in the 80′s, which had long since passed. The Replacements, Husker Du, and Prince even. The idea that it was a small city with a really burgeoning music scene appealed to us. We actually looked into moving to Chicago, and it just didn’t feel right to any of us. I think we had more friends in Minneapolis, people that had gone to Kenyon that had moved there. It just felt like a nice-sized city to go from small town Gambier to. We lived there for five years, put out three CDs with the band, and toured around regionally, in the Midwest primarily.

When I first got there I worked as a preschool teacher which is when I first started writing kids songs. But I soon found that playing at nightclubs on weeknights until really late and then getting up very early in the morning and trying to work with three and four year olds was not a great combination. So I only did that for one school year. Then I started temping, and ended up in computers, like a network administrator eventually, just kind of on-the-job training. Still playing music.

JM: So the scene wasn’t really happening at the time?

JR: It seemed it was a little past its prime. There were some great groups that were playing there still, but it didn’t seem like the focus was on Minneapolis like it had been.

JM: This was, what, early 90′s? So Seattle was taking off.

JR: Yeah, the grungy, shoegazing audience that doesn’t clap kind of thing was happening. We seemed to attract strange and sparse audiences that were very devoted, but kind of on the fringe of what was happening musically at the time.

JM: When you look back at Pimentos for Gus, do you feel that it was a successful band?

JR: You know, I have fond memories of working with Mike and Tracy, and other people that were in the group. I think we did some fun stuff together. It certainly, I think, was very influential to what I do now. Working with Mike, and seeing some of the stuff he was doing, I think some of that stuff rubbed off on me as I started writing songs for kids. I felt this kind of freedom that we had in Pimentos, where you could do anything… You could play a fast punk song on an acoustic guitar, or play a ballad after a weird instrumental that had a bunch of parts that didn’t really fit together. Just kind of a general silliness. We would do this instrumental called “Hurling Sprouts Part II” where there was a faux James Brown section in the middle where we do “Hit me one time, Hit me two times, Hit me seventeen times.” But live we would do “Hit me ninety-eight times – unnh, unnh, unnh…” just drive the audience crazy. Stuff like that made me laugh at the time and maybe the audience did or didn’t like it.

I felt that kind of freedom when I started writing songs for kids, realizing you could almost do anything and kids would dig it. They were really open-minded about the music when I was playing for them at the preschool. I even played them a Pimentos for Gus song that they really liked a lot. So I think in that way it was very influential in what I did. I think with anything, as a musician or artist or whatever, you look back on stuff that you did, and you have mixed feelings about everything about it. Sometimes I’m really proud of certain things, other times I cringe. It’s the same with the stuff I do now. [laughs]

JM: Can you expand a little more on your transition to children’s music?

JR: At the time, the kids were singing a lot of the traditional children’s songs that I knew, and watching Barney on the television set. I was just out of college, and I found some of that stuff at the time to be not something I wanted to listen to personally as an adult. So I started singing stuff like “Cupid” by Sam Cooke to them, and Irish jigs, and various things. And they responded to that music just as much as they did “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”, which we would also sing. Then I started playing them a Pimentos song, a ballad called “Giraffe/Nightingale” that is four verses with no chorus and no catchy repetition or anything. I thought they’re going to be bored, and the next day they requested it again. I played it again, and eventually they started singing along. We had an open house a few months down the line and the kids sang the song themselves to their parents, and I was like, “Wow, they can remember all these words.” It goes against everything that everyone told me about kids music.

Then I just kept writing kids songs. I was living in this apartment in Minneapolis and it was 20 below zero outside. I’d be sitting down with my cat and write a song called “Kitty Cat, Kitty Cat” for no apparent reason. I really had no desire to be a children’s musician, and I wasn’t planning on making a record or anything. It was just sort of for fun. But I amassed these songs, and I thought they were funny. I just sent them to friends of mine as a gift. None of them had kids, it was just sort of like, “check out these weird kids songs I wrote.” One of my friends Liam Davis loved it, and said “these are great. We should record them professionally, and I’d love to produce it.” So we made “Great Big Sun” right as I was leaving Minneapolis and going off to graduate school at the University of Chicago.

The band broke up. It was just sort of a mutually agreed thing. We felt that we all wanted to go our separate ways. Mike went on to make a bunch of really great solo records after that, and he has since gotten into sound art, and does things at galleries. He also does sound design for theaters and stuff like that. Tracy started writing songs a lot more as the group was coming to an end, and she has put out a few solo records – Liam produced three of them – that are great.

So we made this record, and printed up probably 500 copies. I went off to graduate school and carried some of them with me, and thought nothing of it. I thought it was going to be, “Oh, here’s some funny kids songs that I wrote.” So I moved to Hyde Park, and was going to do the philosophy of religion track, with maybe a comparison of Buddhism and Christianity. But once I started studying Sanskrit all of that started to fade. I don’t really want to write a book about a verb tense for 100 pages. It’s not my thing. But the record kind of took off. At first it was giving it out to friends, and
I played a couple of bookstores and things like that. We had no promotional budget or anything. It ended up getting reviewed in a national magazine, which never happened with Pimentos when we were actively sending stuff out and pushing. So while I was in graduate school I kept writing kids songs. I’d be trying to procrastinate from studying for a language exam or something, and I’d sit down and write “Willy Was A Whale”. It was just sort of weird. It felt like a good release and something different from what I was doing.

JM: You never wrote a song in Sanskrit?

JR: I didn’t [laughs]. Everything but.

JM: Your kids songs often tell a clever stories about common experiences. How do you come up with what you are going to write about?

JR: Usually I just sit down with a guitar and start singing and playing chords. Sometimes I might start with a vague idea of what I’m going to write a song about, but I don’t really know where it’s going to go or what it’s going to be about. In terms of the childhood experiences, I do have some vivid memories of things, but it also comes from just people telling me stories and weaving those into the songs. A good example of that is “My Brother Did It”. In reality, I have an older brother and I was the younger brother who was probably getting blamed for things more than doing the blaming. But I switched sides for the song. I had a good friend who carved his sister’s name into a Steinway piano. She got in huge trouble. The parents never knew until she was twenty that this wasn’t true. And the brother and sister were friends, they were not evil enemies like my brother and I were for many years. They were friends all along, and something like that happened, and it makes me think that even the nicest kids who are best friends holding hands together, they even did evil things to each other. So I weaved that into “My Brother Did It”, where there’s writing on the wall and someone signed my sister’s name.

JM: And in the song, the younger brother can’t even talk yet, so of course he didn’t write his name on the wall.

JR: I love that idea. I don’t think kids are evil at all, I think they are amoral at times. They don’t really know the difference. But there’s a little bit of treading the line and kind of a glint in the eye that maybe this is wrong. But I think there is something great about that, that innocence.

What makes writing kid’s songs continue to be interesting for me is that I find that for a lot of things a childhood experience is also an adult experience in a different context. The song “Pop Fly” can be about a little leaguer who can’t keep his head in the game and is anxious about a pop fly coming towards him. I was certainly a horrible little leaguer as were many of my friends, you know, that kind of classic experience. The song itself feels very natural to me because there are tons of things like that in grown-up life. You know, you get anxious about things that are coming and you hope that you can do well at it, and you space off [laughs] and end up in la-la land enjoying the wonderful things in the world. A lot of that stuff feels very natural. Some of it I feel comes as much from my adult experience as much as the kid’s experience. I’m just putting it into a story that fits both.

JM: Do you ever solicit ideas from family, friends, or fans?

JR: Yeah, I do. Sometimes I get unsolicited ideas. An good example of what usually happens is that I got an email from a mother who said, “I have two daughters and they cry every time I brush their hair. It’s just a horrible experience. Could you write a song about how it’s OK to have your hair brushed?” And I thought, I don’t want to write a song about how it’s OK to have your hair brushed. It’s probably horrible. But it turned into the idea of “Henrietta’s Hair” and I thought of the idea of this girl who didn’t want to have her hair brushed and then it turned into this bigger metaphor for other things.

JM: “Henrietta’s Hair” obviously has the “Tangled Up In Blue” vibe to it.

JR: That’s why I put that phrase in there, in case it wasn’t obvious all along.

JM: When you write songs, do you ever think that you want to write in the style of a particular artist or particular genre?

JR: I knew I was doing that with the Dylan thing, but it just sort of naturally happened. It actually took me forever to finish that song and figure out what the song was about and what I was trying to do. I had “I knew a girl named Henrietta” and that was where it started from, and it went on and on into a lot of weird places until I thought, oh it could be about this. But I don’t usually consciously sit down and think that I’m going to write a song in this style. But I love music, and I love listening to music, and there are a lot of people that I’m a humongous fan of. I know sometimes Elvis Costello’s creeping into the song, so I joke about it, like in “I Chalk” at the end where it says “I’ll draw the radio, radio, radio, radio”. It’s also for the other adults that are listening that have similar tastes in music. There is power pop, Fountains of Wayne: the things I listen to as an adult, that kind of music. I appreciate a really good melody and a good hook, and good lyrics. I actually work hard to make the songs like that.

With every record I’m always like, “are kids going to like this?” I’m more sure that adults will probably appreciate this. Is this going to be too much for them? Are they going to be able to follow the lyrics? The same kind of concerns that I had early on at that preschool. But they’re going to handle it, and they’re going to memorize all the words even if there are hundreds of them, and it’s fast paced, and there are a lot of twists and turns.

JM: At the risk of sounding psychoanalytical, are the moms in your songs like your mom, and are the dads like your dad?

JR: Not always. My dad was the classic dad – he worked a lot of long hours. But he was not the distant dad. I mean, my real memories of my dad coming home from work are him playing with us on the floor and being very affectionate and very attentive when he was around. Not a distant father, and very emotive. Sometimes I joke in the songs about a dad being unable to show his emotions, like maybe in “Nightlight”, where even the dad wants a nightlight but he wouldn’t admit it to anyone. You know, that kind of thing. That certainly is not my dad. My dad was also not a stay at home dad.

I do have overall pretty great memories of my childhood. As with anything, there are things that you remember in a sad and melancholy way and things that are happy. My parents were and are really wonderful people.

There are certain things where I’m borrowing experiences. But there is also a collective idea of what a mom or a dad is in certain different situations, or a brother or sister, older or younger. Sometimes you’re tapping into that collective memory even if it’s not an experience that you personally had.

The song “Moving” is about moving from one house to another. I certainly did that, but I moved, like, five blocks away, which was never really traumatic. Whereas my wife – her father was in the Air Force, and they moved all over the world. She was constantly really leaving her friends behind. We were talking about that, and I thought, “That must have been really sad.” And I thought about it, and that’s when I wrote that song.

Sometimes it’s borrowing other people’s experiences and trying to get into the mindframe of somebody else. Like becoming the child in the song, or I’ve written songs from a female perspective, or other people’s perspective. It’s all about trying to get in the character’s head.

JM: You have a song “Mama’s Sad” which is about divorce. How have kids and parents responded to that song?

JR: It’s very mixed. I’ve certainly met people who fast forward through that song every time it comes on. Truthfully I never intended to put that on a record. My parents have been married a long time. I never went through a divorce. But my producer Liam’s parents did go through that. I played the song for him, just like, “this is weird, I wrote a sad kid’s song.” Who does that? And he said that I should totally put this on a record, and I think it’s really important. So we did. The good responses it has gotten have been worth a million times over anyone telling me that they skip through it every time or they reprogram their iPod so it’s not on there. I’ve had people that are really going through that experience play that song for their kids for them to understand. You know, kids are very perceptive, and they know when things are not going right. They take in tons of stuff that’s happening in their environment.

I played a show at a public school on the Southside many years ago. The teacher there was playing a lot of the music for the kids, and they were requesting different songs and singing along. It was really awesome. Then someone requested “Mama’s Sad”. It was like, wow, I only played that song for them once, and they were singing along. There were tears… it was really intense. From working with kids, I think sometimes we limit our conception of what kids are, that they are this pure innocence and joy. There is a lot of that in kids that sometimes as adults we lose. But there is also this great emotional base, where just like us they feel a lot of the same things. They are little human beings, and they go through similar experiences, whether its the anxiety of the first day at school, or the boundless imagination of things that happen in backyards. So I think that writing a song like that is trying to appeal the broad range of what kids are capable of understanding.

JM: It is sometimes surprising, but kids are able to process very sophisticated emotions.

JR: Exactly, that’s what I’m trying to say – that’s a much better way of saying it [laughs].

JM: What is the story behind the song “Sand Castle”?

JR: I wrote that for a good adult friend of mine whose mother passed away from cancer. That was the inspiration. It was one of those things where you’re like, I don’t know if I should write a song like this. But I thought if I couched it in enough of a metaphor and story it would work. For me, it was a very emotional experience writing that song. I’m not always thinking, is this going to be a big hit with kids. Of course, we’ve never played that song live. But, generally from adults, I’ve had people say, “that song reminds me of my dad who passed away”.

I had fans in LA whose father seemed sort of reserved, and was there with his whole family. He said, “my favorite song is ‘Sand Castle’, I love that. Do you ever play that?” And I thought that was so cool that he loves that song.

I also had an email from a mother whose nine-year-old was listening to that song, and she said “Mom, this song is about me.” She was like, “what do you mean?” And she said, “it says, ‘you’re beautiful and brave’, and that’s about me”. So I think kids can pick up on different things and adults can pick up on different things, and hopefully it works.

That’s the great thing about making these records. I don’t feel totally constrained by the genre. Although I want some fast, funny songs, it has to be something that resonates with me as well. So that it’s not just like, “Kids want to hear a song about a firetruck, so here’s the song about a firetruck.” I try not to do that. Sometimes you’re like, “OK, kids like superheroes, so let me see if I can write a song about a superhero.” But it has to be something that makes sense for me, too. So when I’m writing a song about a superhero, it turns into “he can’t even fly, don’t turn invisible, he’s a regular guy, it’s not so miserable.” Not the most uplifting, joyous beginning. But it turns out to be something pretty wild and wonderful eventually.

JM: It takes a gift to be able to write a song about the passing of a someone’s parent and make it a kid’s song. Probably a lot of kids aren’t picking up on that aspect of it, but the parents do. Some adults probably think, “wow, this is really quite deep.”

JR: Even if the kids don’t make it past the metaphor, it’s about building a sand castle and watching it go away. Kids have that experience all the time. Things are tenuous. You draw a chalk drawing on the ground and rain comes, or a sprinkler comes and it goes away. There’s a certain sadness to that, but I think with kids they’re a lot more accepting of that than we are as adults.

JM: Well, to a kid that’s an opportunity. They get to draw something new.

JR: Yeah, to us [as adults] we dwell on it [laughs].

JM: On your new CD, you have a song “From Scratch” which is dedicated to Clara. Is that your grandmother?

JR: Yes, she just passed away last year. That was another one that was very hard to write, but another one that I’ve gotten some really nice responses to. I’m happy when people really love “Pop Fly” or “Yellow Bus” or “Way Out”, or certain songs that are kind of upbeat and fun. I’m kind of aware of what the response will be. But when I put things like “From Scratch” on record I just never know who is going to respond to it. So when people do, I’m happy that people are picking up on it.

It’s loosely based on her. Some things are not true. She never had a cat – she didn’t really like animals at all. Her stove was not really a gaslit stove. But she was a great cook, and she did grow up in the Depression, so she knew how to take something that cost nothing and turn it into a large meal for everybody. Those memories of being at her house for Thanksgiving and things like that, you know really stuck with me. In our modern world that’s an important thing for people to return to.
That sort of dinner table, slow down, enjoy the present.

JM: Your song “Humpty’s At It Again”, I think is actually deeper than it might appear.

JR: [laughs] I had a professor want to use that for a course she was teaching on The Berlin Wall, or something like that. She wanted to use it for a web advertisement. I thought that was really funny.

That’s one that was total stream-of-consciousness. I was like, I’ll loosely write a song about Humpty Dumpty. It just started off with “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men were really quite confused.” That’s the only thing I had. There are several of my songs where there’s not so well-hidden political ideas or social ideas that I fit into the song. For people that tune into it, it’s fun, and if you don’t it’s still a funny song. What do you get out of that song? My wife loves that song. It was one that I almost didn’t finish but she was like, “you have to finish that one.” It’s almost like “The Fool on the Hill” in a way, that kind of a song. But it’s also the idea of building walls to separate us from other people. It happens in the world.

JM: I sort of see it as… here we are discussing the philosophy of Humpty Dumpty [both of us laugh]. Humpty knows that he is doing something dangerous because he’s falling down all the time. He knows it is dangerous but he’s willing to take a risk for the beauty of the view. “You should see the view, it’s really nice up here.” And not listening to everyone saying that you shouldn’t be doing that. Just following his own “nose”.

