With so many bluegrass and jamgrass acts breaking out lately, it’s essential that a band distinguishes themselves. While Greensky Bluegrass rely on traditions as well as a modern jamming take on the genre, members Anders Beck, Michael Arlen Bont, Dave Bruzza, Michael Devol and Paul Hoffman add a dose of rock ‘n’ roll to the mix. It’s not just a matter of their choice of cover tunes, which run the gamut from Pink Floyd to Prince, that sets them apart from the pack but it’s the quintet’s overall approach to what makes them a bluegrass act for the 21st century. The group naturally ignores the lines that separate one style from another yet in the process transform songs into a bluegrass world with a rock attitude.
Over the past decade the Kalamazoo, Michigan-based act built a national reputation with impressive live performances. Besides hundreds of club dates, they won the 2006 Telluride Bluegrass Festival Band Competition and became regulars at summer festivals including last summer’s Bonnaroo, All Good and Hoxeyville. During these appearances Greensky’s arranging skills transformed rock, pop and R&B tunes into the bluegrass realm and caused otherwise disinterested listeners to embrace some form of that high lonesome sound.
The creative thrill of adapting such material remains a constant for mandolin player and vocalist Hoffman but it’s more important that his band progresses on the merits of their original numbers. Following two albums that were produced by Railroad Earth’s Tim Carbone, Greensky Bluegrass go it alone on their fourth studio effort, Handguns. Solid from beginning to end, it encapsulates the Greensky musical aesthetic with songs that are alternately traditional, jamming, lyrically introspective, expansive and celebratory.
*JPG: How is it a bunch of nice young men from Michigan didn’t follow in the state’s traditions of Iggy Pop, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Kid Rock and go into rock ‘n’ roll? *
PH: (laughs) We have played some pretty interesting Michigan rock tunes. There’s a lot of famous musicians from Michigan but not a lot of famous bluegrass musicians. I guess it just sort of happened that way.
JPG: There’s the Avett Brothers who were into punk and then moved from that into what they do now…
PH: We’re not all avid bluegrass listeners now. In the learning process of our instruments we went through phases where we listened to a lot of it. At that time it was new to most of us. But we listen to all sorts of different stuff. Myself, I don’t listen to very much bluegrass these days just ‘cause I play it all the time. When I bought a mandolin and decided to try to learn how to play it I wasn’t familiar with bluegrass at all.
JPG: What made you buy a mandolin?
PH: I saw David Grisman play, and I was like, ‘That looks like fun. Maybe I’ll buy one of those.’
JPG: Were you playing in bands before or was that the first instrument you picked up?
PH: I had played guitar and did some songwriting but Greensky was essentially the first band I had ever been in. It’s that way for a couple of us.
JPG: Is there less baggage because this is a first band for you or just a matter of catching that lightning and things have just been progressing steadily over the years?
PH: I think that things have worked out. At first when the three of us and we were playing open mics and gigs around the state as Greensky Bluegrass it wasn’t very serious. We were serious in that we weren’t just jamming in the basement, we were playing gigs and making money and getting fans but I never would have imagined that it would get this far. When we did make the decision to do this more seriously and fulltime I guess everything was just right for it to work. I met Dave [Bruzza] and Mike [Arlen Bont] was I was 18, just about to turn 19. So, that’s why I hadn’t really been in a band. There were some guys in high school that I jammed with but we weren’t really a band, per se.
JPG: Where did you meet them?
PH: It was an open mic. The two of them were playing. It was two or three after I had bought my mandolin and I was like, ‘I got a mandolin. Can I play with you guys sometime?’
JPG: And the rest is history…Speaking of Dave, there’s a quote by him in the Charleston paper where he viewed Greensky Bluegrass as “rock ‘n’ roll in disguise.”
PH: We coined “rock ‘n’ roll in disguise” as a workshop that we do at festivals — bluegrass festivals where we play all rock tunes or we play all covers — but I think in a lot of ways we are. There’s a lot of time spent discussing what is and is not bluegrass. Certainly, we all have bluegrass instruments and we don’t have drums and we play a couple pretty bluegrassy tunes. And even the stuff of ours that’s not bluegrassy is probably more bluegrass than anything but I think our approach to the music and our volume, our attitudes, our lyrics, our song choice is more rock ‘n’ roll. I’m with Dave on that.
