Moon & Back Music

JoCo: *laughs* I hadn’t thought of it that way. It does look a little sort of Morrissey like. Yeah, it’s a little Morrissey. You know, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but sure. You could do worse than to be Morrissey. You’d be depressed, but you’d be alright.

AB: So that begs the question, if a missile hit you in the head during a show would you walk off stage?

JoCo: *laughs* Did that happen to Morrissey?

AB: Indeed it did.

JoCo: Really, what did they hit him with?

AB: A bottle of beer. It was a good shot.

JoCo: A full bottle of beer?

AB: Pretty much.

JoCo: Was he doing so poorly? I don’t know. I have to say, to answer your question, I think it would be kinda hard to get back on stage if someone had just thrown a full beer bottle at your head. I mean, it’s hard enough to put yourself out there in front of people, but then to have them respond negatively and with violence I think I would leave the stage and never return. Are you gonna throw a bottle at me?

AB: No.

JoCo: Good.

AB: Getting back on track again, how do you feel about newer, upcoming musical comedy acts like Flight Of The Conchords or Tim Minchin?

JoCo: I actually met Tim Minchin at the Aspen Comedy Festival a couple of years ago and I thought the was great. We had a lovely conversation, he’s a very nice guy. I think he’s very funny and a very talented piano player, which I have great respect for. It’s not often that comedy musicians are great musicians. I think that Flight Of The Conchords are also hilarious. I’m a big fan of theirs. I actually like their live show better than I like their television show. The television show is great, but their live show I find really, really funny. There’s just something about it that just works better when it’s two guys performing.

AB: I agree. I want to talk about the Thing A Week Project. Was that you breaking away from the mold?

JoCo: Yeah, I mean it was basically an attempt to stay busy when I was unemployed, to attract attention on the internet and to push myself to create a lot of things. I don’t traditionally have a very prolific output of music so forcing myself to write was part of that.

AB: That’s where a big chunk of your audience came from too.

JoCo: Yeah, that was really the beginning of it. I had a very tiny insignificant fanbase when I started and by the end it was clear I was going to be able to make a living this way. At least for a while. That was the beginning of everything really.

AB: You gave away a lot of it for free too.

JoCo: Yeah, they were all free on the blog and, the same day they went up for free, I would put them on the store so you could either get them for free or buy them in the store and a lot of people chose to pay for them and still people choose to pay for them. I think part of that is because it’s easier to buy them on the store and spend a dollar than it is to dig through the blog and find them. I also think people want to support musicians. Y’know, if there’s an artist that you like and you know you can buy the song directly from that person. Why not?

AB: Exactly. People have asked me to bring that up a lot recently and people have said that soon all recorded music will and should be given away for free. However, to do that you would have to change other economic elements of the music industry. To quote Frank Turner: “it isn’t free to make records and it isn’t free to have instruments and all that kind of thing”. What’s your take on all of that?

JoCo: Well, I think he could be right. I think we could be heading towards the point where music is free, but I think a better way to look at it is payment for music will be optional. In fact, we’re already there. If you’re an artist and you think that people can’t get your music for free then you’re wrong. Any time somebody chooses to pay you they’re making a choice to pay you. It may be not a very difficult choice, maybe they’re a grandmother and they don’t have a computer or they don’t know how to use the internet, so they couldn’t figure out how to get your songs for free. Maybe they think it’s very complicated and they’d have to involve someone else in the crime *laughs*. Like it or not, music is freely available and I don’t know how artists are going to be supported. I hope that they will be, but I can’t imagine that they won’t be. I think we’re gonna have fewer megastars who are making millions and millions of dollars per year and living in enormous houses, but I think there’s a lot more music that’s gonna be made and a larger amount of people are going to be able to make a living as musicians than in the past.

AB: Which is great. It’s always good to have new music and new artists getting out there. So have you now stopped Thing A Week for good, or is it going to come back?