JR: Several of my songs have that similar theme. The “3 Lil Pigs” song that we played at the show the other day, off of “Great Big Sun”, the same kid requested both of those songs ["Humpty's At It Again" and "3 Lil Pigs"]. I was like, “wow”, because those never get requested. I like them personally, but we just don’t play them a lot. They don’t tend to be the ones that people want to hear over and over. But with “3 Lil Pigs” I wrote that when I was [teaching] at the preschool, I was reading this Disney version of the three little pigs story where the first two little pigs were prancing in the fields – one of them was playing a flute – and the third little pig, who was the hero of the story, was wearing a three-piece suit. I was thinking about how the whole story was about instilling fear in kids to make them build really big houses to keep everything they’re afraid of away from them. The two artists that were dancing in the fields and playing music were the losers in the story. I thought, “what a horrible thing. There’s enough things going against you as you grow up in the world to make you feel that way, why instill that in a child? I hate that story now, and I’m going to turn it around and make it be the opposite of that.”

JM: You can blow my house down, but I’ll still be OK.

JR: Yeah, I’m not going to let a wolf run my life.

JM: So is this your post-September 11th song?

JR: That’s what someone asked me at the show, but I wrote it in 1994, so that would be impossible [laughs]. That’s what the people who requested it said. You know, that’s a good message. I like that to be out there.

JM: You had mentioned “Willy Was A Whale” which seems to be another stream-of-consciousness song, but also has such clever wordplay. Was that something that just came to you?

JR: It really came out of a horrible eight hours of studying Sanskrit. I was living in a basement apartment in Hyde Park, looking out at parked cars. I just was so frustrated, and I picked up the guitar and started singing the chorus. I wrote the chorus, and I liked the melody. It’s fun to write silly alliteration. Then I sat on the song for probably nine months or a year, and finished the song when I was out in Los Angeles. It was just total stream-of-consciousness, one thing led to another. Nothing in it was thought out. “Weno, Nevada” and all of that, it was just the first thing that came into my head. Even the “cactus/fact is” rhyme. Even though that took a long time to write because I waited between the chorus and the verse, it was one of the songs I wrote in probably a total of ten minutes, whereas other songs I spend days trying to get something out and then re-editing it, changing things, adding a bridge, taking it away, and moving things around. Really constructing it.

JM: When you get writer’s block, do you pull out the old Sanskrit textbook?

JR: [laughs] I get writer’s block all the time. There’s a lot of anxiety involved in writing songs for me. Some of that comes out making the song better, like “Meltdown” which totally came out of the horrible anxiety of writing it. It’s a song about anxiety so it makes perfect sense [laughs]. But other times it gets in the way. Some of the songs that people respond to the most are often the songs that I write at the end, when I’m getting ready to record the record. Because I’m pretty much done. And I know I’ve got ten songs or I’ve got nine songs, and I just have to do a few more. Then I do something that is just silly and natural, and people respond to it.

Getting out of the writer’s block is hard. Sit with it, deal with it, try not to avoid it. It’s like everything [laughs].

JM: When you’re writing songs, does it ever feel like work, or is it always fun?

JR: It is almost never fun, I would say [laughs]. It is only fun when everything is flowing and I know I’m on to something. But even then, like “Henrietta’s Hair”, I was like, “this could be a really good song.” But it was days and days of beating myself up and not being able to figure out what the story should be. Even with “Pop Fly”, I started writing it and I thought, “Oh, this is going to be good. I like this. It’s flowing and I see how the rhyme scheme is working.” And then I was working on it, and I finished the verses and the choruses and didn’t have the bridge yet. Then I listened back to it, and I was like, “this is stupid, this is a horrible song.” It’s a total self-doubting process. It’s really weird. I don’t think everyone does this, but it’s just my way of writing. Just very self-critical, I think.

JM: It sounds a bit like the Paul Simon school of songwriting, where he might spend up to a year perfecting a lyric.

JR: I think he has an office that he goes to where he writes songs. I’ve read interviews where he’s just like, “I go to work every day, and sit and write.” I do that, too. When I’m writing songs, that’s my job. I wake up in the morning and make coffee, and spend the whole day, whether I write anything or not, working on trying to write songs. Sometimes that’s very frustrating. But out of that frustration, if you get something that you really like, you think, “where did that come from? How did I do that?” You can never remember, and you’re back to the drawing board again.

At the time it feels really weird to be dealing with all this frustration over writing a song for kids, that should be just fun and simple and easy to do. Sometimes that just feels absurd to me. But then I make the record like “Pop Fly” or something, and I get an email from a fan who says, “I wish you could be a fly on the wall of our minivan as we’re driving through San Francisco and my daughters are singing every word at the top of their lungs. It’s awesome that you do this.” That makes it all worthwhile. Little do they know that I’m sitting in my house, sweating trying to come up with something and feeling like nothing is good enough.

But every writer goes through that. I read stories about other songwriters where they are like, “when I’m starting working on a new record I write ten songs that are just terrible, and I have to go through that to get to the one song that’s really good.” I do that, too. I work days and days on something that I do realize isn’t very good afterwards, and I scrap it. Maybe I come back later and listen to it later and pick up a melody or something.

JM: How is writing kids songs different from writing songs for grown-ups?

JR: For me, it’s not all that different other than that the subject matter has to in some ways pertain to something that kids will be interested in, whether it’s a childhood experience, or a story about an animal or some interesting person or something. I think even when I’m writing songs for grown-ups it’s about getting in the character’s head of whoever you’re writing about. If it’s some emotion I’m feeling, couching it in a story or a metaphor or a good rhyme scheme, and a good melody, it’s pretty similar.

JM: Why do you think your songs for kids do appeal so much to grown-ups?

JR: I think a lot of it is that I’m trying to write something that I am proud of as an adult, and that I would want to listen to as an adult even if it’s based on childhood themes. So musically and lyrically I try to make it really interesting to me as an adult. It goes back to that experience I had at the preschool where I wanted to be listening to something that I enjoyed, too. So I’m trying to make music that parents are going to enjoy as much as their kids. You know, kids can handle anything, and I think they love a good hook just like we do.

JM: How would you describe the evolution of your style of kids music starting with “Great Big Sun” up to through the current album.

JR: Definitely, for better or worse, things have gotten more complicated [laughs]. Sometimes I think about “Great Big Sun” and I wish I could write songs that simple again. But you just have to do what you’re doing at the time, and try to accept it and move on. You can’t recreate the past.

It started off very folky, me on the acoustic guitar. That record was recorded primarily with just Liam and me. Liam tapping his knee or playing a bongo, or a bass line. We had a horn player and a few other people come in. But as things moved along, I started playing a little bit more with other people, and then started writing songs because I was playing with other people, thinking I should start to write something that’s a little more for a band since we have a drummer that we’re playing with. So I think it gradually turned into more of a full rock band thing. But even early on with “Great Big Sun”, there is “Do You Wanna Go”, which is a silly Ramones-like punk rock song that is on an acoustic guitar. “Yellow Bus” is fairly folky, but it has “One Little Cookie”, and certain songs that are rock songs. And if we were to record them now, they would probably be a little more rock than they are on the records.

I think the style of recording has changed over time, too. With “Great Big Sun” we just got in a room together and recorded thirteen songs in 24 hours. As time has gone on, Liam does pre-production with the band, and we work out some things before we even get in there. We spend a lot more time making the recording just how we want it. I like the natural sound of a room and people playing together, but I also like a really good power pop record. I like the sound of that. For some reason as I’ve written songs over time and have learned more about the craft of writing songs, I’m like, “Oooh, this is how you change keys. Let’s do it three times” [laughs]. You’re on a journey, you’re like, “what can I do next? What will be interesting?” For me that has involved sometimes making the songs more complicated and making the lyrics more complicated. It’s fun.

JM: Do you ever listen to songs by other kids artists?

JR: I do a little bit just because we often trade records and I keep in touch with different people. I enjoy what other people are doing. It probably doesn’t influence me in the same way that listening to whatever record I pick up in the store as an adult listener does. But it’s cool to hear what other people are doing, because I think there is a wide variety of ideas about how to do it. But as someone who doesn’t have kids, I don’t necessarily find myself listening to too many things that often. I think there are things out there that sound good to an adult, too. I can put it on a Sunday morning, and make coffee, and if it’s a good sounding record and has good songs, it sounds nice.

JM: Do you think kids have the attention span for a Kidapalooza with various artists such as yourself, They Might Be Giants, Laurie Berkner,…?

JR: I didn’t think they did but we did an event in Kansas City called Jiggle Jams which was actually with They Might Be Giants and us, Trout Fishing in America, and then the day I wasn’t there John McCutchan and a bunch of other people. It was two days of music and tons of different bands. It kind of ebbed and flowed like a Lollapolooza event does, but it worked really well. There were a lot of people, and people saw different acts. People that came to see us saw another group and enjoyed them and vice versa. It was a good time. As someone who bought They Might Be Giants’ first record when it came out on vinyl, it was pretty amazing to be playing with them. I love what they do. It’s cool to have such a variety of people getting into kids music and making interesting stuff.

JM: Do you think there is potential for a kids song to cross over and become a Top 40 hit?

JR: Gosh, I don’t know. In some ways, with the record industry in such dire straits, kids music is doing better than other genres. Some [kids records] are starting to appear in Billboard charts, although I think it has tended to be the Kidz Bop type things rather than original kids music. You never know, I guess.

JM: What does Liam Davis bring to the songs?

JR: He’s just an absolutely brilliant musician. He’s often able to help me articulate what I’m trying to do, like if I say “the vibe should be like this or that” he’s really good at how it should go. He does a lot of arrangements on certain songs, like “Liam, why don’t you do something here with strings?” I think we very similar sensibilities. Not exactly the same, which I think is part of what makes it good because we push each other in different directions. That’s helpful. He’s definitely a big part of it. He works with several other artists, and he’s just amazing at listening to what other people do and bringing the best out of them. He is one of the people, including my wife, that I run songs by when I’m writing them. He can be both comforting and critical at the same time, which is helpful for someone who is beating themself up writing the songs [laughs]. He’s good at, “this is definitely good, but you should go back and work on this part,” or “it still needs more of a hook”, or “I don’t think this works.” So he’s a good person to have on your side.


JM: More broadly, how would you describe your relationship with the band Frisbie?

JR: That has just kind of gradually come out of working with Liam. He brought in Gerald Dowd who is now drumming with us for a couple of songs on “Meltdown”, “Imaginary Rhino” and “Cartwheels and Somersaults”. He also brought in bassist Matt Thompson, who also plays stand-up bass, to do that made sense for him to be doing. When we play with a slightly larger band than the band that you saw, with the back-up singers, we sometimes have Steve Frisbie. Liam and he are the main singers in the band. He sings with us along with Keelie Vasquez, they do back-up singing. So, at times, we have nearly the entire band on the stage, which is pretty funny. They’re just an amazing rock group. Everyone in that band is pro beyond pro. The more you surround yourself, like I do, with musicians who are better than I am at their instruments, the better you sound [laughs]. You get a drummer like Gerald Dowd and everything sounds good [laughs].

[Frisbie, Brian Eno discussion]

JR: Liam brings a Brian Eno-like presence to the table. When he works with other groups he tends to push them in certain ways, but he also brings out who they are in that way. It makes a good producer. There are producers where you hear their records and you know it’s them, but you still hear the artist even more so than you did on the record when they were working with someone else.

JM: Certainly when you listen to your records, it’s not like, “Oh, that’s just Frisbie with kid’s lyrics”. When you present your songs to him, do you just have demos on an acoustic guitar?

JR: More recently, I’ve been using Garage Band [for the Mac] quite a bit, I’d say for the last couple of records. It used to pretty much entirely be me playing them on acoustic. But around when “Meltdown” came out I started using [Garage Band] because I’d be recording the vocal and the guitar for myself while I was writing it, and I starting using the program to write the song. It added a lot of stuff that I never would have done before. I’d start adding ideas for back-up vocals and melodies on synthesizers and various things, some of which make it onto the record and some of which don’t. But it at least gives more of an idea of the vibe I’m going for.

I’m horrible at recording stuff. It’s all done in a very working-take way. I’m not trying to make something that I would ever want anyone to hear except Liam, and the band just so that they can get the idea. I’m not trying to perfect anything. I just go through and sing it. If things are horribly out of tune I’m not even concerned because I’m just trying to get the thing down. I end up cutting and pasting stuff, and moving sections around. It’s a really fun way to write.

Unfortunately sometimes it leads to slight disasters, like with “Pop Fly”. I wrote that on Garage Band, and then I realized when we performed it live that there was absolutely no time to breathe in the entire song, because I’d been recording it piecemeal, just one thing into another. It’s just non-stop lyric lines running into each other. When we do it live, Liam sings the harmony part with me on the pre-chorus section, and a lot of times I drop out from one of the words and take a big, deep breath. I can’t make it through.

JM: I’ve read that you play about 200 shows per year. Are you still on that schedule?

JR: For the most part that is true. This summer has been a little more mellow than usual, which has been very nice after seven years of constant touring. It’s been good. I’m going to be in town for a whole month, I think. We’re playing here and there during that time. But there are a lot of times, like earlier in the year, where we’re out of town Friday through Monday. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I’m back trying to take care of all the things that have fallen apart, then I’m getting on another plane going somewhere else. Every single week. Then I’m gone for a week somewhere. That weighs heavy on anyone, I think. But I love performing, so it’s kind of a Catch 22.

JM: I asked you this about songwriting. For playing shows, does it feel like work?

JR: I really love performing. I’m just kind of an anxious person [laughs]. I get nervous before shows. Sometimes I’m not as comfortable as I’d like to be onstage, even if it doesn’t come across that way, which is often what people say if I say “every other line I kept on thinking I was going to forget the words to the song”, or “I just didn’t feel in my own skin”, or whatever. I mean, I really love performing. Most of it is getting to watch the kids in the audience and watch the adults in the audience interact with their kids, just knowing that you are bringing families together. It’s fun to watch that stuff happen, and to know that you’re being a part of that.

Because it’s a lot more abstract making a record and putting it out there. Like that guy I mentioned who wrote me that email who said he wished you could be a fly on the wall of our van. I’m not, so I don’t really know what’s happening. I just put it out there. You get some feedback from people, but I think it’s nice in concert to know what people are responding to, getting to see how it works in reality. It’s all in my head when I’m writing it. Then Liam and I put it onto a record together with a band, and we’re all like, “we do like how it sounds,” but we have no idea how that is going to translate. So live is a good experience for getting some feedback. And it’s fun. It’s a fun band to play with, and then I have a great time when I’m onstage. Everyone’s a pro. Sometimes we take the show off the script and people go with it. It’s fun.

JM: Any embarassing onstage moments?

JR: Plenty, I’m sure but [laughs] hopefully I’ve forgotten those. I mean there have certainly been times when I’ve forgotten lyrics, and the worst thing is that often it’s because I’m watching a kid in the audience sing along to every single word, and I’m thinking, “how do they know all the words to this song?” Then I’m going to forget the words myself, watching them. It’s a lot to remember [laughs] when you’re trying to make sure that you’re performing well for the audience, and that the interactive stuff is going well. It’s just a lot on my mind to make sure that it’s all coming across.

JM: I would guess that you played several hundred shows with Pimentos for Gus, and over a thousand shows for kids. How would you compare the experiences of playing for young adults with Pimentos for Gus versus playing for kids?

JR: When Pimentos for Gus was playing together, it was kind of that shoe-gazing period of the early 90′s. Especially in Minneapolis, it was like, people wouldn’t even applaud if they were enjoying the
show. There was this weird kind of distance between the audience and the performers.

The great thing about kids music is that we start playing and a kid will jump up and start dancing by themselves. Or a grown-up will start singing along in the back or whatever. People just feel a lot more free to enjoy themselves. You just get a lot more instant feedback when playing for a kid audience.

When either we have people who have joined the band or we have guests join us onstage who are used to just playing for adults, I think every single time when we finish the show the person who has joined us says, “that was the most fun I’ve have had perfoming in a long time. The audience was so awesome and so responsive.” It’s a different experience because it’s a lot of back and forth with the audience.

JM: And you do a lot of interactive things.

JR: Which is something we’ve developed over time. When I realized the first time I tried to play “Great Big Sun” songs in this bookstore and I had the kids there for about three songs and then they wandered off to another section of the bookstore. I was like, wait, I can’t just play the songs and you’ll listen?

JM: Have you ever thought of releasing a live album?

JR: Yeah, we have… we haven’t done it [laughs]. We’ve thought about releasing a live album or a live DVD. We’ve done some recording of things, but just haven’t quite figured out how to make it work the best way. I’m always wanting everything that we put out to feel like it’s the best thing that could be. Sometimes, I’m like, it’s not. It doesn’t feel as solid as a record. I think we might do something at some point, but not yet. We’re more concentrated on DVD stuff, which may be more videos and more interstitial type things. Trying to make something that’s more of an experience, that’s not just a bunch of songs.

JM: What’s the timetable for the DVD?

JR: It was supposed to be done about four years ago. We’ve kind of gone through many transitions. Dave, our trumpet player, made the “Pop Fly” video that’s on YouTube now. It was something he just took up, and was like, “I’ve never done this before, but I’ll figure it out. I’d love to do it.” I think he did a fantastic job for never having done anything before. But we’re also talking to another group in LA that might be working with us this summer, to start recording some stuff. If everything goes as planned maybe Christmas or early next year we’ll have something put together.

JM: Is the plan mostly videos of songs you’ve written already. or new songs?