And we all agree that we don’t want to quit playing bluegrass and start playing electric guitars and drums and stuff but it’s going to limit ourselves just being a bluegrass band. A festival like All Good is a good example where there’s all sorts of music there. We often do pretty well in those instances, the token bluegrass band. We want to be able to accomplish the feeling that a lot of those bands can accomplish even though we sonically are different. That means I don’t expect us to play the two to four a.m. late night set like Pretty Lights played there but we don’t want to be totally pigeonholed into something that we’re not.
JPG: If it gives you some idea that anything is possible in the future, Yonder Mountain String Band played an early morning set there.
PH: And we certainly have done late night things but we want our show to rock, and we put a lot of value into the importance of our show being fun and energetic and understand that people who don’t play music festivals for a living or go to shows every night ‘cause it’s their job, those people are putting aside their lives and investing their expendable income into having a good time and seeing their friends. We’re serious musicians and we value our craft and we want people to appreciate our songs, our solos… We also recognize that a big part of the show is just having a good time.
JPG: In the case of All Good there was a bluegrass or jamgrass act every day, which brings this up. Did you consider a need to distinguish yourselves from other acts?
PH: It’s not necessarily unintentional but we just play music that we like. At bluegrass festivals where everyone is playing the same instruments as us and playing bluegrass it’s there that we will be easily categorized as the most rock ‘n’ roll, the loudest, and the only one to play a Prince tune or something like that. But then at All Good we fall on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. We’re the acoustic band. It’s interesting that in both environments we shine in different ways. When we started playing in Michigan years ago [Prince’s] “When Doves Cry” was the first off-the-wall cover that we added. We might have played “Cassidy” before it by the Grateful Dead but I don’t think Grateful Dead seems as off the wall since we all discovered bluegrass through the Grateful Dead. So, “When Doves Cry” was the first, and it wasn’t like we were trying to be silly as much as it seemed like a good idea. It ended up working well with the crowd because we were playing for so many people who didn’t already love bluegrass or weren’t familiar with it. It’s not a far cry from obvious to say that you expose a crowd to music they know and then they’ll like you.
For people in Michigan who saw us early on the bluegrass version of “When Doves Cry” that we play could have been their converter. ‘Wow, this is really neat.’ Since then, some of the stuff that we’ve tackled has been pretty complicated on bluegrass instruments, trying to figure out how to convey the same feel that a drum, keyboards and electric bass can convey. It’s been really challenging to figure out how it fits on our instruments. It’s taught us a lot about arranging our own tunes and what our instruments are actually capable of.
JPG: I was going to bring this up later but we’re touching on this subject now. I know that you had a program at All Good where you discussed your choices of cover tunes and played them. So, give me a specific example of song, why you chose it and then how you put it through its transformation.
PH: That’s the “Rock ‘n’ Roll in Disguise” workshop. The idea behind the workshop is that this is what we’d talk about but then the first time we did it, it ended up being so much fun just playing a bunch of covers that it turned into more of a show than a workshop. “Beat It” is a good one to talk about. We learned “Beat It” on the day that Michael Jackson died in the Moore Theatre in Seattle. Stuff just starts to fall into place, like that lick (he vocalizes the song’s main riff. Da-dadadada-da-dadada). It’s very electric guitar. We’re like, ‘That should be the dobro. That’ll sound the best.’ And while we were learning it we experimented a lot with playing it…some of the covers we do we play true. And some of them we make bluegrassy. We experimented with “Beat It” both ways, and we were having a tough time figuring out what was coolest because you don’t want to…we think it’s cheesy just to make it bluegrass if that’s not cooler. When we were playing it slow, it wasn’t conveying the same power without the drums and what was going on in Michael Jackson’s band, but when we sped it up, and played it really bluegrassy, and then I’m still singing it at the same tempo but underneath we’re playing a lot more complicated, greater division of the beat, it regained some of the momentum that that song has when you listen to it. So we were like, ‘That’s the way to do it.’ I think, since then, we made the right choice.
We feel out what’s best. A lot of the covers that I like doing the best go back and forth between a true version of the tune and a bluegrass style. We play “We’re an American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad, which is a Michigan band. We play that straight, true to the way they play it. We don’t bluegrass it at all.
JPG: You mention about the rhythm of “Beat It” and it makes me think of this. With the mandolin, it always seems like the piston that moves the song along. For someone who came to it with no preconceptions what are your thoughts about the instrument?
