A Quote by Ben Watt
I think, when all bands start, when you're on your first album you have the benefit of hoovering up people who genuinely come across the music and really like it, but also those sort of 'floating voters' who just like pop music when they're young. And I think that when you get to your fourth album, those floating voters have dissipated and you're left with a core audience, and at that point you've really got to get your act together and move on to something else to keep afloat, or you'll just shrink with your core audience.
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In an odd way I thought I was lowering the bar for myself, in saying, well, I'll make a pop album. But in a way it's kind of harder to make pop music. It's like the more abstract you get with music, you get into that emperor's new clothes thing, where you can go anywhere, and just claim that your audience may not be prepared to go with you. But with pop music, I think everybody understands the form, everybody knows what it's meant to do. So I would say it's harder to write that kind of music.
Nirvana, Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins, all those bands, at their core, are just really incredible pop music and I think a lot of that stuff has deeply affected the way I approach music.
When we first get to space, we feel sick. Your body is really confused. You're dizzy. Your lunch is floating around in your belly because you're floating. What you see doesn't match what you feel, and you want to throw up.
Keep making music.. Keep improving your music.. If there's no viral action on your music, you're just not good enough. Don't get mad at the audience, get mad at yourself. Either give up or get better.
I don't think that anyone was trying to keep me from writing the first album. It's just when you're on 'American Idol' or a TV show like that, you wanna capitalize on that momentum, and you want to use that to your advantage, obviously, so the best way to do that is to get the music out as fast as possible. And there's no time to create, really.
There's so much of this thing now, where you're supposed to do all the work before you get the commission. I think it's really good to try to resist that. If you just have a week to come up with a pitch for something, your ideas aren't going to be very good. Get your income from somewhere else, and keep your writing not tied into these contracts.
I think with defense especially, you have your core principles. If you do those consistently, then it's easy to make, sort of, game-to-game adjustments. But, when you're not doing your core principles consistently, you end up just guessing a lot. To be honest with you, that's what bad teams do.
I couldn't imagine what it's like to be a journalist talking about music. You're left with empty descriptions; you probably have to make up a sort of weird cocktail of band influences and references to other music to get your point across.
I think everything about it. Just the experience, but mainly performing live for people. I think if it wasn't for playing in front of audiences, I don't think that anyone would want to play music. That's where you get all your gratification. It's just something else to be up on stage, playing music that you wrote and having people enjoy it - and have it mean something to them also.
I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn't like that battle, or they just couldn't do it. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. But they lost those crucial years of learning to turn any audience into your audience.
Put in every joke that's not a dud and then let's just start pulling the ones that work the least. You're just constantly sifting until you're left with the biggest chunks of gold. The audience also tells you what some of those chunks are. You can have your own favorites, and then, once you screen it for an audience, the audience tells you what they're entertained by. I feel like that's a big part of it.
If you can't get your core audience to watch the show, it's very hard to then pull in enough people outside of your fan base to your network. The networks are just so branded now; USA can't really do a dark despairing drama and FX can't do a blue-sky show. People watch the networks they watch.
What I was going for in the first two albums I didn't necessarily achieve. Because I was young and because it was my first time out. And the second album was such a 'quickie' sort of 'Let's just get it over with!' But the kind of music I make, there's a lot of subtlety in it. And I think it takes a couple of listens to actually really get it.
It's like the iPod playlist has killed the way we think of the normal album, so let's think of this as just saying you go into your record store and all those categories and all those different ways of segregating music have been thrown out the window, so the difference between myself in real life in that is that I'm the opposite.
I read the reviews sometimes, but I don't let it really affect the next album because, for me, when I approach an album, it's usually coming to me pretty naturally. It's not like I set out, like, "Okay, I'm going to write an album this month." It's more like I'm just always writing songs and eventually I start to realize that a group of songs sort of fits together, and I go from there in putting together the album and themes and artwork and things like that.
Running strips you and works your core, mixing it up with different exercises so your body doesn't get used to one thing, so you can really get intense with your workout. I never like to stick to one thing; otherwise, you don't really see that many results.
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