JR: The songs will probably be things we’ve done already, but there probably be also some interstitial type stuff and some more story line things that wouldn’t necessarily all be music. I’d kind of like it to be more interesting that just a bunch of videos on a DVD, although I’m sure people would like that. It would have that element, but I think it would be fun if there was a little more to it. That’s what we’re trying to develop.

JM: What advice would you give an aspiring songwriter?

JR: I think as with anything, it’s practice. Keep doing it, and be willing to write bad songs. Sometimes I look back on some of the simpler songs I wrote early on and think, wow, I wish I could write one of those. But you can’t. So you have to just accept what you’re doing at the time, and try to be content with that. Because you can only do what comes out of you, and you just have to let that stuff come out and not block it too much.

There’s a book called “Art and Fear” that was recommended to me during one of my many sessions of [writer's] block. It’s a great book. It’s mostly about visual artists, but there’s a great story in there where there’s a pottery class, and they divide the class into two groups. They say for one group they say they’re going to graded on the quantity of pots that you make, and for the other group you’re going to be graded on the quality of the pots that you make. They went off and did the thing, and a week later when they came back all of the best work was done by the group that was going to be graded on quantity. And the people who were graded on quality ended up not finishing things or it was half-baked because they were trying to perfect one thing. Whereas the group that was just trying to make as many things as possible came up with the best stuff. I think with songwriting, it’s a lot like that. You have to just try to write as many things as you can, and certainly discard stuff that is not up to snuff, but don’t judge it right away. Try to work with it and see what could happen.

I think being an editor is good, too, for a songwriter. I sometimes find, for me at least, people that make records and have eight million songs on them, I’m like, you know what, this would be a great record if you had gotten an editor and just gotten rid of some of this stuff. No one has the attention span for a 72 minute CD [laughs]. My favorite records are usually over in about 35 minutes. When vinyl was popular, you could only fit about 18 minutes on a side, and that’s it.

So I think it’s a combination of trying to create as much as you can, and then weeding through it trying to only pull out the best stuff.

Also having people that you trust around you that you can play things to that are the best critics. You don’t always agree with what they say but it’s nice to have people to bounce things off, for me.

JM: Would you answer differently if I asked what advice you would give to an aspiring childrens songwriter?

JR: I think the only different advice I would say is to try not to write a song about what you think a kid would like to hear. You just have to write something that is honest, and if you shoot really high then kids will come with you. I think the mistakes people make often is stuff I wouldn’t personally want to listen to, when it sounds like they’re imagining what they think a kid would want to hear a song about and it comes back as condescending and preachy.

JM: It seems that you mostly, or maybe exclusively, write songs alone. Do you ever think that maybe you should write with someone else?

JR: I haven’t had much luck with that, I think partly because it’s a very private experience with myself, and I’ve never been comfortable enough to just sit down and write a song with other people. I don’t know, I’m exploring that area of self-doubt with myself and what I’m making. It’s not comfortable to be inviting someone in all the time. It’s only comfortable when I’m three-fourths of the way done with something and willing to play a bit of it for somebody.

I’m sure I could do it. I just don’t think it would be as personal. It’d be more songwriting by the books or something like that.

JM: Do you think your songs appeal, or could appeal, to people from other countries? In other words, do you plan to “go global”?

JR: Definitely. I’m working on an all-French album so I can go and tour Burgandy [laughs]. No I don’t. I think it would work with other English-speaking countries. A lot of it is very lyric-based.so it might be hard if there was a language barrier. I do get emails from people in other countries who have the records, who have gotten them from friends in the US. They’re either people from here living over there or natives of England and Australia. I’ve gotten even things from Tokyo and stuff like that, which is fun. So people are hearing it.

I think even with, like, London, it’s funny. I got a message from some fans there, and they love it, but some of the colloquial phrases you use, they don’t know what they mean. There’s a song “Billy Was A Bully” where it says “Bullying was so last year” and they didn’t know that sort of phrase, the fashion idea. Once they found out they started using it all the time in common speech [laughs]. Parents were like, “I loved it”, and like, “oh, it’s so last year.” [laughs]

JM: You write and perform and songs, and I understand that your wife is a seventh grade teacher, so between you, you keep kids entertained and educated. What else do kids need?

JR: Love of course from their parents [laughs]. [Pause] Education, entertainment, let’s go! [laughs] That’s what I need.

JM: Can you say more about the business end of children’s music.

JR: I run the label. I work with the distributor RED Distribution, that’s Sony, to get the records into stores. I work with a publicist, and I work with a booking agent, and a management company out in L.A. for some of the bigger idea stuff. I grew up in the punk rock 80′s and played music in the 90′s when the whole DIY stuff was really big and people starting their own labels and all that stuff. With Pimentos we had our own label. So when I started doing the kids stuff it seemed natural to just put the stuff out myself.

Over the years, with touring around and doing better and better and getting more and more publicity, we’ve certainly had people approach us about putting records out on bigger labels. It just hasn’t really seemed like, with the state of music and everything, the right thing to do. Because when you do it yourself there’s a lot more work and all of the that, but you also retain the rights to everything. It just hasn’t really made any financial sense to go to a bigger label. I say that, now I have nine titles on my label and even though they’re distributed for the most part through RED, I have many of them in my garage and basement, and am hauling boxes around and all that kind of stuff [laughs], and making sure things are getting shipped to various places. Sometimes I feel like I’m running more of a warehouse than playing music for anyone. It has its good side and its bad side.

JM: Presumably when you started you didn’t have a publicist and so on. That grew with time?

JR: Right. Yeah. When I decided to actually make another record, I did the Masters Degree, but I quit grad school and didn’t do a Ph.D, and I was working in computers in Chicago and I quit that job, I was really like, I want to make a living at music, I don’t want to do anything else. Otherwise, I will do something else. I had done enough of the play-music-as-a-hobby-and-work-another-job kind of thing. So one of the things that was recommended to me was getting a publicist, that was the best way of spending your money if you’re going to invest in something. That’s been true. It’s a good person to have on your side.

Especially with me early on, basically just driving all over the country and playing in church basements and maternity stores in Soho, and little random fundraisers in parks and whatever, having a publicist, somebody who can call up the local newspaper and try to get an article written about you and send out stuff. That’s been one of the few things I’ve actually been able to delegate well. I wish I could do that with other parts of the business [laughs]. Like most people that start their own business, there’s a little bit of control freak in that kind of person.

JM: What’s your impression of Chicago, where you’re now based near?

JR: When I ended up moving to Hyde Park for graduate school, although the Sanskrit and other stuff didn’t agree with me as much, I loved the city. I was like, I don’t know why this didn’t resonate with me before. Not to knock Minneapolis, but I was like, what was I doing in Minneapolis all those years. This place is awesome. You can get a hot dog at 4:00 AM [laughs]. It’s a friendly place, the people are super nice, but it’s also got amazing music happening all the time, great restaurants. Of course new things like Millennium Park where we’re playing in July. I’ve been telling people all over the country, you’ve got to come to Chicago just to check out Millennium Park, it’s so amazing. It’s so cool, because it’s filled with sculptures and large art pieces that kids love. There’s that thing with the faces that’s so bizarre and weird from an adult perspective but it’s also a fountain where kids play. The bean is mesmerizing to everybody that steps underneath it, and it’s always constantly surrounded by people. I feel like it’s like a modern Sistine Chapel or something like that. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see a concert there yet, but the sound system is beyond anything I’ve ever heard. Anywhere you’re sitting it sounds like the group is right there with you, but it’s not loud, it’s just natural sounding, it’s amazing. You know, free concerts all summer.

[Discussion of Chicago music scene, L.A., Sly and the Family Stone (who I'd recently seen in concert in L.A.)]

I just recently got the reissue of “There’s A Riot Goin’ On” and it’s such a weird sounding record. Now that you can hear everything even better it’s even murkier and weirder than I imagined it was when I heard it on the 1989 CD that I had before.

JM: Are you a Cubs or a Sox fan?

JR: How about I start with this. The two biggest baseball fans in the group are Gerald Dowd, the drummer, and Liam Davis. Gerald is a Red Sox fan, and Liam is a White Sox fan. I can say that I’m a Cubs fan. I love baseball, but I’m not a sports person in general. I love watching baseball games, but I don’t follow it, I can’t talk stats like Liam and Gerald can, you know endlessly about different players from every year that baseball has been around.

The song ["Pop Fly"] is more about my Little League experience, and things like that. I will say between the Cubs and the White Sox, at the risk of alienating my audience, the park Wrigley Field makes you realize why they call it a baseball park. While I love going to see Sox games as well, it’s just not that experience of being right there where you’re looking out at the beautiful field. It’s a little bit more alienating I think as a spectator. That’s because I like just sitting out like I’m in a park [laughs] as much as watching the game. But when I’m there I get into it and I get tensed up, but I don’t watch it on TV or anything like that.

JM: One of the things that shows up in your songs a lot is faux stuttering, like “M-m-m-m-meltdown”, and I was trying to think what other songs are like that. “Ch-ch-ch-changes” or “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, b-b-b-baby”. Where does this come from? Is it natural?

JR: I’m sure it’s not natural. Or “My Generation.” It seems to be just a great hook. It works. It’s funny. At the time I don’t know that I was even… Now I’m very aware that I was do that and have done it, but when I was making… I think that “Meltdown” has the most of that, but I mean I was doing it with “D-d-d-daycamp”. It just makes a good hook. I don’t know why it is. For me it doesn’t seem to get old. If it does for other people, I don’t know [laughs]. But with “Meltdown” and “Maybe the Monster” on the same record, it’s like “M-m-m-maybe” and “M-m-m-meltdown”. It’s probably all of those things you mentioned, and definitely The Who, I listened to a lot, and still do.

JM: A different thing is repeating a sound in a melodically adventurous way, like “Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop…” or like “Ba-ba-ba”. Where is that coming from? Is it just another good hook.

JR: It is a good hook. I mean, I like “ba, ba, ba” a lot. I think part of that is Beach Boys songs have a lot of that kind of stuff. I like all those choruses that use nonsense syllables. Yeah, I don’t know where it comes from. Something about it is utterly satisfying [laughs], I don’t know why. I have several songs where it ends in the character singing nonsense, like “Sand Castle” is even like that. Or “Dad Caught Stars”, a song about a dad and his kid catching fireflies together, the chorus is total nonsense: “He sang na, na, na, na, na, na, blue moon. And I sang, hey, hey, yeah, yeah, mmm.” When I’m doing that with the band and we’ll playing the song, I invite the audience to sing along. The lyrics are pretty simple: it’s just “na, na, na, na, na, blue moon, hey hey, yeah yeah”. But for some reason that is very satisfying. I don’t really know why. When I hear something like that in another song I like it, too. With the “Superkid” song which also has that, it’s kind of like it’s his theme song, he’s not doing too well in the super power area but he’s got a theme song, which is important for any super hero. As they say.

JM: It certainly is good to sing along to. Even kids who may not be able to keep up with fast lyrics are able to sing along.

JR: Yeah. And sometimes words can’t always express what you want to say. Sometimes it leads to that. I think with that “Dad Caught Stars” song it’s as much about that as anything. It’s that beautiful, being out at dusk with fireflies with your father. It’s kind of hard to express what that’s all about. But nonsense syllables seem to work as well as anything.

JM: I guess The Beatles do something like that with “Na, na, na, na, na, na, na” [Hey Jude]. But you do it faster. Can you think of anyone else who does that? Is it your trademark sound?

JR: “Pop Fly” kind of has classical roots. [Orchestra sound] “Da, da, da, da, da, da, da…” Some of the melodies are just so completely random when I think about them afterwards. A lot of times they’re driven by the lyrics as much as anything. If I actually sing just the verse melody to “Meltdown” I think what the hell? Where did that come from?

[chat about Beach Boys]

JR: Brian Wilson’s songs are insane. Even “Surfer Girl”, never one of my favorite songs mostly because the lyrics don’t really do anything for me, but melodically and the chords, it’s so genius.

I’ll totally geek out with you for a moment. One of the greatest moments of my life is still captured somewhere [pulls up picture on his phone]. It’s better than anyone could ever imagine. This was at his kid’s school in LA. Keith Richards was supposed to be the special guest. They were having a big fundraiser and I was playing an opening set. Some people were fans at the school and had hired me to come out and play. And Keith fell out of a tree. You remember that happening? So they got Brian because he’s a parent. They had a Beatles cover band and he sang “Let It Be” and “God Only Knows”, I think, with the band.

So he was there at the soundcheck. I often sing Buddy Holly songs when I’m soundchecking, just because I like the songs and they’re a good warm-up for me to be singing, and I played “Rave On”. The sound guy was like, when you’re done, could you come to the soundbooth? Mr. Wilson wants to talk to you. The person who made my favorite record. He wanted to hear “Rave On” again. He really liked it. I played it for him, he wanted to hear it again and I played it again. He started singing counterpoint melody with me. We ended up spending about an hour together talking about “Rave On”. It was really absolutely weird and it was awesome. Then he said something to me like, “when you sang that song that made my entire day.” And I said, “how could you be thanking me? Pet Sounds is my favorite record.” And he’s like, “Oh, Justin”. It was the weirdest surreal experience. It was hilarious. At first it was just like, “Brian Wilson is at the same thing that I’m at.” I called my wife. Then the next thing I know I’m standing right in front of him singing a song to him. Pretty weird. I just think he made so much great music.

JM: One of your songs on your latest album has the Beach Boys vibe for the chorus.

JR: “Kickboard”. Totally embarassing. I mean, totally fun to do, but geeky. That’s part of the fun with kids music. I would probably never do that otherwise. It’s fun. You can be all over the map stylistically and it’s still kids music. You can do a ska song, you can do faux world beat, you can do a total folky song, you can do a punk rock song. That’s what makes it interesting.

Pete Seeger is a legendary folk singer with quite a colorful history. In the early 1940′s he performed with the Almanac Singers, whose ranks also included Woody Guthrie. In 1948 he co-founded The Weavers, which had a number one hit with their cover of “Goodnight, Irene” by Leadbelly. In 1953, The Weavers were dropped by their record label and their songs were denied airplay because of suspected communist activities. When Seeger was called to testify before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Commitee in 1955, he refused to name his personal and political associations, which led to him being found in contempt of Congress and blacklisted. Seeger was a key figure in the 1960′s folk revival, and wrote or co-wrote the folk classics “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer”, and “Turn, Turn, Turn!”. He also helped to popularize “We Shall Overcome”, which became an anthem for the American Civil Rights Movement. Seeger also recorded multiple albums for children. In January 2009, at age 89, Seeger led the crowd in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” at President Obama’s inauguration.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter?

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Sir George Martin

Sir George Martin, commonly referred to as the “fifth Beatle,” is recognized as one of the top producers in the history of recorded sound. His musical arrangements and use of studio experimentation elevated many of The Beatles’ songs, with notable examples including “Yesterday”, “Strawberry Fields”, “I Am The Walrus”, and “Eleanor Rigby”. Martin also produced albums by Jeff Beck, Mahavishnu Orchestra, America, Cheap Trick, and others.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Sir George Martin: So much depends on the talent and abilities of the individual. If one is suited to perform or compose music and has a genuine talent, then the age old adages apply: the advice is consistent hard work in training and practice to develop the talent and then persistence in finding the opportunity to perform.

Many thanks to Brooks Firestone for passing this question on to Sir George Martin while he was in the Santa Barbara area, and for sending his reply.

Jeff Barry

Jeff Barry is one of rock and roll’s most accomplished songwriters, and was recently selected for a 2010 Ahmet Ertegun Award by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Barry and his songwriting partner Ellie Greenwich co-wrote such early rock and roll classics as “Be My Baby”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “Chapel of Love”, “River Deep, Mountain High” (all co-written with Phil Spector), “Leader of the Pack” (co-written with George “Shadow” Morton), “Hanky Panky,” and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” Later, Barry co-wrote the bubblegum smash “Sugar, Sugar” with Andy Kim, and theme songs for the TV shows “The Jeffersons,” “One Day at a Time,” and “Family Ties.” Barry also was the producer for many well-known songs, including “I’m A Believer” by The Monkees, and early Neil Diamond songs such as “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” and “Kentucky Woman.”

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter?

Jeff Barry: [long pause] Have a clear vision of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. All show-biz, all entertainment has one thing in common, whether it’s film, TV, writing a novel, a song, or a script, painting, anything. Almost all creativity that is even commercial design, cars, you know, designing…, what do you call that, when you’re designing products? That’s what I was studying to be, too, before I quit. It’s all about creating emotion. There’s an old adage that if you leave them like you found them, you blew it. So it’s all about creating emotion, and a songwriter needs to understand that as well. That’s why people want to buy, and own I should say, the thing that you’re presenting, because it creates an emotion. Otherwise why would they want it? I think that’s fact #1.

You’re communicating. You could even say songs to some degree are a little like greeting cards. People buy them to express something to someone else that they can’t make up themselves. So it’s all about communication and creating emotion. If you’re writing strictly for yourself, and the lyrics are obtuse and unavailable and people don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, then you sure are limiting your ability to create emotion. So write those songs, get that stuff out, that’s fine.

