Thursday, November 09, 2006
I had the chance to interview a pleasant up and coming musician yesterday who goes by the rather uncommon name of MoZella (no relationship to the web browser). It was nice to talk with a musician and not have a time constraint for once. For those of you uninitiated, the way things work with in-demand artists is that the publicist will schedule a series of interviews back to back on the same day, giving you, say, twenty minutes with the artist to get your interview completed. What this means is that you have to be a bit wary of inserting too many unplanned follow-up questions for fear of running out of time and not being able to get in all your scripted questions.
But with MoZella it was nice to work without a time limit, which allowed the whole thing to become less interview-ish and more conversational. And I've found that with an audio interview, this is what you want. Ideally you'd want to chat with the artist for an hour or two and let it go in all directions and then pull out the most interesting fifteen minutes after the fact, but at some point you have to let the artist hang up the phone and get back to their life.
I've had a few people ask me how we ended up interviewing her on the day that her debut album was released, but that turned out to simply be something of a coincidence. I was aware that the album was coming out very soon, but when I checked out list of open dates, November 7th just happened to be the next available one we had. I did realize that this was the album release date when I was submitting the request, and I knew that was probably a good thing, but it did just sort of work out that way. Actually, interviewing an artist on the day of the new album's release presents the challenge of making sure you've heard the new album before the interview. In other words, you've either got to ask the label for an advance copy, or wait and grab it from iTunes the morning it comes out and then spend some serious quality time with the album that morning. It was a bit easier than that with MoZella due to the fact that a good chunk of her album had already been released as an EP which I already had my hands on.
A colleague of mine posed an interesting question the other day: iProng being an iPod/iTunes-based publication, would I interview a musician whose music is not available through iTunes? Well, the answer is yes, and I've already proven that with the print interview I did with Peter Griesar (an early member of Dave Matthews Band) back in 2004. Peter's music isn't anywhere near iTunes (with the exception of DMB's "So Much To Say" which we co-wrote but didn't perform on), but that's because he's such an independent that he actually sells MP3 downloads of his albums through his own website.
I suppose the truer representation of the question is whether I would interview a major-label artist who was actively withholding their music from iTunes. Sure I would. But to be honest, half the scripted questions would probably be about why their music wasn't in iTunes. Of course the question might have been more relevant a year or two ago, when there were still a significant number of major artists missing from iTunes. These days the list is so short I can almost rattle it off from memory. And besides, an artist who has decided to hold their music out of iTunes is probably the least likely type of artist to say yes to an interview with an iPod/iTunes publication anyway, so it's probably a purely hypothetical scenario anyway.
In any case, you can find the iProng Radio interview with MoZella here, and you can find her new album in iTunes here. MoZella tells me I have to go to her album release party on the 14th, and since I'll be in Los Angles next week anyway for Electronic House Expo, I just might take her up on it.
But with MoZella it was nice to work without a time limit, which allowed the whole thing to become less interview-ish and more conversational. And I've found that with an audio interview, this is what you want. Ideally you'd want to chat with the artist for an hour or two and let it go in all directions and then pull out the most interesting fifteen minutes after the fact, but at some point you have to let the artist hang up the phone and get back to their life.
I've had a few people ask me how we ended up interviewing her on the day that her debut album was released, but that turned out to simply be something of a coincidence. I was aware that the album was coming out very soon, but when I checked out list of open dates, November 7th just happened to be the next available one we had. I did realize that this was the album release date when I was submitting the request, and I knew that was probably a good thing, but it did just sort of work out that way. Actually, interviewing an artist on the day of the new album's release presents the challenge of making sure you've heard the new album before the interview. In other words, you've either got to ask the label for an advance copy, or wait and grab it from iTunes the morning it comes out and then spend some serious quality time with the album that morning. It was a bit easier than that with MoZella due to the fact that a good chunk of her album had already been released as an EP which I already had my hands on.
A colleague of mine posed an interesting question the other day: iProng being an iPod/iTunes-based publication, would I interview a musician whose music is not available through iTunes? Well, the answer is yes, and I've already proven that with the print interview I did with Peter Griesar (an early member of Dave Matthews Band) back in 2004. Peter's music isn't anywhere near iTunes (with the exception of DMB's "So Much To Say" which we co-wrote but didn't perform on), but that's because he's such an independent that he actually sells MP3 downloads of his albums through his own website.
I suppose the truer representation of the question is whether I would interview a major-label artist who was actively withholding their music from iTunes. Sure I would. But to be honest, half the scripted questions would probably be about why their music wasn't in iTunes. Of course the question might have been more relevant a year or two ago, when there were still a significant number of major artists missing from iTunes. These days the list is so short I can almost rattle it off from memory. And besides, an artist who has decided to hold their music out of iTunes is probably the least likely type of artist to say yes to an interview with an iPod/iTunes publication anyway, so it's probably a purely hypothetical scenario anyway.