JoCo: I don’t think I’ll do Thing A Week again. It was a difficult year and it was only possible because I had nothing else going on. By the end of the year, it became harder and harder to find the time to do. Now, I don’t know if i’d be able to do a weekly thing again, but I write when I can. It’s been a bit of a sparse output of late. I’ve been concentrating on touring and I was working on the concert DVD, that was taking up a lot of my time. That’s out now and I have a few ideas stored up and, once I get my studio set up again, I’ll probably do some recording.

AB: How’s the live stuff going by the way?

JoCo: It’s a DVD and audio CD package, it’s called Best Concert Ever. It’s one concert I did in San Francisco in front of a really great crowd. It’s a great example of what a live show is like and what the songs are like when they’re done with just an acoustic guitar as opposed to the studio versions. Yeah, it’s been selling well. People have been very complimentary about it. There’s a lot of extra stuff on it too, it’s a fun thing.

AB: One of the things I saw recently was the idea of a “JoCo Cruise”.

JoCo: Yes. The JoCo Cruise.

AB: Is that not a joke?

JoCo: That is not a joke. It’s not a real thing yet, but I’m looking into it. I would like to do it if I can figure out a way to make it work. The idea would be to, basically, rent out part of a cruise ship, sell tickets and I’ll invite Paul & Storm and various other famous entertainer friends that I have and we’ll entertain every night for four nights or whatever and we’ll all be on a cruise together. It would be a lot of fun *laughs*.

AB: So, you’re an unsigned artist. Do you ever think you’ll sign for a record label?

JoCo: Maybe. I can’t dismiss it out of hand, it would have to be the right deal and it would have to be the right situation. There’s definitely a lot of work that I do that is not writing music and I can see a day when I would want to pay someone to do that for me. That’s sort of what a record deal is. If the terms were right, the company were right and the people were alright then, yeah I think it’s possible.

AB: Do you think some fans would see that as you “selling out”?

JoCo: I think some people would say that, yeah. I think there’s a continuum. You can sell out a little, you can sell out a lot. Like it or not, there’s a significant amount of work that goes into doing this. I think that to say record labels are nothing more than crooks or parasites that feed off of artists is missing the point. They actually do quite a bit for artists. It’s just that, in the past, it hasn’t always worked out in the artist’s favor. I think that’s changing now.

AB: Yeah, definitely. Less work for you is undoubtedly a good thing. I put it out on Twitter and Facebook that I’d be interviewing you and one of the questions I got from Twitter was “Have you ever considered doing chiptunes?”

JoCo: Doing chiptunes? You know, it’s one of those things I think is a very cool thing. I like seeing it when it happens. It’s one of those things I just haven’t had time to really mess around with yet. Somebody actually pointed me to some 8-bit music plugins for a piece of software called Ableton Live, which are pretty cool. Instead of having to program chips yourself, the hard way, you just use your on screen keyboard to play them. It’s very cool. I’ve become really interested in all of that new digital music stuff that’s happening. I think I’ll always be an acoustic guitar guy at heart, but I do like messing around with toys so I hope to do some of that.

AB: Another question I got, just prior to coming in here was “What’s the geekiest thing you’ve ever done?”

JoCo: The geekiest thing I’ve ever done? When I was in the 5th grade, I went to a Halloween party where there were girls. I wore as my costume,  a giant cardboard box that I had painted to look like a Rubix Cube. I went as a Rubix Cube to a party where there were girls. That’s pretty nerdy.

AB: It is, but it sounds like a pretty good costume.

JoCo: *laughs* it was a pretty great costume. The thing that made it super-nerdy is that I made sure to copy a configuration on my Rubix Cube exactly. It was an unsolved Rubix Cube and I felt it was very importannt that it be an actual configuration that was impossible to solve.

AB: Sadly, that’s all the questions I have for you, music-based ones anyway. Thanks a lot Jonathan.