But if you want to make a living at it, you need to write songs that are commercial. Commercial is a good word. There is nobody in show business that is not trying to be commercial. I don’t care how obscure and weird they are, they want to sell, which is commercial. Pop is short for popular, and that’s the idea. If you’re not looking to make a career of it, it doesn’t matter. Write songs, that’s great. Play them for family and friends, and whatever, that’s beautiful, there’s nothing wrong with that.

But your question, I think, is aimed at people that want to make a living at it, which is tough these days. I’m very thankful that when I came into the industry the songs were more valued than they are today. Today record companies are interested in things other than the songs, a lot of the time. And the artists who are writing their own songs, they’re having hits, maybe not based on the song all the time, [instead] on the rhythm and the haircut and the tattoo and the weirdness and the publicity. Which is different from what it was back then. In my heyday, it was certainly more based on radio play, what it sounded like. The E Channel didn’t exist, and TV wasn’t such a source of entertainment as it is today. The visual, let’s put it that way. It was more about the audio than it is today, which is a lot to do with the visual.

So the advice would be to basically create emotion, keep it simple, keep it clear. When you’re trying to get to somebody in the industry, take the three to five best songs, most commercial songs, most valuable songs, and put them on a disk. Don’t present 25 songs. You don’t have 25 hits, you just don’t. Take the best five, even if you have 25 smashes. Take the best five. Get that to whoever you can. And the emotion you want to bring out in anyone that you’re pitching to is greed. No one is going to do you any favors. Greed is a healthy word, whether it’s a music publisher, or a recording artist, or an A&R person at a label, or a record producer. You want them to want the material. No one is going to do you any favors, record it just because. If it’s a relative, perhaps. But otherwise, as it should be, they have to hear something that is going to make them look good, make them a success. So keep that in mind.

The other hint would be, sometimes you start a song and you write the first verse and you write the chorus, and then you get to the second verse and you can’t come up with the second verse. It could be that you’ve already written it. You take the first verse, make it the second verse, and then write the first verse [as] pre-story, set-up. That will free you up. So in other words, the beginning, middle, and end, I mean you might have already written the middle. And if you have, and you put it at the beginning, you’re messed up. Because then you’re going to write the ending for the middle, and you’ll have no ending. So I find that, for myself, that works. Because basically if you have an idea for a song you’ll write the core idea instantly, and the core, which is represented in the chorus usually too, but story-wise many times it’s overrepresented in the first verse. So you can take a look at that. That might be a good hint for songwriters in general.

For full interview with Jeff Barry, click here.

Graham Nash

Graham Nash is an English singer and songwriter best known for his contributions to British Invasion band The Hollies (he co-wrote “Carrie Anne”, “King Midas in Reverse”, “On a Carousel”, and “Dear Eloise”, and sang on many others including “Bus Stop”), to Crosby, Stills, & Nash & sometimes Young (he wrote “Teach Your Children”, “Our House”, “Wasted on the Way”, and “Marrakesh Express”, and sang on nearly all of their output) and as a solo artist (he wrote “Chicago” and “We Can Change the World”). In 2010 he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his service to music and to charity.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Graham Nash: Gotta mean it. Gotta believe it. You gotta have a passion for it. ‘Cause if you don’t you’re fucking wasting your time.

Fats Domino

Fats Domino is one of the pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll, bringing New Orleans rhythm & blues into the fledgling genre. His first hit, “The Fat Man”, was released in 1950 and sold over a million copies; it is sometimes argued to be the first rock ‘n’ roll song. His 1955 song “Ain’t That A Shame” become a #1 pop hit for Pat Boone. The next year, his version of “Blueberry Hill” reached #2 in the pop charts, and spent eleven weeks at #1 on the R&B charts; it sold more than 5 million copies. Another notable song was “I’m Walkin”, which hit #4 on the pop charts in 1957. All told, between 1956 and 1960 Domino sold 65 million records, second only to Elvis Presley.

From the 1980′s onward, Domino rarely left New Orleans, not even for his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or an invitation to perform at the White House. He was feared to have been killed when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but he survived; his home is being restored, and he hopes to return there someday.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Fats Domino:

Wanda Jackson

Wanda Jackson is often referred to as the “Queen of Rockabilly”, and for good reason. After some success as a country singer, Elvis Presley himself encouraged her to try singing rockabilly, resulting in a string of hot tracks including “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad”, “Mean, Mean Man”, “Fujiyama Mama” (which hit No. 1 in Japan), “Funnel of Love”, and “Let’s Have a Party” (which was a Top 40 hit in the U.S.) She blazed the trail for women in rock ‘n’ roll, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. Not content to rest on her laurels, earlier this year she released an album of smoking covers called The Party Ain’t Over, which was produced by and featured the guitar of Jack White.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Wanda Jackson: Well, things have changed so much in the industry. So I really don’t know much about the workings of it. Even country music is big business these days. It’s a big thing. So everything’s different.

But I would say I think it’s a good time. People are loving music, and they’re accepting people who are different, and want to do it their own way.

So, golly, I would say, you have to get a record contract, that’s your first step. And I don’t know how to tell anybody how to do that. They’d have to ask someone… People come to me now to record, so I really don’t know how to go about going out.

But you just knock on doors and talk to people, and sing everywhere that you have the opportunity. And hold on to your dream, and don’t be swayed. You might get detoured, but that’s OK. If something happens in your life, that you can’t sing or something for a while, it’s OK. Go ahead and do what you have to do. But hang onto that dream, and continue to be determined.

For full interview with Wanda Jackson, click here.

Jon Anderson

Jon Anderson is, quite literally, the voice of Yes, the band whose albums The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close To The Edge are amongst the most beloved of the progressive rock genre. Songs from this era co-written by Anderson include “Roundabout”, “Yours Is No Disgrace”, “I’ve Seen All Good People”, “Heart Of The Sunrise”, and many others. His first solo album was 1976′s Olias of Sunhillow, and he sang on Yes’ 1983 runaway hit “Owner of a Lonely Heart”. Anderson also had a long-running collaboration with Vangelis of Chariots of Fire fame. (Robin Kauffman photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Jon Anderson: Never give up…. keep practising, music will always give you a life… a special life.. be true to your dreams…

For full interview with Jon Anderson, click here.

Chuck D

Chuck D is one of the most important figures in the history of hip-hop music. He is the founder and lead rapper for the hugely influential (and controversial) band Public Enemy, which created a powerful mix of politically-charged lyrics and layered, aggressive sounds. Their second album, 1988′s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, is widely regarded as one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, and is considered to be hugely important for making rap music popular with white audiences. Other notable Public Enemy albums include Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987), Fear of a Black Planet (1990), Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black (1991), and How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul??? (2007).

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Chuck D:

1. Truly do what you do from your training and belief.

2. TRY NOT TO ASK other people opinions of your art.

3. Give music away like an advertisement for your performance as an act.

4. Make a video for 33% of your music, we live in a visual audio age, not audio visual.

For full interview with Chuck D, click here.

Rickie Lee Jones

Rickie Lee Jones is an acclaimed singer-songwriter who released her first album in 1979 and won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1980. Her song “Chuck E.’s In Love” was a huge hit, as were her first two albums, both of which reached the Top 5 in the U.S. She went on to release a dozen more albums in various styles, and her 1989 duet with Dr. John, “Makin’ Whoopee!”, won her another Grammy Award.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Rickie Lee Jones: Remember the Music. Concentrate on how you feel when you sing it. If there’s a place you don’t like, fix it. That’s the place that’s not true. Have fun always. Even sad songs, have fun. Go there to the place the song Is. And remember, it’s your job to make Them cry, not to cry yourself.

For full interview with Rickie Lee Jones, click here.

Todd Rundgren

Todd Rundgren has worn many musical hats, from principal songwriter and guitarist for the 1960′s Anglophile band The Nazz, to the pop meister who wrote the 1972 hit “Hello, It’s Me” and co-wrote the 1983 anti-work anthem “Bang the Drum All Day,” to a member of the prog-rock ensemble Utopia, to the lead singer of The New Cars after Ric Ocasek decided not to join a reunion of The Cars, to the producer of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, The New York Dolls’ debut album, and albums by many other artists including Patti Smith, Grand Funk Railroad, and XTC.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Todd Rundgren: Well, as you will recall, I gave you this whole dissertation about the difference between being a musician, and a performer, and an entertainer. The first thing to do is to have a clear distinction of what you’re trying to accomplish in that regard.

So if you want to be a musician, the first thing you need to do is get a day job [laughs]. You need to find something to do to feed yourself because music is one of these things where there aren’t success guarantees. It’s not like going to business school, getting an MBA, and then finding a job in a company somewhere. You’re going to go through this period of mystery regarding whether or not you are going to be able to ever make a living at making music. At some point you will have to make a decision that, yes, this is the life that I want to live, and that this is enough success for me to at least make a commitment to that lifestyle. Or you’re going to give up and find something else to do.

The question that you’ll have to answer for yourself at that point is, “am I really any good at it?” If I’m good at it, then regardless of what I have to do otherwise, I’m going to continue to do it. Because I’m good at it, you know? Because it means something to me to do it. And being good at it means that people respond to you.

I mean, you could say that there are egg-headed measures that only a musician would understand, in order to determine if something’s good. But really, the bottom line is, do other people enjoy listening to what you do? If they enjoy it enough to eventually go out of pocket to hear it.

But if you really just believe that you’re doing something musically important, and other people don’t understand it yet or whatever, and you’ll be lauded after you die for your incredible musicality that nobody was yet ready to listen to, then I don’t have any advice, you know [laughs]. You already have the level of self-assurance that makes you keep going regardless of what kind of success you have.

If the kind of advice is, how can I succeed as a musician, in other words, to get paid to do it… you know, I’m having enough trouble myself and I don’t need the competition. So if I knew how, I wouldn’t reveal it [laughs]. And I wouldn’t be telling you how to do it.

For full interview with Todd Rundgren, click here.

Alan Parsons

Alan Parsons has had a truly amazing career in music. His start was as an assistant engineer on the Abbey Road and Let It Be albums by The Beatles. He went on to engineer Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and their sonic masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon. He also engineered and/or produced works by Paul McCartney (Red Rose Speedway, Wildlife), The Hollies (“The Air That I Breathe”), Pilot (“Magic”), Al Stewart (“The Year of the Cat”), and Ambrosia. He then focused his attention on The Alan Parsons Project, with classic albums including Tales of Mystery and Imagination, I Robot, Pyramid, Eve, The Turn of a Friendly Card, and Eye in the Sky, and songs including “Eye in the Sky”, “Games People Play”, “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”, and “Sirius”, the latter of which is particularly beloved by fans of the Chicago Bulls.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Alan Parsons: Never give up. It’s tough, but never give up.

[different day, asked same question]

Alan Parsons: I think the basis of successful rock music is collaboration. I think too many people try to do it on their own, and sit in front of their laptop and try to be creative, and think that they can do the whole thing themselves. All the best records have come from successful collaborations, co-writing, co-performing. I would encourage musicians to work with others.

For full interview with Alan Parsons, click here.

Mark Volman

Mark Volman and long-time collaborator Howard Kaylan were founding members of The Turtles, whose 1960′s hits include “Happy Together” and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”. When The Turtles disbanded, Volman and Kaylan joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and due to contractual reasons adopted the names Flo & Eddie. Flo & Eddie performed on the Zappa albums Chunga’s Revenge, Fillmore East June 1971, and Just Another Band from L.A., and in the movie 200 Motels. Flo & Eddie also sang background vocals for T. Rex, including on the worldwide hit “Get It On (Bang A Gong)” and the albums Electric Warrior and The Slider.

And that’s just scratching the surface. They also sang on records by notable artists including Bruce Springsteen (“Hungry Heart”), The Psychedelic Furs (“Love My Way”), Stephen Stills, Alice Cooper, Ray Manzarek, Keith Moon, The Ramones, and Blondie. Volman is also the Chair of the Entertainment Industry Studies program at Belmont University in Nashville.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Mark Volman: Well, learn the business. In this day and age, any young musician who is trying to have any kind of success at all should strengthen themselves emotionally, spiritually and creatively. And one of the ways you do that is by becoming much more aware of the business of music, because it will allow you to become more valuable in all of the areas of your career. And it will help you to be able to look at what’s going on management-wise, and creatively that is very important to understand ownership, and understand publishing, and understand what record companies are about.

If you’re really moving towards the music in a business way, then you definitely have to take the time to take yourself more seriously, and the way you do that is to become much more in tune with the elements that come into the music business in terms of ownership and what makes a good manager, and what makes a good record company. So that you can protect yourself. The saddest thing is for a musician to have a great record lost in the shuffle because he didn’t know what needed to be done. Just because you make the record doesn’t allow you the ability to ignore the necessities of marketing, and public relations, and advertising, and understanding what needs to be done in the most important things.

For full interview with Mark Volman, click here.

Howard Kaylan

Howard Kaylan and long-time collaborator Mark Volman were founding members of The Turtles, whose 1960′s hits include “Happy Together” and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”. When The Turtles disbanded, Volman and Kaylan joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and due to contractual reasons adopted the names Flo & Eddie. Flo & Eddie performed on the Zappa albums Chunga’s Revenge, Fillmore East June 1971, and Just Another Band from L.A., and in the movie 200 Motels. Flo & Eddie also sang background vocals for T. Rex, including on the worldwide hit “Get It On (Bang A Gong)” and the albums Electric Warrior and The Slider. And that’s just scratching the surface. They also sang on records by notable artists including Bruce Springsteen (“Hungry Heart”), The Psychedelic Furs (“Love My Way”), Stephen Stills, Alice Cooper, Ray Manzarek, Keith Moon, The Ramones, and Blondie.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Howard Kaylan: Don’t give yourself a fallback plan. Never give yourself a fallback plan. Because the minute things go wrong, you’ll fall back. Go straight ahead with your career, and pretend that it’s the only important thing in your life, because it is. If you give yourself something to fall back on, like another career, you’ll be selling shoes.

Richie Furay

Richie Furay is best known for co-founding two notable bands: Buffalo Springfield, which is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and for which Furay was one of the primary songwriters along with Neil Young and Stephen Stills, and Poco, which is regarded as one of the pioneering bands of the country-rock genre. After leaving Poco in the early 1970′s, Furay was in the short-lived supergroup Souther-Hillman-Furay, and has since released several solo records. His song credits include “Kind Woman”, “A Child’s Claim To Fame”, “Hurry Up”, “Keep On Believin’”, “You Are The One”, and “Let’s Dance Tonight”.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Richie Furay: Enjoy the gift; be serious about it but don’t take yourself too seriously.

For full interview with Richie Furay, click here.

Ted Nugent

Ted Nugent is known as the Motor City Madman for his gonzo persona, music, guitar playing, and right-wing punditry. He was in the Detroit band The Amboy Dukes best known for the 1968 acid-rock song “Journey to the Center of the Mind”. After going solo in the 1970′s, he recorded the multi-platinum classic hard rock albums Ted Nugent, Free-for-All, and Cat Scratch Fever, plus the live album Double Live Gonzo!

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ted Nugent: Stay clean and sober and treat your mind, body and soul as a sacred temple. Eat smart, remain athletic. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Be early, stay late. Carry yourself with confidence and pride. Demand accountability from yourself and everyone around you. Put your heart and soul into everything you do and demand the same from everyone around you. Avoid losers. Get a bow and arrow, discover the spirit within. Aim small, miss small. Listen to every black soul artist, R&B and blues artist you can. Listen closely. Be one with the groove. Trample the weak, hurdle the dead.

For full interview with Ted Nugent, click here.

Billy Corgan

Billy Corgan is the lead guitarist and singer for Smashing Pumpkins, one of the best known alternative rock bands which broke through in the 1990′s. Their 1993 album Siamese Dream is widely recognized as one of the best and most influential albums of the decade.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Billy Corgan: I don’t know, because in the old days it was just, get your shit together and tour, and now I think that’s a complete waste of time. I think if you go recording first, you know, you end up being sort of a victim to the pitchfork[.com] culture, of “you know, that’s really precious.” I think the lack of bands of great width and power says something about the ground level. When we came in at the ground level, we had to be able to play. And I don’t think that exists anymore, so I don’t know.

I mean, your first album could be hailed as a masterpiece, you can play, and there’s forty guys with beards [in the audience], but it’s not going to translate to Iowa.

JM: I’m from Iowa, by the way [laughs].

BC: That was always the Pumpkins’ thing. Yeah, things like The Strokes and bands like that, that might work in New York, but it doesn’t work in fucking Iowa. That’s the thing. You can’t really truly succeed in America. You see a lot of English bands that come and play New York, Philly, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, LA, they play like eight cities and then they get the fuck out. Because they can’t go through the heartland.

I think it’s really difficult. Honestly, I don’t know. I think, sometimes, well, if I was eighteen, what would I do?

I think at the end of the day, talent is always the great arbiter. Every system is different. But at the end of the day, it should be that the talented win. Right now the mediocre seem to be winning. You know, the ones that… if everything’s niche, then you have to be somebody who kind of basically attracts four niches to add your thing up. Or be really non-offensive. And I don’t know how you do rock and roll and be non-offensive. Coldplay mastered that [everyone laughs]. I think they’re really good, but I’m saying, they mastered the art of feeling a little dangerous without being dangerous at all.

