Well, we're movin' on up... An interview with We Are Scientists about life after getting signed by Virgin
We Are Scientists, touring Europe presently and the U.S. in July, are a "super b" (stands for "superb band") from Brooklyn who very recently signed on with Virgin. What's life like after the ink dries on a major labor deal? Let's take a look...
[INS: Indie Night School; WAS: Chris of We Are Scientists]
INS: Think of those before/after dieting ads you see on the L-train. Before: We Are Scientists are unsigned. After: You're on Virgin. From the perspective of running your band (booking, promoting, building fan base, finding time to write songs, structuring practice, trying to sell albums) please describe both the "Before" photo and the "After" photo.
WAS: The fact of the matter is that we've always had loads of ambition, but not really much of a mind for the business aspect of things - none of us really liked hounding people to listen to our demos, or passing out fliers outside of shows, or wrestling with bookers on the phone - I just always found it really humiliating. We'd loathe the few months before a tour, when we'd have to call every random venue in, say, San Francisco and beg for a show, only to wind up playing a Halloween party in the basement of a teenager's parents' house in Alameda, instead (which, by the way, was actually a pretty fun show). Life got a lot easier for us once we'd been playing around NYC for a couple of years and could finally stop actively soliciting shows - I think we've been invited by another band or promoter to play every show we've had in the past two or so years, so we haven't really done too much local booking in a while. We've never been very good about promoting ourselves - there always seemed to be something of the sleazy and shameful in passing out fliers or talking up our band to people, at least in my mind.
After. Uh, it's kind of hard to say, at this point. Really, we currently spend most of our time correcting the work of the people who are working with us. Mind you, we're very happy with our business relationships - everybody we work with seems largely concerned with making us happy, and they're all good at what they do. It's just that, now, there's a certain disconnect between our ideas and the final product (here I'm talking about actual, physical products - things like album art and t-shirts and promotionalposters, etc.). Everything goes from our mouths through a third party before it's manifested physically, and sometimes things are lost in translation, so we spend a good deal of time piping up and explaining what it is, exactly, that we envision. I'm fairly certain that that was a large part of our draw for Virgin - we definitely know what we want, and their job is essentially to make it happen.They are certainly welcome to weigh in with their opinion, of course, as they're a business and we are, for lack of a better term, their product, but we're pretty vehement in asserting our views. Here's something that most people might not find intuitive - unless you're a totally pre-fabricated boy band, labels don't want to have to do any of the work, in terms of figuring out how to present the band to the world. Things are so much easier for them if they just spread the message that you've already devised. We've got a pretty definitive idea of who we are and how we want to present ourselves, and we're pretty vocal about it.
I'm not really sure how to answer that question, I guess, in fewer than a couple hundred thousand words. I'm going to move on and hope that all of this is answered incrementally in the following responses.
INS: Do you, Chris, and Michael live off of music now, or are there still "day jobs" and the feeling of "oh shit, it's the first of the month... time to pay rent"? What's life like now that you're signed.
WAS: We do all live off of music now, mainly because there is legitimately no time to do anything else - we've been at home for about 20 days in 2005. For a while, rent was a nagging issue, although we were never destitute by any means - we'd all maintained pretty good jobs for the past few years, and, by virtue of our abstaining from extravagant lifestyles, had saved up enough to keep ourselves out of real financial trouble. There were a few months before we'd gotten signed when we were all jobless, touring and recording our album, which we produced on our own before we were signed, and, since there was no real way of knowing whether that gamble was going to pay off, there was always the creeping suspicion that we'd screwed ourselves.
Luckily, it worked out, and we can do this for a while without really sweating it too horribly, but I'm always acutely aware of how much money the band is spending, and the notion of a quickly dwindling band bank account is never far from my mind. We definitely all have less money than we did when we had day jobs, but the payoff is that playing music is our day job, I guess.
INS: Your best friend in the whole world calls you tomorrow and says, "Hey, Keith, Virgin wants to sign us!" He wants to get a beer with you and ask you your advice. What do you say to him? If, instead of Virgin, he had said "Kill Rock Stars," would your advice be the same or different (how)?
WAS: I guess the answer to that question is wholly dependent on who that friend is and what their band's situation is like. The fact of the matter is that there are no guarantees, whichever way you go. To jump into signing to a major label while harboring the notion that your going to be a huge fucking superstar is obviously ludicrous, but, likewise, assuming that you're automatically going to build a slowly-but-surely escalating grassroots following by signing to a solid independent label is equally presumptuous.
We signed to Virgin with zero expectations, and our intent is legitimately to simply make the most of our time playing music. If we sell 10,000 albums and get dropped straight away, we'll certainly be disappointed that our career lacked in longevity, but, shit, at least we'll have done something fairly interesting with our brief time as professional musicians. Before April, none of us had ever been to England, and by the time the year is out, we'll have been here at least four times. We're going on tour in the States in July with our best friends and favorite band, Bishop Allen,and then, (hopefully) in September, we'll be touring the UK with Editors, our favorite band over here. So, you know what - we'd be assholes to ever complain about having had this opportunity.
