billpalmer.net

KT Tunstall is seemingly everywhere right now. In the span of an hour this evening I saw her featured in an Ask.com commercial, heard one of her songs being played in the grocery store, and saw her poster in the window of a movie rental storefront. This all is on top of the fact that she was hanging out with Steve Jobs and the rest of us at the Apple press event last month (see left sidebar). None of this is by coincidence. I wouldn't even have to know that she just released an album to know that she just released an album; her omnipresence gives that away. You want to promote your new album, you simply have to be everywhere.

Accordingly I've learned that if you want to interview a musician, your best shot of doing so is when they're releasing a new album. And that's for a variety of reasons: no artist wants to break their creative concentration by stopping to do an interview while they're in the studio creating the album, and what exactly would they have to talk about anyway? Best to get with them right when the album is going on sale, because they'll have plenty to say about it, and the fact that it's just gone on sale bring with it the motivation to do as many interviews as possible. And of course there's the fact that they typically hit the road right after the album drops, meaning they've got a fair amount of time to kill in strange cities between gigs and typically don't mind jumping on the phone with one interviewer after another.

That's a long and winding way of saying that if you want your interview you've got to follow along with the progress of their forthcoming album and tour, and then strike while the iron is hot. You also have to know precisely whom to contact, but that's another lesson for another day. I've done plenty of album-just-droppped-tour-just-began interviews, and they're always fun (mainly because the artist has plenty to say) but they're also always when the artist is in a certain state of mind. And typically, the next time you'd get to talk to that artist is just after the next album drops, at which time they will have once again cycled back to the same state of mind.

One of the nice things about being here in LA is that musicians tend to play here rather frequently, often with multiple stops on the same tour, and doing on-site interviews at venues is a commonplace practice. This evening I went scanning around the various schedules and found that two of iProng Radio's previous interview subjects are playing gigs here in LA within the next month. I thought it would be nice to catch up with them, follow up with the topics we discussed back at the beginning of their tours, see if things played out in the way they were expecting to.

So I hollered at one of them through their label, and at the other through, well, Facebook (I love social media). We'll see if it happens or not, as it's not exactly considered standard practice. But from the start I've been wondering when this new-media-type would get to start doing music coverage in a way that's different from the way old media covers music, and maybe this is it. I've never known where this music journalism stuff is going to take me next, and that's the case here, but as always we'll see.

I found myself wincing this evening at my odds of success when I realized that the Foo Fighters were playing Saturday Night Live in the same week I put in my interview request with the band's publicist, but hey, you never know. Later this week I'm (supposed to be) interviewing another artist who's way too popular to be doing my show because he's got a specific reason for wanting to chat with me, and at one time or another I've managed to get interviews with a Grammy winner, an artist who's already been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and an artist who's sold more than a hundred million albums. It's all about striking (in the right manner) while the iron is hot, and now I'm about to find out whether I can strike again with some of these same folks while the iron is local.