For the full chat with Billy Corgan, click here.

Peter Buck

Peter Buck is guitarist and co-founder of the long-running alternative rock band R.E.M., whose songs include “Radio Free Europe”, “It’s The End of the World As We Know It”, “Stand”, “The One I Love”, “Everybody Hurts”, “Man on the Moon”, “Losing My Religion”, “Shiny Happy People”, and “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?”. In 2007, R.E.M. was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Buck has also produced records by The Feelies, Uncle Tupelo, and others.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Peter Buck: Only do it if you have to. It’s a great life, but if you’re doubting that you want to be a musician for life then you shouldn’t be, because it’s tough work. And don’t ever sign anything. I’m one of the only people I know who didn’t get ripped off.

JM: Because you didn’t sign anything?

PB: I’ve been careful.

Bryan Adams

Bryan Adams is the all-time best-selling male Canadian artist, having co-written and performed some of the best known songs of the 1980′s and 1990′s, including rockers like “Cuts Like a Knife”, “Run to You”, “Summer of 69″, and “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started”, plus the ballads “Straight from the Heart”, and “Heaven”. He has also brought us mega-hit songs from movies, most notably the theme song “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)” from the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which spent a record sixteen straight weeks as the No. 1 song in the United Kingdom. He has also hit No. 1 with “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” from Don Juan DeMarco, and “All For Love”, performed with Rod Stewart and Sting from The Three Musketeers. He even did the soundtrack for the 2002 DreamWorks animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Bryan Adams: Well, as long as you are OK with the fact that you’ll probably never get paid for your work, thanks to internet and free downloading, then at least don’t sign your songs away. Hang on to everything you can.

For full interview with Bryan Adams, click here.

Maceo Parker

Saxophonist Maceo Parker played on many of James Brown’s most popular songs, including “I Got You (I Feel Good)”, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, “I Got The Feelin’”, and “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud”. He also played with George Clinton on Parliament’s albums such as The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein and Mothership Connection. More recently, he has made guest appearances on recordings with the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Brian Ferry, Living Colour, Deee-Lite, 10,000 Maniacs, and Prince. He has been described as the funkiest saxophonist on the planet, and Music Illuminati would have to agree. (L. Paul Mann photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Maceo Parker: Play. You don’t necessarily have to be in a group. If you’re in a group, that’s alright, but just try and find situations where you can play, play, play, play, play. Because the more you play the better you get at it.

“Weird Al” Yankovic

When “Weird Al” Yankovic was sixteen years old, he gave a home-recorded tape of original and parody songs to Dr. Demento, who broadcast them on his radio show. This was the beginning of Yankovic’s career in comedic music, which really took off in 1984 with his hit song with “Eat It”, a parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” with a hilarious video which spoofed Jackson’s own. He has released many other popular parodies, including another song by Jackson (“Fat”) and songs by Madonna (“Like A Surgeon”), Queen (“Another One Rides The Bus”), Nirvana (“Smells Like Nirvana”), Coolio (“Amish Paradise”), and Chamillionaire (“White & Nerdy”). He also has written a number of original comedy songs.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter or musician?

“Weird Al” Yankovic: I would say give up, because all of the slots are filled. There’s really no openings left. So thanks for your interest, but they’re not taking applications anymore.

Abdul “Duke” Fakir

The Four Tops, one of Motown’s premiere music groups, performed the timeless classics “Baby I Need Your Loving”, “Bernadette”, “Reach Out I’ll Be There”, and “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)”, the latter two of which reached #1 in the US charts. The original group members Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, Lawrence Payton, and Abdul “Duke” Fakir stayed together from 1953 until 1997, and The Four Tops continue to perform today with Fakir as the only surviving member.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Abdul “Duke” Fakir: Learn everything you can about being a musician. And just be totally committed. Don’t let nothing stop you. If you really know you’re good enough, and you really feel it in your bones, just follow that. Because you’ll push the doors open. Those doors will come open if you do it and you’re really committed. It just might take a while. Don’t get discouraged.

David “Honeyboy” Edwards

David “Honeyboy” Edwards is a Delta bluesman who was with legendary fellow-bluesman Robert Johnson on the night in 1938 that Johnson drank the poisoned whiskey that led to his premature death. Edwards was first recorded in 1942 by folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Edwards was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996, won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, and in 2010 received a Lifetime Achievement Award Grammy. Edwards died on August 29, 2011 at age 96.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

David “Honeyboy” Edwards: If you’re playing, and you like to play, keep on playin’. Don’t care what anybody tells you, you do what you want to do. Keep on playin’. That’s the way I do it. Keep on playin’. And finally it’ll pay off.

JM: By the time you’re 95?

DHE: Yeah.

Ray Manzarek

Ray Manzarek is best known for being the co-founder and keyboard player for The Doors. Since The Doors didn’t have a bassist, he also usually covered the bass parts on the keyboard as well. The Doors recorded six acclaimed studio albums before Jim Morrison died. Manzarek has also recorded several solo albums, including The Golden Scarab and The Whole Thing Started With Rock & Roll Now It’s Out of Control, both from 1974. His production credits include the debut album by Los Angeles punk band X.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ray Manzarek: Practice, practice, practice.

JM: That’s how you get to Carnegie Hall, right?

RM: That’s how you get to Carnegie Hall, exactly. And if you’re a guitar player, learn your fucking scales. A, E, G, D, C, then when you get good, E flat and B flat. Learn your scales. I want to hear you go [sings] da da da da da da da da. Major and minor. And practice, practice, practice.

Paul Kantner

Paul Kantner was a co-founder, singer, rhythm guitarist, and songwriter for the Sixties psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit”. His songwriting credits include “Crown of Creation”, “We Can Be Together”, “Volunteers” (co-written with bandmate Marty Balin) and “Wooden Ships” (co-written with David Crosby and Stephen Stills). Kantner stayed onboard when Jefferson Airplane morphed into Jefferson Starship. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Paul Kantner: Just keep playing. Play your guitar as many places as you can. If you want to work with other musicians, go to places where other musicians are. And learn from them.

Hopefully you’ll have some favorite musicians and music. The way I started out was copying and learning things from people that I liked, like Fred Neil and the Weavers, and stuff like that. Eventually I started writing a song or two. The first song I ever wrote actually became part of the lyrics of “Wooden Ships”. Part of the lyrics of the first song I ever wrote.

Go places that music exists, and immerse yourself in it in as many ways you can find enjoyable and possible. And be around people who play music, and give you new ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of. Just sitting in your back room making up music and putting it on a tape recorder is fine for a certain element of things. But for me I love the interaction between musicians, which for me produces usually a “one and one equals three” kind of situation. And things occur that you never would have thought of by yourself, and other people’s influences touch you and move you. So, yeah, other people.

For full interview with Paul Kantner, click here.

Jorma Kaukonen

Jorma Kaukonen was the lead guitarist for the Sixties psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” from the album Surrealistic Pillow. His signature song is the instrumental “Embryonic Journey” from the same album. Other acclaimed Jefferson Airplane albums include After Bathing At Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, and Volunteers. As the Sixties wound down, Kaukonen and Airplane bassist Jack Casady’s attention shifted to their new band Hot Tuna, which focused on acoustic and electric folk- and blues-based music. Kaukonen has also released multiple solo albums, including 1974′s masterpiece Quah. Kaukonen continues to tour in Hot Tuna, and with his wife owns and operates the Fur Peace Ranch which runs a yearly music and guitar camp.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jorma Kaukonen: I guess the most important thing is, first and foremost, to love whatever it is that you do. Whatever your muse, whatever kind of music, whatever instrument that you play, you love that first. Every now and then you meet people that are chasing stardom. If that works for you, then that’s great. If you’re lucky it might happen. It probably won’t. But if you love to play music you’ll have a great companion for your whole life.

For full interview with Jorma Kaukonen, click here.

Jack Casady

Jack Casady played bass guitar for the Sixties band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit”. Their albums Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing At Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, and Volunteers are amongst the best of the psychedelic rock genre. Casady also played on “Voodoo Chile” with Jimi Hendrix, and “Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves)” from David Crosby’s first solo album. As the Sixties wound down, Casady and Jefferson Airplane lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen’s attention shifted to their new band Hot Tuna, which focused on acoustic and electric folk- and blues-based music. (L. Paul Mann photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jack Casady: Well, I think nowadays there’s so much opportunity to investigate music. When I was a kid, I would get on a bus in Washington D.C., and go down to the Library of Congress. You’d get signed in, and you’d get to pull out records and take them into booths, and listen to world music – that it’s called now. Music from all over the world. Later on, in the early Sixties they started to be put out in collections on albums. But nowadays you have the Internet, you can do so much exploration of music from all over the world, and I think that’s really fascinating for any young musician, and to hear music from all different time periods. I mean, you’ve got recorded music for a hundred years now, so I think that offers a tremendous opportunity to expand your horizons, and hear different approaches, and to be intrigued and inspired to work on the music yourself.

There’s that aspect, and then there’s the good old know your instrument, know the theory. It always pays to take lessons and explore the harmonic aspect of your instrument as well as music in general. I tell my bass players, you should play another instrument that has chords. You should at least play a guitar, and learn piano. It would expand your horizons terrifically. Particularly in songwriting, and writing music in general.

For full interview with Jack Casady, click here.

Martin Gore

Martin Gore is a multi-instrumentalist, sometimes singer, and principal songwriter for electro-pop band Depeche Mode, whose hits have included “People Are People”, “Personal Jesus”, and “Enjoy the Silence”. Depeche Mode has sold over 100 million albums and singles worldwide, and has been called “the most popular electronic band the world has ever known”. Photo: 805Live.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Martin Gore: I would advise any aspiring musicians to just try to be original, and do something that’s unique. Obviously you take influences from something you like, but you have to somehow put a twist on it and do something that comes from the heart that is different from everybody else.

Bob Cowsill

Bob Cowsill played guitar and sang in The Cowsills, a band of siblings and their mother who recorded some of the most beautiful sunshine pop in the 1960′s, including the hits “Hair” and “The Rain, the Park and Other Things” (think “I love the flower girl”). The Cowsills played on the Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and The Johnny Cash Show, and were the inspiration for the TV series The Partridge Family.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Bob Cowsill: Well first, get good at what you do. Then once you have something that you’re good at, and you want people to hear it, get on the internet and take advantage of all the free ways of marketing yourself, that cost you nothing. You get a YouTube presence, you play, you put it on YouTube. That’s number one. I only say that because you can do that immediately, without a record deal, without any help. That gets you out there. And when you go looking for bigger stuff, you’re gonna have to be tough, you’re gonna hear “no” a lot, you’ve gotta hang in.

John Cowsill

John Cowsill played drums and sang in The Cowsills, a band of siblings and their mother who recorded some of the most beautiful sunshine pop in the 1960′s, including the hits “Hair” and “The Rain, the Park and Other Things” (think “I love the flower girl”). The Cowsills played on the Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and The Johnny Cash Show, and were the inspiration for the TV series The Partridge Family. Later, John played drums and sang background vocals on “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone. He is currently the touring drummer for The Beach Boys.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

John Cowsill: [laughs] I don’t have any advice. I mean, you either do it or you don’t do it. You either like it or you don’t. I guess, do it for the right reason – because you have to. I could say “practice”, but an aspiring musician’s going to be doing that anyway.

It’s a weird business. I know so many guys better than me, and so many guys better than the other guy, and certain guys who are shitty have got gigs, guys who are great don’t. I don’t understand the math, actually.

David Pack

David Pack was the lead singer and guitarist for the prog-rock/soft-rock band Ambrosia, whose hits included “Holdin’ On To Yesterday”, “How Much I Feel”, “Biggest Part of Me”, and “You’re the Only Woman (You & I)”, all of which he wrote or co-wrote. He also co-wrote “All I Need”, which was a No. 1 hit for soap opera star Jack Wagner. He has performed on albums by other artists, including The Alan Parsons Projects’ Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Kansas’ Vinyl Confessions. Pack is also an acclaimed producer for artists including producer for Phil Collins, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Loggins, Wynonna Judd, and many others.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician or songwriter?

David Pack: I would just say to follow your heart, and try to hone in on what it is that makes you truly authentic, as opposed to any other artist in the world. Find your own voice, try to be authentic, and don’t give up.

David Lindley

David Lindley was a key member of 1960s eclectic psychedelic band Kaleidoscope, which was described by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page as “my favorite band of all time — my ideal band.” He is best known for his fretwork for Jackson Browne — for example, on the classic albums Late for the Sky and Running on Empty, and he also contributed to music by David Crosby and Graham Nash as part of The Mighty Jitters band, Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt and many, many others. Somehow he also found time for his own project, El Rayo-X, in the 1980s.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

David Lindley: Play all the time. The right way. Practice makes permanent, not perfect. So practice stuff the right way. I mean do it all the time, like all the people who I really like, whose playing I enjoy. Jascha Heifetz said, “If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days of practice, my audience notices it.” [Actual quote: "If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it."]

T-Bone Burnett

T-Bone Burnett is a musician, songwriter, and noted producer of albums by the likes of Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Los Lobos, Leo Kottke, Spinal Tap (!), Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elton John and Leon Russell, Willie Nelson, B.B. King and many others. Burnett also has produced movie soundtracks such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Crazy Heart. Burnett shared the Academy Award with Ryan Bingham for Best Original Song for “The Weary Kind” from the latter film.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

T-Bone Burnett: Learn how to paint [laughs].

Johnny Rivers

Johnny Rivers was the leader of the house band when the Whisky a Go Go opened in 1964 on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. His long residency helped the club to be the place to be. Between Rivers’ sets, go-go dancing was invented. Rivers had many hit songs in the 1960′s; probably the best known is “Secret Agent Man”, originally used in opening of the TV show “Secret Agent”.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Johnny Rivers: Always take your wallet onstage.

Gary Brooker

Gary Brooker is the singer, pianist, and principal songwriter (with lyricist Keith Reid) for Procol Harum, whose 1967 debut single “A Whiter Shade of Pale” melds Bach-inspired Hammond organ with Percy Sledge-like vocals and evocative, cryptic lyrics to give an enduring classic. With Brooker being the constant member through multiple personnel changes, Procol Harum released many acclaimed albums in the 1960′s and 1970′s. The band reformed in the 1990′s, and continues to tour.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Gary Brooker: Have you got about seven hours? I haven’t.

JM: Do you have quick advice?

Matt Pegg (bassist for Procol Harum): Yeah, buy as many lottery tickets as you can.

GB: Find a rich wife…

MP: Yes!

GB: …to support you.

MP: A wife with a real job.

GB: Practice every day, and pick the right muse. Pick the right muse.

Robin Trower

Robin Trower first gained fame as the guitarist for Procol Harum, playing on their classic late ‘60s and early ‘70s prog-tinged albums. When he left after 1971’s Broken Barricades, he followed the direction hinted at on that album’s “Song for a Dreamer” and his earlier Procol Harum song “Whisky Train,” namely Jimi Hendrix-inspired blues-based rock. He went on to release more than 20 albums in this vein, including 1974’s acclaimed Bridge of Sighs.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Robin Trower: Become a barber.

June Millington

June Millington sang and played guitar for Fanny, the first all-female rock band to record a full-length album (the self-titled Fanny in 1970) for a major label. Her sister Jean Millington played bass guitar for Fanny. Fanny released a total of five stellar albums in the 1970′s (the last without June), and toured with many of the era’s biggest artists. Both June and Jean played on albums by Ringo Starr and Barbra Streisand. June also played guitar on Cris Williamson’s classic Women’s Music album Changer And The Changed, and co-founded the Institute for the Musical Arts.

Jeff M: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

June M: I’d say, number one, practice. Eat well and get enough sleep. And learn how to schedule, learn how to prioritize. This is a business, it’s not all just glamour. It’s not a hologram. It’s a lot of work. So if you can get your head behind the work part, then all the exciting stuff happens. And if you can not blast yourself out of the universe through bad eating and sleeping habits – it can’t be that forever, it can be that for a bit but it can’t be that forever. So you just kind of have to fit all that in, because, you know, it’s so much fun [laughs]. But the fun isn’t the thing. You get to the fun through hard work. I bet that’s kind of dull and boring, but that really would be my advice.

Jeff M: Well, you’re speaking from experience.

For full interview with June Millington (and her sister Jean), click here.

Jean Millington

Jean Millington played bass guitar for Fanny, the first all-female rock band to record a full-length album (the self-titled Fanny in 1970) for a major label. Her sister June Millington sang and played guitar for Fanny. Fanny released a total of five stellar albums in the 1970′s (the last without June), and toured with many of the era’s biggest artists. Both June and Jean played on albums by Ringo Starr and Barbra Streisand. Jean also appears on albums by David Bowie and Keith Moon.

Jeff M: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jean M: It’s so funny that June said what she said, because I haven’t heard that. But the first thing that I would say is make the decision that nothing’s going to stop you. And practice your butt off. Because that’s the only thing. When I first started learning how to play slap bass, I literally sat in my room for three months, and that’s all I did day in day out. I got tunes, I played along with them, I learned how this thing went. What they call woodshedding. I’m sure they don’t use that term anymore, it’s so ancient.