In any case, you can find the iProng Radio interview with MoZella here, and you can find her new album in iTunes here. MoZella tells me I have to go to her album release party on the 14th, and since I'll be in Los Angles next week anyway for Electronic House Expo, I just might take her up on it.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Jay Leno: "You've got your 'I voted' sticker on. Did you vote today?"
Courtney Love: "Not yet."
Courtney Love: "Not yet."
Thursday, November 02, 2006
How to tell your cashier is on drugs
I've resolved myself to stop worrying about the fact that so many young employees at stores and restaurants don't seem to have any idea what they're doing, and instead I'm content to just get a kick out of it. Like the last time I walked into the local Kentucy Fried Chicken and ordered a piece of chicken and the cashier had no idea how to ring it up because I wasn't ordering a combo meal.
But the best yet has to have been yesterday when I was at a convenience store and my total came to $4.04 so I handed her a five dollar bill. She asked if I had four cents, and to my surprise it turns out there was a nickel rattling round in my pocket. So I hand it to her and she says I need to give her another penny. Rather than trying to explain that that five is actually more than four, not less, I just fish in my pocket and pull out a penny and hand it to her. So now I've given her $5.06 to pay for a bill of $4.04, and for the change he hands me back one dollar and one cent. It's a good thing she understood that particular mathematical progression, because it was way over my head.
The kicker is that I was trying so hard not to bust out laughing that I dropped the penny on the floor, so she pulled another penny out of the drawer and handed it to me! At that point I couldn't refain from laughing, but at least she thought I was laughing about dropping the penny. I was tempted to keep dropping it to see how many more pennies she'd hand me out of her drawer, but having gotten enough of a laugh out of the exchange, I headed out the door.
The only thing that could have made it funner is if she'd tried to chat me up by telling me she was a math major..
I've resolved myself to stop worrying about the fact that so many young employees at stores and restaurants don't seem to have any idea what they're doing, and instead I'm content to just get a kick out of it. Like the last time I walked into the local Kentucy Fried Chicken and ordered a piece of chicken and the cashier had no idea how to ring it up because I wasn't ordering a combo meal.
But the best yet has to have been yesterday when I was at a convenience store and my total came to $4.04 so I handed her a five dollar bill. She asked if I had four cents, and to my surprise it turns out there was a nickel rattling round in my pocket. So I hand it to her and she says I need to give her another penny. Rather than trying to explain that that five is actually more than four, not less, I just fish in my pocket and pull out a penny and hand it to her. So now I've given her $5.06 to pay for a bill of $4.04, and for the change he hands me back one dollar and one cent. It's a good thing she understood that particular mathematical progression, because it was way over my head.
The kicker is that I was trying so hard not to bust out laughing that I dropped the penny on the floor, so she pulled another penny out of the drawer and handed it to me! At that point I couldn't refain from laughing, but at least she thought I was laughing about dropping the penny. I was tempted to keep dropping it to see how many more pennies she'd hand me out of her drawer, but having gotten enough of a laugh out of the exchange, I headed out the door.
The only thing that could have made it funner is if she'd tried to chat me up by telling me she was a math major..
Looks like Robert Martin is hungry too
According to the latest email that our friend Robert Martin has received at my address, not only is he broke, he's also in need of a good meal or two:
According to the latest email that our friend Robert Martin has received at my address, not only is he broke, he's also in need of a good meal or two:
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Apparently Robert Martin is broke
According to the latest email that our friend Robert Martin has received at my address, he's broke:
According to the latest email that our friend Robert Martin has received at my address, he's broke:
I am not Robert Martin
I wish I was as popular as Robert Martin, the man who keeps receiving email at my address, addressed specifically to him. Of course it's all thinly disguised spam (the stuff that gets through the filter), but I'd love to know why I get so much spam that's specifically annotated "to Robert Martin" or "for Robert Martin" or "Hello Robert Martin..."
I see several per day that aren't getting caught by the spam filter, so who knows how many more "Robert Martin" emails are going straight to my junk folder that I'm not seeing. So out of pure morbid curiosity, I'd love to know whether this is an internet-wide thing where everyone is getting mail addressed to the same phony name, or if somehow the great spammers in the sky really do think my name is Robert Martin ;-)
I wish I was as popular as Robert Martin, the man who keeps receiving email at my address, addressed specifically to him. Of course it's all thinly disguised spam (the stuff that gets through the filter), but I'd love to know why I get so much spam that's specifically annotated "to Robert Martin" or "for Robert Martin" or "Hello Robert Martin..."
I see several per day that aren't getting caught by the spam filter, so who knows how many more "Robert Martin" emails are going straight to my junk folder that I'm not seeing. So out of pure morbid curiosity, I'd love to know whether this is an internet-wide thing where everyone is getting mail addressed to the same phony name, or if somehow the great spammers in the sky really do think my name is Robert Martin ;-)
