I spoke with Jeff Coffin in September and he seems like the kind of guy who doesn’t feel weird talking about all this stuff.

Yeah, Jeff is like one of those guys I go to for all of that stuff. He’s a smart guy and a fun guy to talk to. We do a lot of video chatting on G-Mail. Every time I talk to him, we start talking about records, art, books and poetry. He’s one of those guys that are on my list of people that I can relate to. One thing I think is important to say: My take is that this is the best time ever to be in music and I’m just so excited. And a lot of people are saying negative things about the reality of music right now, and I disagree. It’s easy to get, you can find it, you can enjoy it and you can share it. I think it’s the best period for music ever.

There are a lot of people who said that music is becoming more de-valued because of illegal downloading and may disagree with you. What would you say to them?

I’ve studied enough symbolic logic to realize that I don’t think you could make that sentence a valid statement.

When I was studying audio decades ago, you had to cut tape [destructive vs. non-destructive editing], and when you wanted to order records you would have to order through the mail. Things are so much easier now!

Now I find out about music so quickly, and it’s what I do. I think as an artist, I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching those guys in the 1920s, birthing the modern world so to speak, all of these painters and architects, and they were often friends with each other and invented all of this stuff from just hanging out and bouncing ideas off each other.

Artists have always had to economically adjust up or down—maybe we have to wait a few tables. Read Man Ray’s biography.

But I don’t think personal economics comes into play within the art discussion and I feel like people mistakenly look at music the way they look at sports teams or politics. There are certain variables that are easier to quantify, so a certain type of mindset will focus on this data. But as far as it’s relevance in determining the value of a work of art, I’m sorry, these figures are of no use.

They ask why so much money is spent on a player when his batting average is only this? I think this line of reasoning as applied to music may be technically correct numerically, but is of no use to anyone, artistically.

In years past, I’ve collectively spent way over 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars on various record contracts, maybe waaaay more, to pay someone at the label to stick a record, at wholesale price to me, into an envelope with postage that I pay for to be sent to the program director of a radio station that has no interest in the record. In some cases it would have been cheaper to just burn them. Not always of course, but sometimes.

With downloads— promos are free. I never downloaded anything that I wasn’t already predisposed to like. In other words, my guess is that the promos are going to folks that want them! If I’m going to offer my promo for download or streaming, it’s going to cost me nothing, and that’s significant. So the way that I look at today’s musical calendar, it’s perfect for a guy like me. The way people find out about stuff, the way people work together, it’s a perfect time for me to do what I’m doing. I’m not a fan of the cash bonfire.

It’s a good time for experimenting.

It’s like in the ‘20s, those guys probably didn’t know what they were doing when they were coming up with all that stuff, they didn’t know that contemporary composition was going to be born right there, and that was a very dark time historically. We are still dealing with their innovations today.

This whole thing came out of that. I just look at the bright side of all this stuff, just the ability for most everyone to freely consume music, like how can that be bad?

You mentioned John Paul Jones, how did you meet him?

Just how I met many of these guys. One day I just got an email from him saying, “Hey, I like your records, you really did well with that record.” And I couldn’t believe it, so I started writing the guy and when I went over there and played in London, he came to the show and we hung out. These people that are my friends that I have on speed dial they’re way up there, and they’re fans of what I do. I’m a big fan of his work, not just in Led Zeppelin, his orchestral works, and his scoring work and his solo work. He’d come to a couple of shows and one time I called him and he took me on this rock and roll tour of London, where all these studios used to be. He took me to this Indian restaurant where Zeppelin would hang out and the Beatles would hang out, and we went over to his house and played his giant three-necked instrument, it was just fantastic. It means so much to me for someone like that to tell me that they liked my record, because I really look up to these guys, and I don’t compare myself to them by any means. He’s kind of my model too, doing a lot of stuff, having a really good attitude and being great, and being into stuff. He’s a little older than myself, and I want to have that attitude, I want to go the distance. I don’t want to be a bitter or negative person, and a person like him is someone I model myself after.

You wrote on your website “It’s a very odd conversation when your record label wants you to be less commercial than the music that you have written.” That’s pretty outrageous. What was your initial reaction when you heard this?

Well I was just stunned and I couldn’t understand it. I like pop music, I like fractured pop music, and I’ve always liked that. I consider myself to be a fractured pop writer, and it’s just tough because I don’t want to rag on labels because they have a hard road on holding a lot of expenditure and a lot of them don’t know what to do. But there are some that are doing really great, and they’re going to continue to do well. That’s just one part of the industry that can’t give up the anvil or the typewriter, so if they can’t function in the contemporary world, I don’t know what to say. I think it’s good for that part to go away. I want everyone to have a job and that kind of stuff, but I think it’s okay for us to change and for things to happen. I went from selling a certain amount of records to selling a whole lot less records and I just had to deal with it. That happened to me way before the economy went bad, about six or seven years ago, and it was considered a horrible thing but we just dealt with it. Artists had to deal with the depression, wars, and we just keep making stuff, and we adjust our lifestyle to fit what we’ve got and just keep moving.

I’ve been in this bluegrass/acoustic world for a long time because I play a banjo, and it’s been hard for me because I’m a subgenre of a subgenre. I’m the weirdest guy because I have limitations upon limitations. Really what I do is that I’m a songwriter, and if you listen to my records, I have all kinds of different stuff. In that world, it’s always kind of stressful for me, I’m on a label with records that I just don’t dig, and then I’ll be on tour with bands that are nice, but I just get tired of that stuff. I mean I grew up playing the banjo and grew up playing country music, and wanted to do something beyond that.

This kind of goes back about what’s so great about right now. We have a giant database to build ideas on. Johnny Cash had musical history only up to that point in time. Now we have that, plus all this other stuff. So we have a bigger database to build ideas from, and that’s awesome. To ignore that is very difficult. It’s funny as a person in this business when you say, “I got this batch of music that I think people are going to like.” Then they say to you, “Can you not do that? Can you do a banjo instrumental?” And then I’m like, “Oh maaan.” I mean how many records is that going to sell—1,500? I don’t do that very well. That is really difficult. I mean I’m really thankful to be in a situation with people where if you mention Soul Coughing or Ghostface Killah or Metallica, they know exactly who you’re talking about. I just feel like I’m amongst friends, and I enjoy working in that world, it’s just that my ideas are more contemporary.

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