And one of the most important things is also to keep your mind and your health together. It’s so easy to get caught up with all the addictive behavior, because it’s so darn inviting and seductive. So, I mean, when you’re young, of course you’re going to do that. But the thing is, it’s about trying to keep a balance, to stay in the middle ground. And moderation is the key. The most important thing is you have to take care of yourself.

Jeff M: Do you have any specific advice for females, or pretty much the same?

Jean M: Pretty much the same.

We really thought it would’ve changed so much by now, the attitude toward girls. It hasn’t really changed, and as a matter of fact, with all the single performers, it’s become more sexist than ever. It’s just unbelievable to me, what even say Beyonce has to go through or Rihanna. I mean, the kind of images that they try to live up to. But that’s with the pop music.

KT Tunstall, I just so admire her. She plays like a dream, her compositions are great, it’s very original. And she retains her sense of rock and roll looking sexual, but not being that overt horrible thing. And I very much respect that.

But there still aren’t any girl bands out there. You have all of the individual performers that you admire. You have women as musicians who are recognized just for being a musician, but it’s not an all-girl band.

For full interview with Jean Millington (and her sister June), click here.

Jake Shimabukuro

Jake Shimabukuro is a ukulele virtuoso who gained international prominence from his viral YouTube cover of The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. He has performed with Jimmy Buffett, Bela Fleck, Yo-Yo Ma, Ziggy Marley, and others, and has released multiple albums that include ukulele instrumentals in a multitude of styles. His latest album is called Peace Love Ukulele.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jake Shimabukuro: I usually tell people this. When I first started playing I just played songs that I liked, because that made me always want to pick up my instrument, you know, because I liked playing the songs. I’ve had friends that were more classically trained, and they were always forced to learn the usual songs that you have to know, and for them it was like pulling teeth, you know, they didn’t want to practice. It was like, “I don’t want to play these silly songs.” So for me it was always important to play songs that I love playing, because even if they were difficult I would just be driven to practice. Every time you get through a passage, you’re like, “Well, I know that much more of the song.” So, yeah, I would definitely say play songs that you love.

Country Joe McDonald

Country Joe McDonald was a co-founder of the 1960′s psychedelic band Country Joe & the Fish, whose acid-soaked album Electric Music for Mind and Body is one of the classics of the genre. The band’s best known song, off their next album, is “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag”. McDonald performed solo and with the Fish at Woodstock, and led the massive crowd in the “Fish Cheer” which starts with “Gimme an ‘F’…” Since the band broke up, McDonald has released many solo albums. McDonald is a strong supporter of causes related to Vietnam Veterans. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Country Joe McDonald: Get an audience and make them happy. It’s as simple as that.

Jonathan Richman

Jonathan’s Richman’s place in rock and roll history is assured by the debut album by The Modern Lovers, produced by ex-Velvet Underground multi-instrumentalist John Cale and belatedly released in 1976. This album features the classic Richman songs “Roadrunner” and “Pablo Picasso”, and influenced the emerging punk rock sound. Richman’s later albums moved away from the Velvets-inspired minimalist proto-punk of The Modern Lovers’ debut, as he developed into a quirky singer-with-an-acoustic-guitar. He is featured several times in the movie There’s Something About Mary.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jonathan Richman: Sing what you feel. But do not sing what you do not feel.

Van Dyke Parks

Van Dyke Parks wrote the lyrics for the lost-Beach Boys-masterpiece Smile, which was resurrected a few years ago by Brian Wilson. Parks also played keyboards on many albums and songs including The Byrds’ Fifth Dimension album, Tim Buckley’s self-titled debut album, and the should-have-been-a-hit “Magic Hollow” by The Beau Brummels. His production credits include the first albums by Ry Cooder and Randy Newman, both with Lenny Waronker, and he has also done arrangements for U2, Laurie Anderson, Joanna Newsom, and the song “Bare Necessities” from the Disney movie The Jungle Book. His solo albums include the eclectic Song Cycle from 1968, and the Caribbean-tinged Discover America from 1972.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Van Dyke Parks: I am in no position to advise anyone. Ask my CPA.

Steve Wynn

Steve Wynn was the vocalist, guitarist, and principal songwriter for The Dream Syndicate, a key band in the guitar-driven neo-psychedelic Paisley Underground style which emerged in early 1980′s Los Angeles. Their first album, the Velvet Underground-influenced The Days of Wine and Roses, is considered an early classic of the alternative rock genre. The Dream Syndicate recorded several more albums, including 1984′s Sandy Pearlman-produced Medicine Show. After The Dream Syndicate broke up, Wynn continued his prolific career, with acclaimed albums as a solo artist and with Gutterball, The Miracle 3, and The Baseball Project.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Steve Wynn: Remember: you are always right. No matter what people tell you or what came before, you are always right. If you hear it and you feel it and it rings true to you, then that’s what you’ve got to do.

For full interview with Steve Wynn, click here.

Andy Shernoff

Andy Shernoff was the primary songwriter for The Dictators, a seminal New York City proto-punk rock band whose huge influence was sadly never matched by huge record sales. Shernoff also played bass, keyboards, and sang many of the songs. The band’s first album The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, released in 1975, is a brilliant mix of irreverent lyrics and youthful energy. Two more albums followed – 1977′s Manifest Destiny and 1978′s Bloodbrothers. Their last studio album was 2001′s D.F.F.D. (“Dictators Forever Forever Dictators”), which is arguably their strongest album after their debut. Shernoff also played bass on Joey Ramone’s 2002 solo album Don’t Worry About Me, and has produced and/or played with various other bands/artists.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Andy Shernoff: It takes 10,000 hours to excel in your craft so enjoy the journey.

For full interview with Andy Shernoff, click here.

Tony Kaye

Tony Kaye was the keyboard player in the original line-up of Yes, and played on the albums Yes, Time And A Word, and The Yes Album. After touring with the band in support of the latter, he left Yes and played in Badger, which released two albums. He rejoined Yes for the 90125 and Big Generator albums. He also toured with David Bowie for the Station To Station tour. Kaye is currently playing keyboards in CIRCA:, which recently released the album And So On.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Tony Kaye: It’s a hard road, and you have to love what you’re doing, without thinking of success. You just have to love what you’re doing, and you have to have a love of your instrument. And you have to practice, and you have to become a good band. There’s no real room for mediocrity. You’ve just got to keep on plugging away. We tend to live in an age where things just go by extremely quickly, and even if you’re signed with a record company you kind of have one album to prove yourself. It’s certainly a lot more difficult than it was when we started, you know where record companies kind of kept with you and three albums later you’re still trying. Obviously the thought of and the need for success is a very important aspect of it, but I don’t think that it can be the only inspiration.

For full interview with Tony Kaye, click here.

Glen Phillips

Glen Phillips is best known as the singer and songwriter of the 1990′s alternative rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket, whose songs include “All I Want”, “Walk on the Ocean”, and “Fall Down”. He has released several solo albums, and is a member of the band Works Progress Administration.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Glen Phillips: These days? Diversify. [laughs] That’s a nicer way of saying ‘Don’t quit your day job’. But regardless, yeah, diversify. And work very hard. Learn to write, learn to compose, learn to record, learn to arrange, learn to do website design.

JM: There’s a lot to it nowadays.

GP: There’s a fuck of a lot of jobs involved. [laughs]

Larry Ramos

The Association was one of the most nobable sunshine pop bands, and was the first band on the bill at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Their catalog includes the #1 songs “Cherish” and “Windy”, plus “Never My Love”, which is the second most played song on the radio ever, and “Along Comes Mary”. Larry Ramos joined The Association in 1967, and was the lead singer on “Never My Love”.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Larry Ramos: Don’t give up. When things look the bleakest, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. For a lot of people, the reason they never succeed is that they give up too easily. I’ve been very fortunate in the fact that I’ve never really given up [laughs]. Actually, I started when I was so young that I didn’t know what it was like to give up. It was just a part of my life. Another thing, too. There’s a saying, “talent will out”. If you’ve got talent, eventually people will recognize it. But you’ve got to keep at it. You can’t give it up.

Jim Yester

The Association was one of the most nobable sunshine pop bands, and was the first band on the bill at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Their catalog includes the #1 songs “Cherish” and “Windy”, plus “Never My Love”, which is the second most played song on the radio ever, and “Along Comes Mary”. Jim Yester was the original lead singer for The Association.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jim Yester: Practice, practice, practice.

No, the main thing is just keep doing it. Talent will out. Talent will win in the long run. Just keep doing it, don’t give up. That, and desire. If you have that and the desire to do it, you’ll do it. Desire is the key.

And no man can serve two masters. When we started, nobody did anything else. It was the group 24/7. For the first six months we were together we worked six days a week, eight hours a day, writing, rehearsing, working on choreography. You finish a song, one guy’s stepping back, another guy’s moving a microphone, somebody’s handing a guitar.

And you’ve got to have fun. The audience is not going to have fun unless you’re having fun. So if you have fun, 90% chance they’re going to have fun.

And don’t take yourself too seriously.

Gary Lucas

Gary Lucas has been described as “The Thinking Man’s Guitar Hero” by The New Yorker, a “Guitarist of 1000 Ideas” by The New York Times, and a “legendary leftfield guitarist” by The Guardian (UK). He first gained acclaim for his work with Captain Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet), appearing on Beefheart’s 1980 album Doc at the Radar Station and 1982’s Ice Cream for Crow. Lucas was also Van Vliet’s manager during this time. He has since released solo albums – the first being 1990’s Skeleton at the Feast featuring effect-heavy interstellar guitar instrumentals – and albums with his band Gods and Monsters, whose ranks once included Jeff Buckley. He has worked with many other artists, and was nominated for a Grammy for co-writing Joan Osborne’s song “Spider Web”.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Gary Lucas: If you really want to make music for a living, go for it! And don’t give up as difficult as it gets, you have to pay your dues to succeed in it like everything else that’s worth doing or attaining.

For full interview with Gary Lucas, click here.

Charlie Musselwhite

Charlie Musselwhite is a blues-harp player who got his start in Chicago before moving to San Francisco and being embraced by the counterculture scene. His 1967 debut album Stand Back! is considered a classic, and he has released over twenty more albums. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2010.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Charlie Musselwhite: Follow your heart. Play what you want to play. Play what resonates with you. Just ’cause somebody else is playing something, don’t feel like, “I’d better play what they’re playing, ’cause people like that”. Play what you like.

That’s what happened to me. I never even thought about being a professional musician. I just love blues and wanted to play it, and the blues overtook me. It took me where I wanted to go.

Carl Giammarese

Carl Giammarese was the guitarist, and is currently the lead vocalist, for The Buckinghams, whose songs include the hit single “Kind Of A Drag” which was #1 for two weeks in February 1967, the Top Ten hits “Don’t You Care” and “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”, plus “Hey Baby (They’re Playing Our Song” and “Susan”.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you gvie to an aspiring musician?

Carl Giammarese: One of the main things is that you have to stay focused. You have to be willing to sacrifice a lot. Otherwise you don’t stand a chance, especially nowadays. But it was always that way. Decide what you want, stick with it, and be willing to sacrifice a lot. I missed so many things in my life because of being a musician. But it was worth it to me. As long as it’s worth it to you…

And just stay true to yourself, and your music, too. You can only do what you do. Nobody can do everything. Just do what you do best, and hope there’s an audience there for you. That’s all you can do.

Martha High

Martha High was a singer in The Jewels, which had a minor hit with the song “Opportunity” in 1964. The Jewels became the opening act for James Brown, and when they disbanded High became a singer with Brown’s live band – this lasted for over thirty years. She also sang on various James Brown studio tracks including the 1977 duet “Summertime”. She has also been in Maceo Parker’s live band. She released a self-titled disco album in 1979, and a solo album It’s High Time in 2009.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Martha High: As far as singers are concerned, if it is their dream, don’t give up the dream, to stick with it. And make sure that you have someone to take care of your business, you know what the older singers went through in the past, getting ripped off and everything. It takes a lot of practice and wanting to really stick with it. You have to stick with it. Because I’ve been doing it all my life [laughs]. The things that you go through are lessons learned. You just try not to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Steve Vai

Steve Vai is a rock guitarist who started his career transcribing music for and then touring with Frank Zappa, who called him the “little Italian virtuoso”. He also played with David Lee Roth and Whitesnake, has released multiple solo albums, and has toured with other guitarists for the G3 series. He also played in the super cool guitar duel in the 1986 movie Crossroads.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Steve Vai: Same advice Frank Zappa gave me: keep your publishing.

Thurston Moore

Thurston Moore is a singer and guitarist for Sonic Youth, the alt-rock band formed in New York City in 1981 which pioneered the use of dissonance, noise, and alternative guitar tunings in the post-punk musical landscape. Sonic Youth’s mid- to late-1980′s albums EVOL, Sister, and Daydream Nation were hugely influential on the emerging alt-rock movement, and they maintained their integrity and credibility with their move to a major label for 1990′s Goo and and 1992′s Dirty. Sonic Youth continues to release albums 30 years after their formation. Moore has also released several solo albums and has worked with artists including Glenn Branca and Lydia Lunch.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Thurston Moore: Make cassettes. Cassettes rule, they always rule. They’re the great balancing leveller of recorded music. To me they’re the best sounding, they’re the most economical. They make sense. If people don’t have a cassette player, then just get one.

Bob Mould

Bob Mould was the guitarist and one of the singers and principal songwriters for the influential indie-rock band Husker Du, which was together from 1979 until early 1988. They released various acclaimed albums, including Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig, and Warehouse: Songs and Stories. He later founded the band Sugar, whose 1992 album Copper Blue was hailed as one of the year’s best. Mould has also released multiple solo albums. In 2011 he released his memoir See A Little Light.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Bob Mould: Just make the music that you really care about. Don’t worry about being successful. If you love what you do and you do it well, it’ll happen. So don’t go chasing somebody else’s idea of what success is.

Lou Barlow

Lou Barlow was a founding member and the bass player for Dinosaur Jr., including on their classic album You’re Living All Over Me. When he was dismissed from that band, he focused on his side project Sebadoh, which helped to define the 1990′s lo-fi style of rock music. Another Barlow project, The Folk Implosion, had a Top 40 hit “Natural One” from the movie soundtrack to Kids.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Lou Barlow: Do something weird, and keep doing it over and over again.

JM: And record it, right?

LB: [laughs] Record it. But do something weird.

Cris Kirkwood

Cris Kirkwood is the bassist for the Meat Puppets, which released the indie rock classic albums Meat Puppets II in 1984 and Up on the Sun in 1985. They hit their commercial peak with 1994′s album Too High to Die, which featured the minor hit “Backwater.” Their visibility was helped immensely around this time by Kurt Cobain proclaiming the Meat Puppets to be one of his biggest influences, and by brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood joining Nirvana onstage at their MTV Unplugged performance of three songs from Meat Puppets II. But things crumbled shortly thereafter, in large part because of Cris’ escalating substance abuse problems.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Cris Kirkwood: Yeah… stop. Go back to school. Become a dentist.

God, I don’t know. I’m no one to ask for advice. You know, read about me and don’t do what I’ve done.

[discussion about music]

So I would say to an aspiring musician, do what feels good to you. Then beyond that, I would say sell out when you’re young and make a lot of money.

For full interview with Cris Kirkwood, click here.

Mike Watt

Mike Watt’s musical resume is about as cool as they come. He co-founded the influential San Pedro-based indie-punk band The Minutemen, playing bass and composing many of their songs. After Minutemen guitarist D. Boon tragically died in a car accident, guitarist Ed “fROMOHIO” Crawford joined up with Watt and Minutemen drummer George Hurley to form the somewhat underappreciated late-80′s and early-90′s band fIREHOSE. And since 2003, he has been playing bass with re-formed (but perhaps not reformed) punk rock godfathers The Stooges, fronted by Iggy Pop.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Mike Watt: You’ve gotta find the inside voice. The best analogy I can give for it is writing a novel. You don’t have to invent new words, but there’s ways of using the words that everybody knows, where you can get a very personal work. And I think that’s what you’ve gotta do with music. It’s not like you have to invent new kinds of notes, or instruments, or styles. Though that might be kind of neat [laughs]. I still think you can do it with the stuff that’s there, you know that you learn from other people and stuff. I’m not talking about copying them. I’m saying – you know what I mean – like writing a novel. You might not invent one new word, but you can still write an original novel.

And also, it’s not bigger words. You read “Old Man and the Sea” that Hemingway did, you know, there are no big words. It’s just over a hundred pages. It ain’t that long. It’s still a very good story. And I think the same thing with music. It’s not about incredible technique. It’s finding your voice, finding your expression. Which is probably very difficult. But you know what, maybe it should always be kind of difficult. If there was some system to make that easy, maybe it wouldn’t be as genuine.

For full interview with Mike Watt, click here.

Will Oldham

Will Oldham has been steadily releasing records for nearly two decades now, under different names including (rarely) his own, Palace Brothers, and, for most of the last decade, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. His music receives much (well-deserved) critical acclaim: for example, his 1999 album I See A Darkness – the title track of which was covered by the late Johnny Cash – was ranked as the 9th best album of the 1990′s by the influential indie-arbiters pitchfork.com, who say that it “confirm[s] that Oldham is indie’s detached and brilliant DeNiro.”

