And no one wanted to do anything with Radish because they were like, ‘We didn’t find you. And there were all new people that came in. And Mercury got bought by Polygram or Universal bought Polygram? Some big corporate merger happened. And then we wanted to spread our wings and I wrote this complete opus, it was a double album with 18 songs, and I delivered it to the record label, and they didn’t know what to do with it. Yeah, so you had label support behind you, right? Well, it was kind of crazy because before…it was my band Radish when I was a teenager and when I moved to New York in 1999, technically we were still signed to Mercury Records. It had the little hinge on the side, you could open it up. Oh yeah, I remember those old G3 Towers with like a 300-megahertz processor.
BEN KWELLER ON MY WAY RAR UPGRADE
You can upgrade the megabytes and all that and at the time it probably seemed really fast with only like a few gigs, you know? And he said if you do music, you really got to get the tower. I wanted one of the fruity colored iMacs, but the guy at the Apple store - I don’t even think they had Apple Stores! - no, it was just a computer store. That was burned off of my first Macintosh computer. So how were you distributing stuff back then? Because I seem to remember getting a hand-burned CD-R of your stuff passed to me in a dorm room, in maybe 2000 or 2001… When I was coming up in New York and it was me and the Strokes and the Moldy Peaches and that whole garage revival thing that was happening, it was really just stapling flyers to lampposts. You know, there wasn’t social media in the early 2000s. In fact, I think a fallback is great because chances are music as your primary is gonna be very difficult, you know? And I’ve had lucky breaks here and there, but I’ve been so freaking persistent, you know? There’s so much to it and every artist is so different…I came up in a much different time, as well. So, do you think it’s detrimental for artists to have a fall back? Does that mean that they may be not as committed as going full-steam ahead? But if you don’t have a backup plan and music really is THE thing, then now you’re talking, you know, because that’s kind of how it has to be. ‘How do you do it? How do you last in this world and keep making the music you want?’ and my main thing is I first say if you’re good at something else, you might want to pursue that. I totally know and that’s really the number one thing that I first tell up and coming artists when they come to me. You know, you mentioned something important a few minutes ago, which is “if you’re going to make this a career” - because there’s a lot of bands who get into this and they think, “Oh, it’s all gonna be fun and games, trashing hotel rooms…and they don’t really understand that this is a business and you have to treat it as such. And I’ve been able to do that with the Noise Company, which is my label and management company and there’s real world situations that are otherwise super boring that we have to deal with as musicians. I appreciate you what you guys are doing because it’s very much the world that I live in ’cause…one of my favorite things is mentoring other artists, as well. You sure did, and I also enjoy that you got a kick out of the word ‘inland marine’ much like myself back in 2002 when I first had to get inland marine insurance for the first time. You know what? We try to make insurance fun! It’s funny, as an “indie- preneur,” as I like to call myself …I think it’s pretty good, I coined that shit! I went to website and immediately saw some nerdy things that I’m like, ‘Ooh! I gotta read that article about key insurance concepts for musicians!’ Hey Ben, I’m really psyched to talk to you.
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