Casey Frensz

Interview With Casey Frensz

SBS:  Welcome to our pages!  Whether you’ve been here with us in some way before, or you’re brand-new to the site, it’s probably best to get an introduction from you so that we get everyone on the same page to start.  Tell us a little bit about the history of your music, and what’s happening with it lately!?!

Casey Frensz:  I’m a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and music teacher based in Minneapolis, MN.  I’ve been playing instruments for over 25 years and recording my own music since my teens.  I started my music career as a high school band director, which I did for 9 years before opening a recording studio in my home and transitioning to full-time gig work.  I play with lots of bands in the Twin Cities areas, most notably the Brother Jon Band, and during the days I teach lessons and make records for the musicians in my community.  Lately I’m feeling super creative, but I’m really busy with work for other people, so it’s hard to say when my next release will be ready!

SBS:  Let’s talk about the before and after of where you’re currently at.  What’s something about the music that you’re making now that you don’t think you could have done five years ago, and what’s something you think you’ll be able to do with your music five years from now that you can’t do today?  How have you grown as an artist/band, and what steps do you take to continue your artistic evolution?

Casey:  I prefer to use real instruments and microphones when I make music.  My work could probably be done much easier by using more digital instruments, but I much prefer the sound, and even more-so, the feeling of accomplishment when I learn a new instrument and add it to my compositions.  Since I finished my last record, I picked up a tuba and a nylon string guitar, so I’m pretty excited to write some songs that will utilize those sounds.  My music community is also constantly growing, so while I’ve typically worked alone on my music in the past, I’m getting more excited and curious about trying to do some collaborations with local artists that I really enjoy – I dipped my toes into that on my last record and had a great experience!

SBS:  If you were to assess the overall health of the independent music scene right now, what would you say?  What are the positives and the negatives about the current state of independent music, and what do you feel like artists & bands can do to contribute to the community & help it grow beyond the music being made?  If you’re not actively looking to listen to the music of other independent artists/bands, is it really all that fair to expect anyone would listen to yours?  How do you help the scene around you grow?

Casey:  I love the independent scene and find it incredibly inspirational, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly healthy.  As a producer, I get the privilege of working all the time with motivated artists who want to bring their works to life and share their music with the world.  I truly support creators and I can relate closely with the need to put art out there.  The musicians I work with are creative, good players, and they are making good music.  That said, we all seem to be in pretty much the same boat.  The artists I work with are using their own money to finance making records that ultimately get heard by very few people.  Bands that are playing out a lot have more success selling CDs or records, but those that are just releasing on streaming services don’t get much attention.  The music is definitely good enough, but how will it ever get discovered?  There’s not usually much money left over for marketing once an indie album has been completed, and the artist is competing with corporations, and even worse, robots pumping out tunes that are well-fit to the streaming algorithms by the thousands.

And yet, here I am, and I work with others all the time who are still managing to eke out a scrappy living playing this game.  It’s very hard, but not impossible.  I only know a tiny handful of musicians with label representation and true management and support, but I know many more who are succeeding on hustle alone.  It’s possible with enough passion and grit, just really hard.  With AI now able to generate “recordings” in seconds things are only going to get harder on the streaming and sharing front – if we want a more robust independent music scene people really need to spend more time out in the real world at real venues with real artists.

SBS:  What do you consider to be the biggest accomplishment or achievement you’ve had with your music to-date?  How do you personally measure your own success – is that something that even can be measured?  Is it awards, accolades, chart position…or is your definition of success based on something entirely different?  Should success, however you define it, be something that artists are continually focused on – or is success something that naturally occurs in the course of doing what you love to do?

Casey:  Success is about your ability to meet your goals, not any arbitrary standard set by anyone else.  It’s important to have goals that are both ambitious and realistic to keep successes meaningful and achievable.  Each one of my albums represents the most ambitious thing I was able to make when I did it – so all of those were successes as soon as they were finished.  I think each one also shows clear improvement in my playing, arranging, recording, and mixing techniques – progress certainly feels like success.  Does that mean my most recent album is the best?  I’m not sure.