That said, the three of us are all well-educated, perfectly competent guys who could very easily have satisfying and profitable careers in other fields, and we were all essentially on our way to doing just that before we got signed. I quit a job that I actually loved to do this, not because I'm a born musician who's only purpose on this earth is to create, but because I'm in a band that I love with my two best friends, and it seemed really stupid to not at least try to make a go of it.
Again, I'm not answering your question. Sorry. I guess my main advice to my friend would be to simply make sure that the label really, actively wants to sign you. After SXSW, we were, for
whatever reason, something of a hot ticket, and we took a lot of meetings with a lot of people, and let me tell you - you can absolutely tell when a label is courting you just for the sake of
having landed a coveted act. We had dinners with label folks who claimed that they loved us but might as well have fallen asleep face- first into their soup, for all the excitement they were actually demonstrating, and there's no way we would have signed with any of them. The fact is, the people at Virgin really seem into us, and our booking agents really seem into us, etc., and (perhaps this shouldn't really be a consideration in matters of business, but I can't help it) we actually like them as people.
A good friend was actually speaking to me recently about his bands' prospects, as they'd just been offered a deal with a small but solid label but also had some majors sniffing around. He opined that he'd rather be his label's prority band (a la Pavement to Matador) than be a forgotten douchebag band on a giant major, which I think is solid reasoning.
INS: Indie bands tend to have a close, almost sympatico/fellow-traveler relationship with their fans - esp. ones who were there from the beginning. Now that you're signed, how has your relationship with your fans changed? Or, if it's too early to tell, how do you think it might change?
WAS: I think the issue has less to do with the indie/major schism than with the actual size of the band. The smaller the band, the more capable they are of interacting with fans on a one-on-one basis. It's just a numbers game. As it now stands, we're still relative nobodies, and so we have more than enough time to dote on every fan we've got.
INS: Lots of bands think, "wow, if we were signed, we'd have much more time to concentrate on music." Is that true? Now that you're signed, have you become more or less busy? Do you find yourselves with more or less time to work on writing music?
WAS: Holy crap, no way. Since we've been signed, our lives have involved very little actual leisure time. Which is not to say that there's not a lot of down time - there's plenty. We get to sit in a van for hours every day, or sit in the back room a club, or wander around anonymous blocks of whatever random city we happen to be in that day. Like i said, we've been home for only a handful of days this year, and my particular song-writing regimen requires maximum
solitude, as I'm insanely self-conscious about the process. Needless to say, minimal song-writing has gone on since we've started touring in March, and we're on tour steadily for the rest of the year. If you're the kind of guy who can write while sitting in a passenger van
with a bunch of other people in close proximity, though, you'll probably be fantastically prolific.
Listen and learn: www.wearescientists.com
[INS: Indie Night School; WAS: Chris of We Are Scientists]
INS: Think of those before/after dieting ads you see on the L-train. Before: We Are Scientists are unsigned. After: You're on Virgin. From the perspective of running your band (booking, promoting, building fan base, finding time to write songs, structuring practice, trying to sell albums) please describe both the "Before" photo and the "After" photo.
WAS: The fact of the matter is that we've always had loads of ambition, but not really much of a mind for the business aspect of things - none of us really liked hounding people to listen to our demos, or passing out fliers outside of shows, or wrestling with bookers on the phone - I just always found it really humiliating. We'd loathe the few months before a tour, when we'd have to call every random venue in, say, San Francisco and beg for a show, only to wind up playing a Halloween party in the basement of a teenager's parents' house in Alameda, instead (which, by the way, was actually a pretty fun show). Life got a lot easier for us once we'd been playing around NYC for a couple of years and could finally stop actively soliciting shows - I think we've been invited by another band or promoter to play every show we've had in the past two or so years, so we haven't really done too much local booking in a while. We've never been very good about promoting ourselves - there always seemed to be something of the sleazy and shameful in passing out fliers or talking up our band to people, at least in my mind.
After. Uh, it's kind of hard to say, at this point. Really, we currently spend most of our time correcting the work of the people who are working with us. Mind you, we're very happy with our business relationships - everybody we work with seems largely concerned with making us happy, and they're all good at what they do. It's just that, now, there's a certain disconnect between our ideas and the final product (here I'm talking about actual, physical products - things like album art and t-shirts and promotionalposters, etc.). Everything goes from our mouths through a third party before it's manifested physically, and sometimes things are lost in translation, so we spend a good deal of time piping up and explaining what it is, exactly, that we envision. I'm fairly certain that that was a large part of our draw for Virgin - we definitely know what we want, and their job is essentially to make it happen.They are certainly welcome to weigh in with their opinion, of course, as they're a business and we are, for lack of a better term, their product, but we're pretty vehement in asserting our views. Here's something that most people might not find intuitive - unless you're a totally pre-fabricated boy band, labels don't want to have to do any of the work, in terms of figuring out how to present the band to the world. Things are so much easier for them if they just spread the message that you've already devised. We've got a pretty definitive idea of who we are and how we want to present ourselves, and we're pretty vocal about it.
I'm not really sure how to answer that question, I guess, in fewer than a couple hundred thousand words. I'm going to move on and hope that all of this is answered incrementally in the following responses.