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter or musician?

Will Oldham: [laughs, long pause] I don’t think that there’s any broad or sweeping advice that I would have to offer to anybody. If someone said, how can I finish this song, then maybe I could say something.

I’m not sure that I have the same motivation as someone else who writes songs or plays music. In my experience, I’ve found that my advice, in terms of making records and making music, doesn’t really get communicated, or doesn’t really apply to folks.

I don’t know. It would depend on the individual – man, woman, young, or old, and what their motivations were, and what their practices were. I think that there’s very few people that I would have advice that would be valuable to them. [laughs] I have a particular way of doing things, and most people think it’s retarded. They’ll ask me, what would you do about this – they’re writing songs – and I’ll say, and they’ll look at me like I’m from Mars.

JM: Well, this of course begs the question. You say that you have a different motivation, and a different way of doing things. What is your motivation for doing music?

For full interview with Will Oldham, click here.

Bill Callahan

Singer-songwriter Bill Callahan first started releasing his recordings under the alias Smog in 1988. His earliest releases were lo-fi home recordings, but as the years passed his recordings gained more polish, albeit without completely losing their grittiness. Fittingly, his song “Cold Blooded Old Times” appeared on the excellent soundtrack to the 2000 movie High Fidelity, being the type of song that the movie’s music-obsessed characters would put on a mix tape. Starting in 2007, Callahan started releasing his music under his own name, his latest album being 2011′s Apocalypse.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Bill Callahan: All you can do is write more songs, play more music. Share it somehow when you think it’s good.

For full interview with Bill Callahan, click here.

Buzz Osborne

“Buzz” Osborne, also known as King Buzzo, is the guitarist and vocalist for The Melvins, purveyors of sludgy, heavier-than-Black-Sabbath metal. Although never really rising above cult band status, The Melvins are assured at least a footnote in rock ‘n’ roll history because of their connections to Nirvana and that band’s frontman Kurt Cobain, who counted them amongst his favorites. Cobain, Osborne, and Melvins drummer Dale Crover were friends from high school. In 1984, Cobain auditioned to play bass with The Melvins, but he was not chosen. The next year, Osborne and Crover played in Cobain’s first band Fecal Matter (with Osborne on bass). Later, in 1988, Crover played on Nirvana’s 10-song demo, most of which was released on their albums Bleach and Incesticide. After Nirvana went supernova with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the album Nevermind, Cobain championed The Melvins, even co-producing and playing on a few tracks for the band’s 1993 major-label debut Houdini. Obsborne and The Melvins have steadily and uncompromisingly kept at it, having by now released 20-plus albums.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Buzz Osborne: Be as peculiar as you can. There’s all kinds of ways you can be peculiar. That’s the best, I would say. And there’s enough bands playing in tune. Nobody should expect you to.

Dale Crover

Dale Crover is the drummer for The Melvins, purveyors of sludgy, heavier-than-Black-Sabbath metal. Although never really rising above cult band status, The Melvins are assured at least a footnote in rock ‘n’ roll history because of their connections to Nirvana and that band’s frontman Kurt Cobain, who counted them amongst his favorites. Cobain, Crover, and Melvins guitarist/vocalist “Buzz” Osborne were friends from high school. In 1984, Cobain auditioned to play bass with The Melvins, but he was not chosen. The next year, Osborne and Crover played in Cobain’s first band Fecal Matter (with Osborne on bass). Later, in 1988, Crover played on Nirvana’s 10-song demo, most of which was released on their albums Bleach and Incesticide. After Nirvana went supernova with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the album Nevermind, Cobain championed The Melvins, even co-producing and playing on a few tracks for the band’s 1993 major-label debut Houdini. Crover and The Melvins have steadily and uncompromisingly kept at it, having by now released 20-plus albums.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Dale Crover: Practice a lot. Get in a band. It’s great to play with other people because that’ll help you. And it’s a lot more fun than playing by yourself. Or playing with yourself.

Neil Hagerty

Neil Hagerty is a guitarist and songwriter who got his start in the uncompromising underground band Pussy Galore, which released albums including Groovy Hate F*ck and Dial ‘M’ For Motherf*cker. When that band broke up, Hagerty and girlfriend Jennifer Herrema turned their attention to Royal Trux, which recorded multiple albums during the 1990′s including Cats & Dogs and Thank You. Royal Trux’s best-known song is “The Inside Game”, which is on the soundtrack for the movie High Fidelity. After Royal Trux broke up, Hagerty released a couple of solo albums, and also recorded with The Howling Hex.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Neil Hagerty: You just better know what it is you really want.

For full interview with Neil Hagerty, click here.

Don Fleming

Don Fleming is a musician and producer who has had his hands in an amazing number of projects, mostly in the alt rock universe. As a musician, he was a member of the Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L., Gumball, and Half Japanese. As a producer, he has worked with Sonic Youth, Hole, Teenage Fanclub, Alice Cooper, The Dictators, The Posies, Screaming Trees, and more. Don recently released a cool EP called Don Fleming 4 which includes contributions from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Don Fleming: Get an MBA. Too many musicians think that if they know too much about the business they are sell-outs, but in reality “the man” wants them to think that way so they can be endlessly taken advantage of. That’s why most musicians barely make a living, have no health care, no retirement plans, no salaries. So my advice is to get a real job and play music because you like to, put the stuff out yourself and avoid “the man.”

For full interview with Don Fleming, click here.

Jonathan Wilson

Jonathan Wilson’s producer and musician credits include work with Jackson Browne, Robbie Robertson, Erykah Badu, Elvis Costello, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and young country-folk rockers Dawes. Wilson was also host to a number of all-night jam sessions at his place in Laurel Canyon, which attracted musicians such as Costello, Conor Oberst, and members of Wilco and The Black Crowes, and drew favorable comparisons to the canyon’s musical glory days. His album Gentle Spirit was rated the fourth-best album of 2011 by MOJO magazine, and UNCUT magazine named him the New Artist of the Year.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jonathan Wilson: Definitely to play some other instruments that they don’t play. That’s what I did, and that was really the best thing that I ever did.

JM: So what did you start out on?

JW: I started out on guitar, then moved to drums, and to piano, played some banjo, things like that.

JM: So just get out of your element?

JW: Yeah, exactly.

Ritzy Bryan

Ritzy Bryan is the singer and guitarist for the Welsh rock band The Joy Formidable, who is making waves with their 2011 debut album The Big Roar, and to Music Illuminati’s knowledge is the best Welsh rock trio since Budgie. In 2011 they have played at the Reading and Leeds Festivals and Lollapalooza, and their hit song “Whirring” has become a staple on modern rock radio.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ritzy Bryan: I honestly refuse to give advice because I think every band should just carve their own fucking way. If you do your own thing there’s no rules, because everybody has a different journey.

Linnea Vedder

Linnea Vedder is the drummer and one of the singers and principal songwriters for Cliffie Swan, whose new Drag City album Memories Came True is a delightful blend of pop, psychedelia, and sweet harmonies. Cliffie Swan was formerly called Lights, with two albums released under this name including the wonderful 2009 album Rites.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Linnea Vedder: I slept and dreamt that life was Joy./ I woke and saw that life was Duty./ I acted, and behold, Duty was Joy. -Rabindranath Tagore

Click here for the full interview.

Scott McCaughey

Scott McCaughey is a singer and songwriter, and is the leader of the bands The Young Fresh Fellows and The Minus 5. Since 1994 he has made contributions to R.E.M. both live and in the studio. He is also in and writes songs for The Baseball Project with Peter Buck, Steve Wynn, and Linda Pitmon.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Scott McCaughey: Put out your own record. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you whether it’s good or bad or not. Just record your music and release it on whatever level you want to release it, either digitally, make your own CD. It doesn’t cost that much. Anybody can do it these days. So my advice is to do it.

James Jackson Toth

James Jackson Toth is an insanely prolific indie folk songwriter and musician who has recorded most frequently under the name Wooden Wand. His latest album, Death Seat, was produced by The Swans’ Michael Gira, and has been receiving a lot of great press from the likes of The New York Times, Interview Magazine, and Crawdaddy. It’s definitely worth checking out!

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter and/or musician?

James Jackson Toth: “Be great or be gone.” – David Briggs. Also, learn a trade.

For full interview with James Jackson Toth, click here

John Doe

John Doe was one of the primary songwriters and singers for the band X, along with Exene Cervenka. X’s 1980 debut album Los Angeles, produced by Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, ranks as one of the best punk albums of all time. This was followed by other acclaimed X albums, and a solo career that explored more of a roots music direction. Doe is also an actor who has appeared in a variety of films and television shows.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

John Doe: Don’t do it.

JM: You’re not the only one to say that.

JD: Because if they’re meant to do it, they will anyway. My second advice would be just to be true to yourself. It’s like Sonic Youth, everybody hated them, or didn’t like them, or they went, “ah, whatever”. But they just kept doing what they did, and eventually it worked out.

JM: And they’re still doing it, too.

JD: That’s right.

For full interview with John Doe, click here.

Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins was the frontman for seminal hardcore punk band Black Flag from 1981 to 1986 – a period which included their acclaimed album Damaged. After that band broke up, he formed the Rollins Band. He also tours as a spoken word artist, and has acted in various movies and television shows including FX’s Sons of Anarchy.

Jeff Moehlis What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Henry Rollins: My advice isn’t all that much to write home about. All I know is what I went through. I don’t know if it’s of any use. I say one must work really hard, harder than they have worked on anything in their lives. Total commitment, that’s the only way. To the point of obsession and losing all your friends. This, to me is the way to do it, all the way or not at all. I never had any talent, just determination.

Joey Burns

Joey Burns is the co-founder, singer, guitarist, and one of the principal songwriters for Calexico, a Tuscon, Arizona-based band which blends Americana and Mexican influences. Notable albums by Calexico include 1998′s The Black Light, 2003′s Feast of Wire, and 2008′s Carried to Dust, and they recently toured in support of Arcade Fire.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Joey Burns: Patience. Patience for your inner critic, and patience on all those around you who are encouraging and inspiring you to be a musician. And I guess just be kind of open and travel as much as you can.

Dallas Good

Dallas Good is the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist for The Sadies, a Toronto-based psychedelic/surf/country rock/garage band that he leads along with his brother Travis, who plays lead guitar and adds exquisite harmonies. They have released multiple acclaimed albums since their 1998 debut, and have worked with notable artists including Neko Case, Jon Langford, and John Doe.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Dallas Good: Only play music you like. That seems like a really stupid, obvious answer, but it’s really easy to get into a situation where you’re playing songs that are like, “I know that he likes this one, but…”

Another answer: we have a song that we wrote with Jon Langford [from The Mekons] that sums it up pretty well: “Get the money and don’t leave anything behind” [laughs].

Michael Chapman

Michael Chapman is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist who has recorded over thirty albums, including 1970′s Fully Qualified Survivor which is considered to be a British folk-rock classic. His guitar playing has been compared favorably to that of John Fahey and Roy Harper.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Michael Chapman: Stick at it. Don’t the bastards grind you down. Nil carborundum bastardum. It you want to do it, do it. Don’t let them put you off. Sometimes are better than other. You’ve got to take the thick with the thin. I’ve been on the road 45 years, some are great and some are not so great. You just keep on going.

Brute Force

Brute Force is the recording/performance name of Stephen Friedland. Friedland was a member of The Tokens in the mid-1960′s, and composed songs recorded by The Tokens, The Creation, Cyrkle, and The Chiffons. In 1967, his bizarrely brilliant solo album I, Brute Force, Confections of Love was released, including songs such as “To Sit on a Sandwich” and “Tapeworm of Love”. He is best known for the 1969 single “King of Fuh”, which was admired by George Harrison and John Lennon and was released on Apple Records. Unfortunately, Captiol/EMI refused to distribute this single because some of the lyrics sounded like profanity. Confections of Love was recently re-released on CD, with “King of Fuh” as one of the bonus tracks.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter and/or musician?

Brute Force: Listen to music of the world. Here and There. Learn something to know you can make money, because making money in the arts is not that easy as picking up a consistent paycheck. If you have to make a choice between a day job and dying for your art it’s probably a happier choice to keep the day job. Be kind to yourself for you are the greatest ally you have. That means realizing what a powerhouse you are and how your body is very sensitive to substances which enter into your body.

You may wish to do drugs. If you’re a singer you ought to know that smoke dries the throat. Your consciousness is far superior without drugs. It is what you are prior to any drug.

Remember when Dorothy, Toto, and her three friends walked thru a field of poppies? They fell asleep! Well, making it in life is a good deal more successful when you’re awake.

You don’t have to know a lick of formal music training to be a songwriter, yet it couldn’t hurt to learn notation, how to play keyboard, or guitar, or instrument of your choice. Take vocal lessons. Learn networking in the arts. Remember that if you are looking to make it in show business that it is 2 words…”show” and “business”.

[later] I would add, belief in oneself, maintaining health and Spiritual Reality.

For full interview with Brute Force, click here.

Mark Tulin

Mark Tulin was the bass guitar player for The Electric Prunes, which is best known for 1966′s psychedelic garage-rock classic single “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night),” the lead track on the highly-regarded Nuggets collection compiled in 1972 by Lenny Kaye. The Prunes’ original line-up also released 1968′s psych obscurity Mass in F Minor, a Catholic mass, sung in Latin, composed by music producer/arranger/composer David Axelrod – the track “Kyrie Eleison” from this album was on the soundtrack for the generation-defining movie Easy Rider. Tulin passed away on February 26, 2011.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give an aspiring musician?

Mark Tulin: I think there’s two things. One is, you’d better love the process. Because if you don’t love the process, no success makes up for not loving what you’re doing. Especially in art of any form. Because at the end you’re left with your process. And you find that as nice it is that people like what you, if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing there’s an empty space somewhere.

And the other thing is, don’t give up. At any age. I think the shame is that my generation took their guitars and put them in the garage, and never picked them up again. I’m a firm believer in dreams, and that dreams come true. And what I think we said on one our newer albums is that dreams never quit. You quit on them. They never give up. So love what you’re doing, and do it.

And keep in mind that someone not liking you is an opinion, not a statement of fact. It’s just somebody’s opinion. And it can be a very high-ranking opinion. If I play a track and Bono goes, “I hate what you just did,” that’s his opinion. So that’s it. I just think it’s internal faith, that is what it basically comes down to.

For full interview with Mark Tulin, click here.

Ian Underwood

Ian Underwood is a multi-instrumentalist who played on classic Frank Zappa albums including Hot Rats and We’re Only In In For The Money. Check out his woodwind playing in “Peaches En Regalia”, which just might give you goosebumps. He later contributed to recordings by Quincy Jones, Barbara Streisand, and many others. He also played on the soundtracks of Blade Runner, Aliens, and Titanic.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give an aspiring musician?

Ian Underwood: I would just say do what you want to do. There isn’t any one thing. There’s no path in the arts. I don’t think there is any one way to do it. The main thing is knowing what you want to do, and applying yourself and saying, “That’s what I’m putting my energy into”.

A lot of times people do that just because they can’t do anything else. I mean, Frank [Zappa] would be useless without doing what he did. And that would apply to a lot of other people. It’s not like, “I could do this or I could have a dry cleaning store. Let’s see, which will I do. If I had a dry cleaning store I’d be making money and supporting my family. Yeah, I think I won’t do music, I’ll do a dry cleaning store.”

But it never works out that way. Because people that do it at any level, you know that’s kind of up there, they’re prisoners of their own brain. They’re complete prisoners of their own brain. That’s it. You could say lots of words to it, but it amounts to just being… I mean, it’s not a bad thing to be a prisoner that way. Everybody lives in their own mind, and you have to just see what the result of that is. If somebody wants to do it, I would always encourage anybody to follow whatever is in their mind, music or something else. But music, absolutely.

Billy Cox

Billy Cox is best known as a bassist who played with Jimi Hendrix, first in the early 1960′s when they were in the army together, and later in the Band Of Gypsys and in Hendrix’s Gypsy Sun and Rainbows at Woodstock. He is the last surviving member of Hendrix’s core bands The Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Band of Gypsys. He is currently part of the Experience Hendrix tribute tour. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Billy Cox: Keep practicing. In order to be good you have to love something greater than you love yourself. If you love that music greater than you love yourself, you gotta be successful. That’s the key. [Hendrix and I] knew we were getting good and getting better, it was just a matter of someone discovering us. He got discovered first, before me [laughs].

Will Cullen Hart

Will Cullen Hart is a co-founder of the Elephant 6 Collective of musicians. He has written and performed songs for The Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory Systems. Hart is also a visual artist, and created much of the the album artwork for these bands.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Will Cullen Hart: Listen to your heart. Even if somebody says it could be better this way, you’re probably right in your heart. That’s really it. That’s what I did. Even if it’s out of fashion, go for it. If you feel like it’s right, then it’s right.

Scott Spillane

Scott Spillane is a member of the Elephant 6 Collective of musicians. He played horns and helped with horn arrangements on the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, wrote “The Fool” from that album, and is frontman for the band The Gerbils.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Scott Spillane: Listen – really listen – to what you’re playing. That’s number one. And kill your babies.