PH: The mandolin translates most easily to the snare in the drum kit, and then often the banjo is the cymbals and the flash, or the banjo, sometimes, we use as the keyboard part because the keyboard player kind of rolls like a banjo does. Obviously, the bass is the bass and the rhythm is the rhythm guitar. Our upright bass player can’t always do what an electric bass player can do just because of the limitations of an upright. There are certain types of basslines he can’t play. So, sometimes adjustments are made there. Sometimes that happens predominantly on the bass of a tune will get transmitted to the guitar instead or sometimes the lead guitar part is the mandolin or the dobro or banjo. It just depends on the tune.
JPG: When you do covers, the true version you’re playing…
PH: Most often I’m playing the snare drum. When I met those guys, the first thing that they told me was, ‘You’re the snare drum.’ When they taught me how to play the mandolin or taught me what bluegrass was. ‘You’re the snare. I play the chords. He plays the banjo.’ The rules in the beginning. The fact that we can talk about this this long it’s made it more interesting for us. If we play a bluegrass tune, like “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” all we can really talk about is what order we’re going to play the solos or how fast we’re going to play it or various little things we can do. Add nuances. Add a stop here or something like that. Doing these songs that are not made for our instruments give us more of an outlet for our creativity, playing someone else’s music. We’re either going to play our music or we’re going to play someone else’s music. A lot more time went into figuring out how to play “Beat It” than “How Mountain Girls Can Love.” So, we like to play the bluegrass tunes too but I think we gravitate the other way because it’s a better outlet for our creativity. In addition to people just liking it but we’re careful not to be a cliché of ourselves, and just playing a cover tune for attention.
JPG: You don’t want it to become shtick.
PH: Yes.
JPG: You do have original tunes. But, before we get to the new album, Handguns, I wanted to go back and ask you about having Railroad Earth’s Tim Carbone producing your previous two albums. Was there anything learned from those experiences that you were able to bring into working on Handguns ?
PH: Oh, absolutely. When we first brought him on we talked about having him come play on the record. We had just met him. It was a blossoming relationship. He said, ‘Well, I want to produce the record.’ And at the time we didn’t even have a concept of what a producer does. It’s sort of an elusive role in the record industry. It can mean a lot of different things, and there’s a lot of different levels of involvement. With that first record he gave us a lot of perspective on the songs in addition to the technicalities of mic placement, the vibe of the album, mixing strategies. The producer does a lot of different stuff. When he came back to do the second album we had absorbed a lot of his ideas and some of the things that he applied to our tunes and what made them stronger for a record, the songwriting had changed, and less of that was necessary. We recorded with a different process. We used isolation. We took a little more time. So, the second time his role changed a little bit, and it was a little more casual, maybe, because we needed less work.
Then with this last album it was the first time that we recorded in a studio in addition to producing it ourselves. I’ve said this a few times in interviews – it’s the first time we’ve recorded in a studio – and I feel like it sounds so…elementary. The past three albums that we recorded we brought a studio to remote location. We set up this cool cabin in the woods. We made a studio, which was cool, because it’s like an isolated event. There’s a Lauren Hill quote that I really like, ‘A record is the recording of an event.’ And it really is a moment in time. As a musician at some point you decide that that’s what it’s gonna be, and maybe it wasn’t the best that you were capable of or two weeks later you could do better but that’s not the point. The point is that you were there and you did it. The idea that some of these people make records for years, and go work on it in their basement or go work on it at the friend’s studio and then stop for a couple weeks and then go back and do more. That’s really foreign to me ‘cause I really like to just capture it all, especially since the previous records were recorded that way, like we were going to summer camp and came home with a record.
So, this time we went into a studio. We did a similar approach. We did it in seven days. We went to Lansing and we stayed there and we went there every day, worked on it and got it done. But we left at night instead of sitting around listening to it all night like we did in the past. We worked 12 hour days instead of 16 hour days. But it gave us a whole arsenal of tools to use that we had never used before because when you create a studio in a cabin in the woods you bring what you need and, maybe, not much more. This time we had so many options. As producers we were all really proud of ourselves for taking our time, selecting things that sounded good and sounded the way that we liked and using our engineer’s knowledge, which is vast, but also, picking what we liked.
