At the beginning, being in a band must be great. Not only are members able to get away with never doing laundry and subsisting on packets of chips and cocaine, people are genuinely interested in their opinion on everything from the commodification of cassette tapes to whether or not they scrunch or fold.The interview is an excellent way to learn about someone you will never meet (through a series of quotes that’ve been angled in a very specific pre-determined manner) and there are some incredible examples out there. Unfortunately, others read like manuscripts depicting butchered Match.com dates between humans who are interested in music, but terminally incapable of holding any sort of substanstial conversation.We learn that the artist loves their fans; that they felt pressure to write a new record; that they absolutely love playing in New York and, fuck me, yes, they’ve crushed it on this summer’s festival circuit. But—so what? You don’t need an interview to tell you that. An interview should tell you things you don’t already know; not confirm the obvious.With that in mind, we’ve created a guide to the questions we imagine have been niggling bands and pissing off readers for years. The sort of inquiries that have musicians repeating themselves for the entirety of their career before they finally cave in and threaten to annihilate all fanmail sent to their house. If you’re in a band, think of this as a navigational map, a way to negotiate through the most boring questions in the world.Random New Hype Band: What do you think? The entirety of Pitchfork’s readership are sat, pants-down, anticipating our next release. Of course we felt pressure to follow-up. You probably get overwhelmed after watching 30 minutes of trailers and being unable to pick a film. Imagine how we feel, being pounded upon by the mountainous pressure that comes from trying not to look like an abject failure of a human being on a career path our parents specifically told us not to take. Yeah, we’re shitting it.Wait, are you asking us to describe the facial structure and dress code of fans in a town we’ve been to once? Because I’ve got to tell you, in a small dark room, the 20-year-old slightly nerdy students who come and watch us in Plymouth in England, look pretty similar to the ones in Cincinnati. Or are you expecting us to make sweeping stereotypes about people from Glasgow being more “up for it?” I guess some band’s fans, like Black Veil Brides' minion army or Directioners, are easily characterized. Ours are not. They’re just people that illegally downloaded the record or ended up in the [insert name of divey DIY-ish venue] the night we played.Our songs, played live, with some talking in between.You want us to say something about a song being delivered in a dream or whatever, but we’re just fucking boring when it comes to writing songs. We listen to something we really like, steal the melody, change the key and put a drum track behind it. Then we arrive at one lyric that seems quite good and repeat that 40 times throughout the song so you remember it when you see us live.A+ to you for employing research skills that move beyond the press release and into the first two pages of Google’s search results. I shall now recount the exact same answer for you, word for word.People grow, they get older, they start to hate everything they once loved. Just look at us, we used to listen to Gina G and now we pretend like we grew up on pure Björk. So just tell us what you’re looking for. We can give some laborious answer about experimenting with woodwind, being inspired by our rural recording location or “learning to write as a group” if you’d like?Personally, I would probably be sailing a boat to Portland, trying to escape my existential crisis. It doesn’t really matter though, does it? The main point is that we’re not. We’re right here so let’s talk about now, sweet-cheeks. Let’s talk about right now. Did you listen to our record?Yep. This is exactly how I thought things would pan out. When everyone else was outside throwing stones at moving vans and we were in the music room learning chord progressions, I always knew we’d be sitting in a Denny's being interviewed by someone from, what did you say this magazine was called again? Look the point is, some bands are a success, some have debut albums that are stocked at Dollar Tree, some never make it out of their bedroom, but the only ones who are convinced of their success, are fantasists.For real?I give up. We make music for ourselves. If anyone else loves it—that’s just a bonus.Ryan Bassil is pretty funny. Follow him on Twitter.
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