JM: What do you mean by that?

SS: Edit yourself. Don’t be afraid to edit yourself.

Julian Koster

Julian Koster is a member of the Elephant 6 Collective of musicians. He played saw, banjo, and accordian on the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. He is also the leader of the band The Music Tapes.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Julian Koster: Belief and faith. And then more belief and then more faith. And then more belief and then more faith and then more belief and then more faith and then more belief and then more faith.

It’s just there’s so much that’s required to do anything that is truly and sincerely heartfelt. It requires a constant, massive amount of faith and belief. And over, and over, and over again.

Bert Lams

Bert Lams is a guitarist extraordinaire from Brussels, Belgium who is best known as a composer and performer for the California Guitar Trio, which in addition to original compositions plays covers ranging from “Bohemian Rhapsody” to “Pipeline” to “Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor”. He was also part of Robert Fripp’s League of Crafty Guitarists and the Robert Fripp String Quintet.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Bert Lams: Wow, there’s lots of things here. From my own experience, I can say that I learned a lot by finding somebody with experience, to share that with me. So I was lucky enough to find some good teachers, and that’s really important. Genius is not that common, so most of us need to stand on the shoulders of others.

JM: Was that [Robert] Fripp for you?

BL: It’s been different people, it’s been different people all through my life. It can be someone who you’re a fan of, who you listen to the music of and imitate all the licks of. But ideally it’s someone that’s there for you.

That’s one thing. If it’s younger people, if they’re very young, if they’re like teenagers, I always recommend that they just go and play with their friends. That’s how it happened for me, playing with other people as a teenager. That kind of opened me up.

Paul Richards

Paul Richards, from Salt Lake City, Utah, is also a guitarist extraordinaire who composes and performs with the California Guitar Trio, and was part of Robert Fripp’s League of Crafty Guitarists and the Robert Fripp String Quintet.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Paul Richards: The thing that worked the best for us was to find a way to do it ourselves. Because you can’t rely on the elusive record deal, especially now that all the record companies are struggling. So if you can find a way to do things on your own as much as possible, that’s one of the best things. In the beginning we booked our own gigs, we did our own recordings at home, you know, bought good equipment and found ways to good quality recordings and found a way to promote ourselves, all without having to rely on somebody else. So that’s a big part of it.

The other thing is, it took us eight years of constant work to get to the point where we could start to make any money playing music. Some bands can go much quicker than other bands. First we started in L.A. and then we started going beyond L.A. and then beyond California and just gradually expanded. And then we did a whole tour at Borders Bookstores [JM saw them at Borders in Palo Alto way back then] and found other things we could do that weren’t reliant on a big promotional unit. They were things that we could do ourselves.

You know, first of all we could get ten people to come, then maybe twenty people, and then fifty people, and then once we could show an agency that we could sell a few tickets then we got a good agency. I don’t think you need a manager, I don’t think you need a record company, but an agency helps you get good gigs. And you can probably do that on your own, too, but for us that’s the thing that makes the most sense, and it works well for us. An agency typically takes 15%, but for the amount of work that they do, 15% is well worth it. And a good agent will have a lot of connections to venues, to places like McCabe’s where we’re playing tomorrow. On our own we had tried to play McCabe’s for years and years and years, and they never had us until our agency finally had a connection and had some other artists who had played there. Then they got us in the door there. So I think an agency is key. But beyond an agency, doing things on your own is one of the best things that you can do.

Seymour Duncan

Seymour Duncan is the co-founder of the company that shares his name and for 35 years has been making guitar pickups, which convert the mechanical vibrations of a string into an electrical signal that can be amplified. Duncan’s pickups give guitarists some of the finest tones in rock ‘n’ roll, and have been used by artists such as Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen, Slash and Joe Satriani. Duncan is also a fine guitarist himself, playing in the Santa Barbara band Flatfoot Joe. (Photo: L. Paul Mann)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Seymour Duncan: It’s best to be very patient, and really believe in what you believe in. Just do it. Just be out there and do it. Don’t let anybody discourage you. Everybody’s different. Everybody has their own soul and their own creativity, and I believe in that. Be your own, and go out there, and just really do it, it’s so important.

For me it’s important to try to help other kids. I got helped by Les Paul, Jeff Beck, The Ventures, they’ve all helped me by asking questions. You know, I want to be there for younger kids, too. I want to try to be a good inspiration for them.

Nolan Gasser

Nolan Gasser is an acclaimed composer, with compositions including American Festivals and two pieces written for NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. He is also the Chief Musicologist for Pandora Media, Inc., which provides the popular Pandora Radio streaming music service; he is the architect of all five Music Genomes (Pop/Rock, Jazz, Hip-Hop/Electronica, World Music, and Classical). Moreover, he is the Artistic Director of Classical Archives which is the web’s largest classical music site.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician/composer?

Nolan Gasser: There are four essentials to building a career as a musician, but I think they apply elsewhere.

You have to have natural talent. You have to be honest with yourself about if you have enough natural talent that’s going to make you stand out in a crowd, and be able to be employable. You have to work hard, because music, like everything else, if you have the audacity to think that you can become a composer, well good luck, buddy. Because there’s been so many geniuses, so many people that you’d be lucky to carry their water. So you just have to work so hard to be the best you can be.

The third thing is you have to be lucky. And luck is one of those things, of course, that you make. You have to be out there, you have to be pushing hard and be daring so that you have the opportunities to be lucky. Getting that email from Tim was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. But I was there. I had put in the time as a musicologist, as a composer, as a rock and jazz musician, so I was ready for that. Because if you’re not ready for the lucky meeting… I always quote Emerson: “I pity he who is a victim of fate, but blessed is he who’s guided by destiny”. Fate is something that happens to you, but destiny is something that you make happen. You can call it luck. You ask anybody who is successful, they say, well I’ve been very lucky. But you make your own luck.

And the fourth thing is you’ve got to be smart. A lot of musicians, including a lot of great jazz musicians and a lot of great rock musicians, are not the most practical people. But if you want to raise a family, send a kid to college, pay your mortgage, and have a nice life, then you need to be smart. You need to figure out how can you take these tools that you have and translate them into making a living. And part of that is, you’ve really got to do all the other things, but you’ve got to have a big toolkit, you’ve got to make yourself indispensable by having skills that other people don’t have.

I always tell young people, do something dramatic. I went to Paris after my undergrad. And that has helped me in more ways than I can count. In part by people just saying ‘wow’, and suddenly you look different in their eyes. You’re not just a kid that grew up in Southern California and stayed there. You went across the ocean. And it wasn’t that hard. It was a lot of fun. But you grow so much. So be dramatic, do something dramatic. And think big. Especially when you’re young. Imagine your wildest dreams, and say OK, I’m going to get there. Maybe you won’t get there, but you’ll get a lot closer than if you say, well, I just want to be able to play at that bar down the street.

For full interview with Nolan Gasser, click here.

Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin is a cognitive psychologist, record producer, and best-selling author of “This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” and “The World In Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature”. He has been a producer or a recording engineer for artists including Blue Oyster Cult, Chris Isaak, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Santana, and The Grateful Dead, and has been a consultant for albums by Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton. He is a professor and the director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. (Photo credit: Arsenio Coroa)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Daniel Levitin: Practice. Deliberate practice. Not mindless, but mindful. And practice a little bit every day, because your brain has to consolidate the information through sleep. So three hours, all on a Sunday afternoon, isn’t the same as even 15 minutes a day.

David Freiberg

David Freiberg was a co-founder of 1960′s psychedelic band Quicksilver Messenger Service, which was known for extended jams as captured on their classic album Happy Trails. He toured with Jefferson Airplane toward the end of that band’s existence, and stayed on when the band evolved into Jefferson Starship. He was a co-writer of Jefferson Starship’s 1979 hit song “Jane”. Both Freiberg and Paul Kantner quit the band as its sound became more commercial, in particular before the recording of “We Built This City” as Starship. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

David Freiberg: Having fun is more important than going to #1. If you’re in a band and something goes to #1, that’s really good luck. But it’s also a big curse. It’s like winning a lottery. Hardly anyone who wins a lottery is ever happy. Their life goes to hell immediately. Everybody wants to get that money, and they don’t know who their friends are, because everybody’s a friend, right? I don‘t know, it’s kind of like that. Just don’t change.

Steve Young

Steve Young is a singer and songwriter whose best known song is “Seven Bridges Road,” which was covered by and became a Top 40 hit for The Eagles. He also wrote “Lonesome, On’ry And Mean”, which became a trademark song for Waylon Jennings, and “Montgomery in the Rain”, which was covered by Hank Williams, Jr.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would give to an aspiring songwriter?

Steve Young: Become a dentist [laughs]. You know, go to dental school. That’s just my joke.

If you’re a true writer, then you’ve got to write. My real opinion is you should do it, and if you don’t make any money from it, try to have a backup plan and just try to see what happens. Because it’s probably tougher than it has ever been. The music business itself is pretty low-key, let’s face it. So, I think you have to be a little crazy to do it. It’s really an unknown. Just like acting, there are a few people who actually make a living doing it. But again, I don’t want to deny anybody their expression or their art. You should try it, you should do it, if nothing else for yourself and a few friends. Just do it and see where it goes. If it goes nowhere, you still have the pleasure of doing it.

JM: Your answer reminds me… I asked the bassist from the Meat Puppets what advice he’d give an aspiring musician, and he also said “become a dentist.”

SY: He did? Wow, that’s cool!

JM: But then he also said, “Look at what I did, and don’t do that.” Because he got involved in drugs and had problems…

SY: Boy, could I ever say the same thing? It sounds like we have a similar story. I was my own worst enemy in the music business itself. I was just lucky to have any degree of success doing anything.

For full interview with Steve Young, click here.

Justin Roberts

Justin Roberts was in the indie rock band Pimentos for Gus before becoming an award-winning children’s musician who writes clever, thoughtful songs with a well-crafted power pop sound. His latest CD is 2008′s Pop Fly.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give an aspiring songwriter?

Justin Roberts: I think as with anything, it’s practice. Keep doing it, and be willing to write bad songs. Sometimes I look back on some of the simpler songs I wrote early on and think, wow, I wish I could write one of those. But you can’t. So you have to just accept what you’re doing at the time, and try to be content with that. Because you can only do what comes out of you, and you just have to let that stuff come out and not block it too much.

There’s a book called “Art and Fear” that was recommended to me during one of my many sessions of [writer's] block. It’s a great book. It’s mostly about visual artists, but there’s a great story in there where there’s a pottery class, and they divide the class into two groups. They say for one group they say they’re going to graded on the quantity of pots that you make, and for the other group you’re going to be graded on the quality of the pots that you make. They went off and did the thing, and a week later when they came back all of the best work was done by the group that was going to be graded on quantity. And the people who were graded on quality ended up not finishing things or it was half-baked because they were trying to perfect one thing. Whereas the group that was just trying to make as many things as possible came up with the best stuff. I think with songwriting, it’s a lot like that. You have to just try to write as many things as you can, and certainly discard stuff that is not up to snuff, but don’t judge it right away. Try to work with it and see what could happen.

I think being an editor is good, too, for a songwriter. I sometimes find, for me at least, people that make records and have eight million songs on them, I’m like, you know what, this would be a great record if you had gotten an editor and just gotten rid of some of this stuff. No one has the attention span for a 72 minute CD [laughs]. My favorite records are usually over in about 35 minutes. When vinyl was popular, you could only fit about 18 minutes on a side, and that’s it.

So I think it’s a combination of trying to create as much as you can, and then weeding through it trying to only pull out the best stuff.

Also having people that you trust around you that you can play things to that are the best critics. You don’t always agree with what they say but it’s nice to have people to bounce things off, for me.

JM: Would you answer differently if I asked what advice you would give to an aspiring childrens songwriter?

JR: I think the only different advice I would say is to try not to write a song about what you think a kid would like to hear. You just have to write something that is honest, and if you shoot really high then kids will come with you. I think the mistakes people make often is stuff I wouldn’t personally want to listen to, when it sounds like they’re imagining what they think a kid would want to hear a song about and it comes back as condescending and preachy.

For full interview with Justin Roberts, click here.

Taylor Goldsmith

Taylor Goldsmith is the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for Dawes, a Southern California band influenced by The Band and the Laurel Canyon style of the 1970′s. Dawes has released two very nice albums, and has been a live backing band for Jackson Browne, who sang backing vocals for one song on their latest release, and for The Band’s Robbie Robertson.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Taylor Goldsmith: I would say play locally until the rest of the country starts hearing about it. Even if you live in nowhere’s-ville, like if you live in Chattanooga, Tennessee but you’re getting 400 people to each show and eventually more, people are going to notice. People always say you just gotta get on tour. I think the only way to do that, and have it mean anything, is if you’re relevant locally.

Larkin Grimm

Larkin Grimm is a well-traveled, eclectic singer-songwriter in the “freak folk” genre. The Swans’ Michael Gira has described her as “the sound of the eternal mother and the wrath of all women”, and also said “her voice is like the passionate cry of a beast heard echoing across the mountains just after a tremendous thunder storm, when the air is alive with electricity.” Grimm’s fourth album Soul Retrieval, which was recorded with the help of famed T. Rex and David Bowie record producer Tony Visconti, will be released in February 2012.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Larkin Grimm: Don’t do it. It is a hard life. We do it because we aren’t suited for anything else. If you can hold onto another job, stick with that! But if you get fired from every job you have ever had and you are a high-strung orchid living on the edge of sanity, GO FOR IT! and try to be kind to the show promoters. They tend to be generous, sensitive, kind people and they deserve respect for what they do.

For full interview with Larkin Grimm, click here.

Jason Reeves

Jason Reeves is a singer-songwriter originally from Iowa City, Iowa. Shortly after moving to California in 2005 he met Colbie Caillat, and co-wrote many of the songs on her debut album Coco, including the hit singles “Bubbly” and “Realize”. He also co-wrote songs on Caillat’s follow-up album Breakthrough, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, plus “The Show”, which was a hit in the UK and elsewhere for Lenka. His 2007 album Magnificent Adventures of Heartache And Other Frightening Tales won acclaim for its heartfelt pop-infused folk songs, and his album The Lovesick will be released by Warner Brothers sometime in 2011.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Jason Reeves: I would say it’s all about insane amounts of patience and belief in yourself. You have to have a vision and know that it’s worth seeing it through. Other than that, just be true to your heart.

For full interview with Jason Reeves, click here.

Buddy Miller

Buddy Miller is a Nashville-based singer, songwriter, musician, producer, and recording artist. He has released several solo albums, and has toured with and/or recorded with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Shawn Colvin, Linda Ronstadt, Alison Krause and Robert Plant, and Robert Plant’s Band of Joy.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Buddy Miller: Just keep doing it. That’s all I’ve ever done. I feel really fortunate to be able to say that. But, you know, if you love it just keep at it.

Black Francis

Black Francis is the primary songwriter, lead singer, and rhythm guitarist of the Pixies, the alt-rock pioneers whose trademark use of quiet verses and loud screaming choruses was a huge influence on Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s songwriting. In fact, Cobain admitted that when he wrote the genre-creating smash hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, he “was basically trying to rip off the Pixies.” Francis’ post-Pixies recordings have been variously released under the names Frank Black, Frank Black and the Catholics, and Black Francis.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Black Francis: Go play. Go play in front of people. That’s the best thing.

Alex Ebert

Alex Ebert is the lead singer for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, whose music mixes elements of folk, rock, gospel, soul, and a touch of glam, and whose live shows – in Music Illuminati’s opinion – are not to be missed. To date, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have released one album, 2009′s Up From Below. They will be playing at the Coachella Festival in April 2010.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?
Alex Ebert: Do it, even if you don’t feel ready. Just do it. And then, be like a child. That’s the most important thing.

Al Kooper

Al Kooper is a legendary songwriter and musician, who is most notable for co-writing the Gary Lewis and the Playboy’s hit “This Diamond Ring”, playing organ on Bob Dylan’s classic “Like A Rolling Stone” and with him at the Newport Folk Festival when he “went electric”, founding Blood, Sweat, and Tears, playing on sessions with Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and The Rolling Stones, playing on the album Super Session with Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills, signing The Zombies to Columbia for their album Odessey & Oracle, and discovering and producing Lynyrd Skynryd.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Al Kooper: Go to law school. I wouldn’t want my son to become one.

Jeff Hanneman

Jeff Hanneman co-founded and plays guitar for thrash metal pioneers Slayer, whose 1986 album Reign In Blood is often hailed as one of the most important and influential heavy metal albums ever produced. He is also one of the band’s songwriters, with credits including “Angel of Death”, “Raining Blood”, “South of Heaven”, “War Ensemble”, and “Seasons in the Abyss”. Slayer’s most recent album was 2009′s World Painted Blood, and the band continues to tour.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jeff Hanneman: Kick ass!

Ira Kaplan

Ira Kaplan is the guitarist, and a singer, songwriter, and co-founder of Yo La Tengo, a “cult band” formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984. Yo La Tengo’s sound is often compared favorably to that of the The Velvet Underground, a band they played in the film I Shot Andy Warhol. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ira Kaplan: Don’t take advice from anybody.