As an example, when we tested vocal mics for me we tried nine microphones and recorded ‘em all and listened to ‘em and figured out what sounded good about what ones. In the end I recorded the whole album with four vocal mics so that we could pick and choose per song or per placement what sounded better. In instances where I would say, ‘My voice sounds too bright and nasally. It sounds weird. The balance is weird.’ Instead of doing something like digital plug-ins and EQ adjustments, we just changed the blend of the microphones and used different amounts of each mic because different mics have different qualities. That whole organicness of the whole album is something that we take a lot of pride in, too. We recorded to tape because we thought it sounded better, and in a lot of ways it sounds worse because tape has a degenerating quality that digital doesn’t have. Digital comes out exactly like it was and tape degenerates a little bit but there’s something there that sounds better. It’s warmer. As producers making those decisions we were really proud of ourselves, especially since we’ve never done it before.And we don’t know squat about a lot of that stuff but the engineer we used is a genius. (slight laugh) So…it helps.
JPG: You mentioned about using different microphones. Did you doubletrack your vocals in that manner, using different mics, or would all those options just end up driving you crazy?
PH: A lot of pop vocals they do doubling just to make it sound bigger, which is the reason why they do it. I don’t recall if we doubled anything. If we did, it was for an effect in a certain spot. We didn’t double the whole track. Most of my vocals are coming through this RCA ribbon mic that was in the RCA studios where Paul Simon recorded a lot of his albums. We also recorded through the Neve Muscle Shoals board that recorded “Free Bird” and a lot of Bob Seger tunes. Getting back to the Michigan thought, a lot of Bob Seger albums were recorded on that. It’s kind of a famous console, and it’s old. It also did some things to the mix. We listen to it without the console and with the console, mixed on tape, recorded on tape, listened back on tape, listened back on the console. Just did a lot of that kind of stuff. I don’t know if it was just an amazing experience for us because it was something we hadn’t spent so much time on and there was so much learning involved or if it will be that way every time. For us I think it was one of the most amazing studio experiences we’d had than all of them.
JPG: How long did take to record and mix compared to past albums?
PH: We spent way more time on it. We were there for seven days, recording. I think “Five Interstates” we did in five days, four-and-a-half, and “Tuesday Letter” we did in four days. Really fast. So, we definitely spent a lot more time as far as taking each track, how many times we did a take I feel like it was pretty similar, but this time we left more for layering and fun stuff. Going back to the record in the end and listening to a track and going, ‘You know what would be cool here if we added this and this here?’ Big picture things that we hadn’t had the time for in the past or after listening to the tune for three days deciding, ‘You know, this part that I recorded earlier would be better if I did it this way,’and then having the time to go back and redo it. When we brought the horns in for “I’d Probably Kill You,” we spent a whole morning setting them up, miking them and talking about what we wanted them to do. Our friend wrote the chart for the horn players and we gave some options.
Doing “Tuesday Letter” really fast was good. It forced us to commit to things and it forced us to do things – record and just capture it and not obsess about if it was perfect or exactly what we wanted. And it forced us to record in a way that sounds really good. Sonically, I think that album sounds amazing as well because we recorded in the same room, this big wooden room, and everything is so live and sounds so real. And I like that we did that but this was nice, too. It brought to life an entirely different nature to us. A lot of those sonic choices we made and the way we layered and mixed that separates us from bluegrass a little bit, too. Our record sounds a little more rock ‘n’ rolly and it’s mixed a little different than most of the bluegrass guys do it. If we are a band that is being compared to the right or the left and the right is bluegrass, I think our studio record, maybe, pulls us a little more to the left as well.
JPG: I notice the difference in production but the final numbers on the album also take a very non-bluegrass approach – “Bring Out Your Dead,” “Hot Dogs (On Parade).” “All Four” jams on and on for something like 14 minutes.
PH: On the record it’s 12, 11:37 I think. It’s been known to be anywhere from 14 to 18 or 20 live. It gets long. We did four takes of that tune in the studio and most of it’s live because that’s the only we could figure out how to convey what that song is. It was an obstacle on the record. We were trying to figure out how to convey, an important part of that song is improvisation and openness, and how do you convey that on a studio record. That’s kind of the opposite of the studio.
Some people who are fans of jam music tell me, sometimes, they don’t like studio albums. It kinda hurts my feelings. Maybe the studio is a self-indulgent place for the musician now and I haven’t talked to a lot of musicians about this, but for me as a writer and as a musician that process of capturing what my song is and capturing the version of it is the ultimate expression of my craft. Playing live is great ‘cause I can feel what people are feeling and they’re giving it back to me and I’m caught up in the moment and I’m having fun but the studio is an awesome experience.