Here’s a success I’ve been enjoying lately.  I have been teaching guitar to a particular student for the last 10 years, he was about 12 when we started.  He’s become a really fine player who is a lot of fun to make music with.  Lately he’s been working his way on to the scene and it’s been an incredible joy for me to watch him find success and friendship in the music world.  This is not a success that I was aiming for or planning on, it just happened and I couldn’t be happier.

SBS:  When you’re working on something brand-new, and something about it just doesn’t feel like it’s coming together the way that you think it should, how do you know when it’s time to give up on it, or how do you know that it’s time to dig in even harder and find a way to make it work?  Are there distinct red flags you can hear when something’s not working?  What are the signs you look for that tell you to stop forcing the material?  What would actually encourage you to keep going with the process instead?

Casey:  Once I have an idea, I rarely find myself getting “stuck.”  I might go for long periods without writing anything at all, because I don’t really have anything to say.  Once I come up with a concept or story worthy of a song, creating the music usually goes smoothly – I have tons of musical ideas floating around in my head all the time, and my years as a band director help a lot to come up with sensible arrangements.  If I don’t like something, there’s not usually much mystery – it’s because it is out of tune or out of time or has an ugly tone – all of those things are pretty easy to fix.

There are hangups in my process, though.  Sometimes I write a part that’s too difficult for me to play well, and I need to spend a few days warming up and practicing before I can get it right.  This happens often with brass instruments, tricky drum parts, and instruments that need lots of tuning like the sitar.  I’ve learned to not even try to record something that I can’t play with “ownership” yet, so I will take as long as I need to practice first.

The other mistake I’ve made a few times is finishing a whole song to realize that it feels a little too fast or slow.  If that happens, I need to start the whole thing over, redoing each part the same, but at a different tempo.  While I hate doing this, every time I’ve had to restart a track it has come out MUCH improved the second time, so maybe I should do it all the time.

SBS:  One of the points of general consensus in the art of making music, is that we all get our sound from somewhere…we hear what we like, then more often than not, we take tiny pieces of what we love to find our own voice & approach to go on and make music in our own way.  Essentially, what I’m saying is that it’s absolutely natural to be inspired by other artists/bands, and almost every artist/band ends up having that inspiration show up in their own work in some way, shape, or form.  What the real key is though, is retaining your own organic perspective – you still wanna be original too, right?  So how do you go about doing that?  Are there artists or bands that you know have been an influence on your style & sound?  How were you able to incorporate that influence without becoming too noticeably derivative and still be yourself?  Should we embrace and celebrate our influences more than we do?  It’s almost like we try not to admit influences exist in the pursuit of being original, but it’s like, bruh…if it’s there, we can hear it.  We all borrow something from those that came before us to some extent, don’t we?

Casey:  I just love music – if I started telling you about the artists that inspire me and why, this little interview would take days.  I grew up listening to lots of The Beatles and The Who, in my teen years I was all about Phish, in college I got deep into Classic Funk and Fusion, and now I listen to more Folk, Spiritual, and World Music than ever before.  My influences represent a wide variety of styles, and most of the bands and artists I really love never confined themselves to a single musical box.  One of the best ways to avoid sounding too derivative is to keep a variety of sounds in your ears and mix them all up!

When I was younger, being “original” in my compositions seemed really important to me.  In reality, it meant I would often add some convoluted part to my compositions to try to be unique.  The more music I play, the more I realize that it’s all been done before.  There’s just as much magic in how you present an idea as there is in the idea itself.  Love songs have been written forever, but there’s room for plenty more – the same applies for any classic musical form or sound.  Now, I’m not afraid to rely on the bread and butter sounds from classic genres – there’s a reason those licks and phrases get used over and over… they’re awesome!  Not everything needs to be unique, some things just need to be good.  I go to a Blues jam every week and playing the Blues taught me the most about this idea.  Countless artists have used the same 3 chords and 12 bars over and over to tell thousands of stories, and I’m not sick of it yet.  Make your performances soulful and it doesn’t matter if every note you play has been played before.