INS: Do you, Chris, and Michael live off of music now, or are there still "day jobs" and the feeling of "oh shit, it's the first of the month... time to pay rent"? What's life like now that you're signed.
WAS: We do all live off of music now, mainly because there is legitimately no time to do anything else - we've been at home for about 20 days in 2005. For a while, rent was a nagging issue, although we were never destitute by any means - we'd all maintained pretty good jobs for the past few years, and, by virtue of our abstaining from extravagant lifestyles, had saved up enough to keep ourselves out of real financial trouble. There were a few months before we'd gotten signed when we were all jobless, touring and recording our album, which we produced on our own before we were signed, and, since there was no real way of knowing whether that gamble was going to pay off, there was always the creeping suspicion that we'd screwed ourselves.
Luckily, it worked out, and we can do this for a while without really sweating it too horribly, but I'm always acutely aware of how much money the band is spending, and the notion of a quickly dwindling band bank account is never far from my mind. We definitely all have less money than we did when we had day jobs, but the payoff is that playing music is our day job, I guess.
INS: Your best friend in the whole world calls you tomorrow and says, "Hey, Keith, Virgin wants to sign us!" He wants to get a beer with you and ask you your advice. What do you say to him? If, instead of Virgin, he had said "Kill Rock Stars," would your advice be the same or different (how)?
WAS: I guess the answer to that question is wholly dependent on who that friend is and what their band's situation is like. The fact of the matter is that there are no guarantees, whichever way you go. To jump into signing to a major label while harboring the notion that your going to be a huge fucking superstar is obviously ludicrous, but, likewise, assuming that you're automatically going to build a slowly-but-surely escalating grassroots following by signing to a solid independent label is equally presumptuous.
We signed to Virgin with zero expectations, and our intent is legitimately to simply make the most of our time playing music. If we sell 10,000 albums and get dropped straight away, we'll certainly be disappointed that our career lacked in longevity, but, shit, at least we'll have done something fairly interesting with our brief time as professional musicians. Before April, none of us had ever been to England, and by the time the year is out, we'll have been here at least four times. We're going on tour in the States in July with our best friends and favorite band, Bishop Allen,and then, (hopefully) in September, we'll be touring the UK with Editors, our favorite band over here. So, you know what - we'd be assholes to ever complain about having had this opportunity.
That said, the three of us are all well-educated, perfectly competent guys who could very easily have satisfying and profitable careers in other fields, and we were all essentially on our way to doing just that before we got signed. I quit a job that I actually loved to do this, not because I'm a born musician who's only purpose on this earth is to create, but because I'm in a band that I love with my two best friends, and it seemed really stupid to not at least try to make a go of it.
Again, I'm not answering your question. Sorry. I guess my main advice to my friend would be to simply make sure that the label really, actively wants to sign you. After SXSW, we were, for
whatever reason, something of a hot ticket, and we took a lot of meetings with a lot of people, and let me tell you - you can absolutely tell when a label is courting you just for the sake of
having landed a coveted act. We had dinners with label folks who claimed that they loved us but might as well have fallen asleep face- first into their soup, for all the excitement they were actually demonstrating, and there's no way we would have signed with any of them. The fact is, the people at Virgin really seem into us, and our booking agents really seem into us, etc., and (perhaps this shouldn't really be a consideration in matters of business, but I can't help it) we actually like them as people.
A good friend was actually speaking to me recently about his bands' prospects, as they'd just been offered a deal with a small but solid label but also had some majors sniffing around. He opined that he'd rather be his label's prority band (a la Pavement to Matador) than be a forgotten douchebag band on a giant major, which I think is solid reasoning.
INS: Indie bands tend to have a close, almost sympatico/fellow-traveler relationship with their fans - esp. ones who were there from the beginning. Now that you're signed, how has your relationship with your fans changed? Or, if it's too early to tell, how do you think it might change?
WAS: I think the issue has less to do with the indie/major schism than with the actual size of the band. The smaller the band, the more capable they are of interacting with fans on a one-on-one basis. It's just a numbers game. As it now stands, we're still relative nobodies, and so we have more than enough time to dote on every fan we've got.
INS: Lots of bands think, "wow, if we were signed, we'd have much more time to concentrate on music." Is that true? Now that you're signed, have you become more or less busy? Do you find yourselves with more or less time to work on writing music?
WAS: Holy crap, no way. Since we've been signed, our lives have involved very little actual leisure time. Which is not to say that there's not a lot of down time - there's plenty. We get to sit in a van for hours every day, or sit in the back room a club, or wander around anonymous blocks of whatever random city we happen to be in that day. Like i said, we've been home for only a handful of days this year, and my particular song-writing regimen requires maximum
solitude, as I'm insanely self-conscious about the process. Needless to say, minimal song-writing has gone on since we've started touring in March, and we're on tour steadily for the rest of the year. If you're the kind of guy who can write while sitting in a passenger van
with a bunch of other people in close proximity, though, you'll probably be fantastically prolific.
Listen and learn: www.wearescientists.com
posted by T(S)M at 3:24 PM
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