We did four takes of “All Four” in trying to figure out how it was going to sit. We ended up keeping the shortest one. I think it was the first take or the fourth take. It kept getting longer and longer. We were trying to keep it concise. It was a tough one because four takes of that took an hour-and-a-half to play it four times, tuning in between, setting up and moving stuff around and rewinding the tape.
JPG: I’ve dealt with other jamband artists who are challenged in making a good studio album but I think you explained it the best as far as why making studio albums are important.
PH: Even with Phish, too. I’m a huge Phish fan and so is one of the other guys in the band. I love their studio records, too. A big part of that band, obviously, is what they do live and what they’re capable of improvisationally and the way that they layer themselves. It’s not just about a long guitar solo. It’s about what they’re creating at the moment and the way that they’re listening to each other and interacting, and you’re a part of this conversation that’s happening musically. Some of their songs certainly need that but there are studio albums as well, and there’s a lot of Phish fans, especially, that don’t like… I can’t believe it when people who have seen 200 or 300 Phish shows and they’re like, ‘I don’t have the studio albums.’ And I’m like, “What?!?!’ Rift is one of the greatest albums ever made. Story of the Ghost, Junta, I love all those records. All of ‘em. They’re great.
JPG: Focusing on the new album’s title track and its idea that anything can happen in life and living a life even if it throws unexpected things at you versus the certainty of a bullet. Elaborate on the development of that view, and was it based on particular experiences?
PH: A lot of songs I write are probably clearly related to a lot of events and choices that I make. The biggest choice being to do what we do, to sacrifice some consistency for such a volatile career that relies so heavily on if people like you and if they decide to come pay you. And it’s been hard. We’ve been a band for a long time and there were years where we had other jobs and not enough time to work those jobs so that we had money to do things. Then, we would come home from tour and have not much money to show for, and it took a lot to stick by it and figure out how to upgrade our gear when we weren’t even making money. I think a lot of that fear and sense of failure and stuff like that really comes out in my songs. I don’t think I’m a bleak person. I don’t think I really spend a lot of time obsessing about the bleakness of my life but I do tend to write that way (laughs) and I think people relate to it ‘cause everybody feels that way. A couple of the tunes are inspired by difficult situations; people that I know have gone through with economic crisis over the last five years, being laid off for years.
I was carrying around this idea for awhile of a song lyric that went something like, ‘I’m gonna buy a handgun and make less mistakes.’ And something about the juxtaposition of responsibility and regret and a handgun as the image seemed like a really powerful message to me. There’s something really sensitive about all those lyrics – handguns without love. At one moment it’s really sensitive and delicate but the image being used is a handgun, which is not that. And that juxtaposition to me seemed really profound.
JPG: When you writing about the economic situation on “Lose My Way,” being from Michigan and that state’s economic problems, really captured that mentality quite well.
PH: Yeah, there’s definitely some lines in there about not finding work. There’s some specific references. That song in the first verse I say something about ‘It seems as though the neighbors aren’t fighting back with us.’ And when I stumbled upon that concept it kind of had the same power for me as the handgun. It’s like that feeling of what a neighbor is supposed to mean, the word not that person. I have neighbors that I don’t really speak to, and I’m not very social with them, but I’m not there very often. But the concept of a neighbor…There’s some powerful stuff in there.
I majored in literature in college if that means anything so I spend a lot of time reading words and thinking about what they mean. I was one of those teenagers who quote unquote wrote poetry. (slight laugh) I recorded an album when I was 16, produced it myself, made a CD and sold it to my peers in high school. Instantly, experienced the feeling of regret and wasn’t proud of what I had made. For a long time I didn’t write songs. I think when I started writing songs again I approached them lyrically the way that I didn’t before. It’s more caught up, I think every writer doesn’t want to sound cliché or you want to be proud of what you’re saying. So, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I’m saying and deciding what I really want all the words to be. Not to say that sometimes lines don’t come real quick to me. But, I think I had an important experience with putting something out there that I wasn’t proud enough of. Now, looking back I recognize that I was 16 and my vocabulary was only so good, and I did really accomplish a lot on my own. I tend to be a quirky lyricist who uses weird metaphors and stuff like that.
JPG: Have you gone back to any of those songs and thought, ‘Hmmm, there’s something in there I can still use.’?
PH: (laughs) No. None of it’s usable. Secret album. If you know me long enough I might let you hear it. And if you know me waaay long enough I might let you take it home. I’m pretty embarrassed about it.