SBS:  Has there ever been a time where you wrote something inside one of your songs…maybe it’s a lyrical line, or maybe it’s a riff of some kind…something that you did, where you surprised yourself?  I like to think we all have a moment or two where we can stand back and be amazed by something we created, and appreciate the fact that maybe, just maybe, we exceeded our own expectations of what we thought we could accomplish – you know what I mean?  Get as specific as you can so the fans out there know what they should be paying attention to when they hear it – what’s your favorite thing that you’ve written on the inside of one of your songs, and why does this particular piece resonate so much to you?

Casey:  Go check out “Ga Na Na: Phases of the Many Moons” from Captain Queso and the Intergalactic Battle of the Bands.  I nailed it with that song and while I can’t say it exceeded my expectations, it’s one of my songs that was most successful in bringing my initial imagination to life.  There are experimental elements of the song that worked out super well, and I got the mix better than I feel I usually do – all the instruments sound really bold and dynamic.  My only gripe about the song is a bit of hiss left over in the high end, but I can live with that since I love everything else.

Ga Na Na is an imaginary band from the Andromeda Galaxy that plays shamanic music with acoustic instruments.  They prefer hand drums and like to use drone instruments with rich overtones.  Their planet has many moons, and this is their song about the celestial movements.  The track begins with some ambient shakers and 7 layers of Rav Vast tongue drums.  Each drum is playing the same pattern, but 1 BPM apart, creating a phase pattern that changes organically over time.  I had to try 2 melodies that I didn’t love before the 3rd created a natural phase that I really enjoyed.

The second half of the song features an ensemble of frame drum, Rav Vast, didjeridu, harp, accordion, and sitar.  I had a feeling it would be magical when combined, and I wasn’t disappointed.  I tuned everything to D dorian, starting 2 weeks before tracking the song so that the sitar in particular would be well settled into the key.  I built a PVC didjeridu in the key of D, tuned my 30” frame drum to D, tuned my harp to D.  I really think the time I spent tuning made the overtones line up better and that’s why the track sounds so good.

When the song was finished and I was able to listen to it, it gave me what I wanted.  A sense of peace, mystery, and excitement all wrapped up in one cohesive package.  It’s the kind of song I can easily “get inside” and feel it all around me like a hug.  Of the songs in my collection, this one is easy for me to enjoy rather than be self-critical about.

SBS:  I’ve been having a lot of great debates lately about whether or not everybody that’s making music has the right to be heard…and you’d probably be surprised by how different people seem to feel about this issue.  I know where I stand on it, and I think you can all probably get an idea of what my position would be from this free interview we’re doing here & the way we run things at sleepingbagstudios…but regardless, I’m putting this question out there to you, because I’m interested in YOUR perspective.  Just because you’ve made a song, does that mean people should listen?  If your answer is yes, do your best to explain why you feel that way & why we should make a sincere effort to listen to the music of others.  If your answer is no, explain why you feel that way, but also explain why people should still be listening to your music if that’s the case – what would make your music the exception, and not follow the rule?  Is there any value to an idea that’s not finished, or a song in its demo stages, or maybe something that’s not recorded in a top-shelf studio or with good equipment – somebody still took the time to make that song to the best of their ability with the means they had to create it – should that be listened to, or not?

Casey:  First off, I’d like to distinguish between hearing and listening.  Hearing is a physical process that happens all the time and doesn’t involve the interpretation of sounds.  Listening is a cognitive process that’s all about trying to gain information and understanding from what we hear.  In my experience, very few people actually LISTEN carefully, and there’s not really any way to force someone to listen.  True listeners are invaluable as friends and collaborators and artists should have deep appreciation for anyone that listens to their work.  Listeners show true love and respect through their act of listening.  For the rest of my response, I will address the right to be HEARD.

Everyone certainly has a right to make music, but that’s different from a right to be heard.  I love music, I teach music, and I produce music, so it is extremely important for someone like me to listen to artists at all stages of their journey and provide others with a space to be heard – my livelihood depends on it.  Furthermore, I’m grateful for those that have helped and listened to me over the years, so I pay that forward by listening to and helping other artists however I can.  However, for someone whose passion isn’t music, there’s no particular reason why they should care about what artists create, especially if they don’t enjoy it personally.