JPG: If Handguns goes platinum you might suddenly find a copy of that album being sold on ebay. And then you have to put up the money to buy all the copies so you can stash ‘em away.
PH: There’s several hundred of them in my basement. (laughs) I don’t know why I keep carrying ‘em around. It seems ridiculous to throw them away but…
JPG: That brings up the idea of the value of music. Last August, Greensky Bluegrass gave away a five track EP from Handguns. Besides a method of promotion, is that a statement as far as the commercial viability of studio albums?
PH: The motives vary, and certainly the formula has changed and the game has changed. We gave half of it away to hype up the release of the full album for reasons like you and I are talking right now about the way that the industry works. We needed to give the release time so that we could get the word out in the appropriate avenues. The idea of waiting ‘til October when the album was done in early summer was daunting to us, and we couldn’t wait. (slight laugh) My wife often buys me birthday presents and gives ‘em to me the day she buys them instead of waiting for my birthday. And I think it’s the same thing. We were really really jazzed up about what we had done and proud of ourselves and we were like, ‘Let’s just give it away.’ (slight laugh) And there was talk of giving the whole thing away, but we wanted to balance the…there’s no way to measure…I don’t even really know the politics of it all.
I think that we’re proud that we gave half of it away. And we didn’t hold back on what we chose to give away either. We didn’t say, ‘Make sure we save some of the really good tunes for the purchase.’ We picked what we thought was right. You got the long jam song, the title track, the tune with the guest horns on there so people would know that there’s some things that are a little different about this record. The first track, “Don’t Lie,” has become kind of an anthem for us since playing it and recording it. A couple of us have described it as a quintessential Greensky song if there had to be one ‘cause it characterizes a couple of the different feels and styles that we play and sonics. So, we put that on there, too. It’s the first song because we think it should be the first one that people hear, and when they hear that one it’ll pull them in if they weren’t already convinced. So, we couldn’t imagine the EP not starting with it as well.
JPG: Well, if they do decide to buy the album they’re actually going to get nine more tracks.
PH: We’re going to appropriately price the other half of the album. I don’t know. The times have definitely changed. I think musicians always made money from touring. Records used to make a lot of money but I don’t know how much money the musicians saw. Everybody’s heard the horror stories about how the record label fronts all the money and then the artist never sees another dime because the record label spends so much money promoting the album and promoting all their records and then it turns multi-million dollars in profits and somehow gets sucked up into the investment of the label and in some exec’s Ferrari or something.
So, the idea is we want to gain fans and we want people to hear our music. In the last year or so we’ve been at this precipice of reaching a lot of new people that we hadn’t reached in the past. And after recording this album we saw it as an opportunity to show people that we’re capable of a lot. We didn’t want people to have to make an investment to know that as well. So, we were like, ‘Let’s give it away.’
We’re doing a print of the record as well. We think the art is bomb. You’ve got it. We’re really proud of it. So, we don’t have any problem selling the CD for $15. I think the people who want to buy the CD they want the package. They want the thing. That’s a fair cost for what CDs are, what we have to do as an independent artist to create them. The download is $6.99, about half price. That seems fair and reasonable, and it’s lower than what’s been the industry standard. We’re also gonna do a vinyl press of it, and we’re doing it on a really heavyweight vinyl. And because the album is 66 minutes we had to do double vinyl. So, it’s gonna be two records and I think it’s gonna look classy as hell. That’s gonna be a little more expensive because it’s gonna be a limited press and it’s gonna be a novelty item for collectors.
The value of records has certainly changed. I’m a member of eMusic online, which sells for half of what iTunes sells for. It’s gained a lot of major record label stuff since I joined and some of the prices have gone up. So, the value has changed but for us I’m often overwhelmed by the consumer responsibility of our fans who buy the record at the show and buy the t-shirt and tell me that they’re buying it because they know that we need the support. Maybe, they’re just going to rip the CD on their iPod and never use the CD again but they wanted us to have the money. It’s certainly not all about the money but I think that’s a real admirable quality in people. I do the same thing. I met a guy at Strawberry Music Festival, a songwriter, Willy Tea Taylor, whose tunes I loved and totally went head over heels for the guy as a writer. I was like, ‘This guy is amazing .’ And I went home to buy his record and he had one of those name your own price record deals going on. I just paid full price for it ‘cause I know he’s not a huge artist. He lives on a farm and…Consumer responsibility is important. If everybody thought that way then more people would shop local and be more wise with their money.