So you’ve made a song?  Big deal.  Tons of people make songs every day, and robots can make even more.  It’s silly to expect people to listen to what you’ve made just because you made it unless they are friends or family.  It’s easy to be an artist, just make art, but to be an entertainer or successful businessperson, you need to give people something that they like, and you’ll need to market it to them in ways that they will notice.  To be a great communicator, you need to give people something they understand.  Too many artists are a bit too self-focused in a sense that they create something deeply personal and then don’t understand why it doesn’t resonate with everyone around them.  If I want someone to sincerely listen to my creations, I should make a sincere effort to give them something that they will appreciate and understand should they take that time.  I don’t take it personally if someone would rather listen to something else, or nothing at all, rather than my music – you can’t win everyone and I didn’t succeed in resonating with that listener.

Musicians have a RIGHT to be heard in their own space, in music lessons, in jam sessions, and at open mics and similar events.  Musicians have a RIGHT to be heard by their collaborators, mentors, and closest friends.  Any listeners beyond that are the ones a musician EARNS through creativity, hustle, and charisma.

SBS:  There are ups and downs in the dynamics of almost every album we listen to, with very few exceptions.  Even those exceptions, probably still come down to more of a personal preference about what we enjoy about music and how we personally hear it, rather than anything being completely and totally “perfect” – you know what I mean?  Does an album actually need to have some kind of up/down dynamics in terms of what’s appealing to the masses in order for the best of the best songs in a lineup to be fully appreciated?  Wouldn’t every artist & band avoid the ‘down’ side (less accessible/less popular for example) if they could?  Does the ‘down’ side represent something else perhaps, like the story of an album or journey of an artist?  Is the ‘up’ side of a record as potent or noticeable if it doesn’t have a ‘down’ side to go with it?  Would a completely balanced album somehow be boring if it didn’t have the ups/downs that most have?  Do we HAVE to like every single song on a record for it to be considered complete?  Are the dynamics of an album something anyone can really steer in the direction they want to, or are all artists & bands simply going with the strongest material they have created at the time?

Casey:  I’m the type of person who almost always listens to full albums front to back.  The recorded album is probably my favorite of all art forms, I think I even like it more than live performance, but it’s less exhilarating.     

For me, an album is more like a story than a mere collection of songs – a good analogy being that a song is a scene, and the album is the movie.  Obviously not every scene in the movie can be the wildest, coolest scene, but there’s no movie without the rest of the story.  Furthermore, I might really like a particular part of the story better or worse depending on my own mood or experiences, so it’s hard to identify a “best” scene anyways.  I can’t really think of any records I love that have songs I don’t like – oftentimes it’s the weird or oddball track that just really puts the final touch on the full picture.  Thinking about up and down songs is too much of a microcosmic view of the record for me and neglects the need for variety when it comes to telling an emotionally rich story.

The songs I think are my best aren’t necessarily the ones my listeners like best – sometimes I’m really surprised when a song that I didn’t put a ton of effort or attention into ends up being a favorite for others.  I think it’s best to create what feels natural and try to tell a nice story, then see what happens.  Art takes on a life of its own once released into the world!

SBS:  I wanna send out a shout-out to YOU from me personally – I appreciate everyone that has taken the time to talk tunes with me throughout the years, and I appreciate the time YOU have taken with this interview too.  Because this one’s a little different in the sense that it’s been sent out to multiple people and is a little more generic in that regard, I have no doubt whatsoever that we probably didn’t get to talk to you about something you wanted to talk about – so let’s fix that!  This final space is what we call the SBS Open Floor – a spot where you can say anything else you want to say to the people out there.  It can be anything at all…your main websites…something else you want them to know about you and/or your music…your favorite bands in the scene right now…the secret 11 herbs and spices to the Colonel’s secret recipe – you get the idea, and it’s probably best you choose something that suits you rather than take any of my suggestions, but feel free to take the SBS Open Floor for a ride.  Whatever it is you want the people to know, now is the prime time for you to tell’em!  Thanks again for everything – keep in touch!

Casey:  For anybody anywhere close to Minneapolis, I’d sure love to make some music with you sometime!  Check out my studio at www.innergroovestudios.com or my artist page www.caseyfrensz.com

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