Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #009

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #009 – “When Did I Get So Scary?”

Fun fact – did you know that we do interviews?  Ha!  You had me fooled, that’s for sure.

If you do, then please tell someone that might wanna take one so that I’ve got someone to talk tunes with one day, will ya?

Everything comes and goes…that’s the reality, and I accept that.  When sleepingbagstudios first decided to get back into print and write stuff instead of just do what we were doing at the studio & trying to make that work, it was actually interviews that got the entire written side sparked up and ready to roll.  I know we don’t always like to toss this saying around, but sometimes it’s true – it WAS a different time.  Independent musicians & bands were freakin’ fearless, and they were out there getting onto all kinds of sites like ours, taking every opportunity that came their way.  Fast forward more than a decade later, and I pretty much gotta hunt people down specifically if I want to do an interview – how wack is that?

For real…when did I get so scary that practically nobody out there in the scene ever wants to do any interview with me anymore?  Me.  A guy that is simply a massive fan of ALL MUSIC, and is on your side.

It’s wild to me for a variety of reasons.  I mean, first and foremost, like I said – I exist to support YOU.  Sure, I might ask a whole bunch of challenging questions and whatnot, but they’re all designed to give YOU the opportunity to crack the bat with your answer and put yourself out there in the best of lights.  That seems to be the thing though…that second half of the equation requires actual WORK, and I think that’s the scary part?  I used to think it was me, but I’ve come to realize that it’s the effort that actually scares people into sitting silently when they could be talkin’ about their music and spreading the word on what they’re up to.  Like, we offer interviews in three different ways even, to make it easier for YOU to find the method that would most appeal to how you might wanna go about it…maybe it’s written, maybe it’s audio, maybe it’s video – we do’em all, yet we hardly do any, because that same drive we once witnessed when sleepingbagstudios first started up is practically non-existent altogether by now.

So lemme see if I can help entice you in through a few tips and things I’ve learned throughout the years, and maybe someone will eventually get brave enough to talk to scary ol’ me again one day.  As much as I love seeing the faces of Tor James Faulkner (Sept. 20^th, 2025), Fred Vanterra (August 13^th, 2025), December Fades (July 8^th, 2025), and Jo Oliver (July 7^th, 2025) in the featured part of our site’s main page that highlights our most recent interviews…you can see by the dates, it might be nice if there was someone else to talk to by now, don’t you think?  It’s been about half a year…which is another thing to consider – with the low amount of submissions, requests, and orders to do interviews with us, your picture and name basically stays up on the main page of the site for all to see for what feels like forever and a day.  I don’t know much about value & whatnot, but it strikes me that that might be worth something to some of you out there that might be hesitant.  That’s the written interviews anyhow…I think we’ve got examples of more recent interviews in both audio and video, which might simply suggest that people are looking for different ways beyond the most traditional interview form to get the word out there.  Fair enough – I can accept that…but good lord, do the right thing by your music and help get it out there!  I don’t care if it’s our site or someone else’s – I just don’t see a lot of interviews being done in any capacity in comparison to what it used to be like, and there’s something concerning about that, even if I’m not entirely sure what it is.  I think to me, I look at it from the lens that, if you’re truly proud of the music you’re making, you should be shouting about it from the rooftops to all that would listen.

Beyond that, I think there’s an opportunity that is consistently misunderstood when it comes to the ART of taking interviews, because I do genuinely believe that a lot of people WANT to take them, but they don’t really know HOW to take them, you feel me?  I tell participants the same thing all of the time.  MY job, is to ask you a series of questions that I think would be beneficial for you to answer as an artist, and that would simultaneously be interesting for your listening audience as well.  As in, I want them to learn something new & exciting about you – that’s always the goal I have in mind as I’m writing an interview.  What I tell the people taking them though, is that it’s not YOUR job to answer a damn thing I’ve asked.  What I tell the people taking our interviews, or any interview they might face, is that every space we create is an opportunity to SAY SOMETHING.  Maybe you want to answer the question in a straightforward way – there’s never anything wrong with that.  Maybe you want to fuck around and say whatever you feel like and not answer the question at all.  You know what?  I LOVE that!  Do it!  Take the space for a ride and do what YOU want to do – because ultimately, that’s what it SHOULD be about.  I’m not saying you’ve gotta be rude or a dick about it, but the space that we create when we ask a question should be completely wide open for you to do with it as you will, wherever your instincts take you.  Just because it’s our job as interviewers to try and keep you focused in a certain area doesn’t mean that’s the only way to go about it.  Should you, the artist, be helping ME do MY job?  Fuck no!  YOU should be doing YOUR job, and taking control of that space to put your music out there in the way you want it to be done.  Make sense?  That’s why I’ve never once had a limit on how long your answers can be.  I’ll let you write a sixteen page essay in response to a question I’ve asked if that’s how you want to answer it!  Same thing for the audio and video interviews…take’em for a ride…if things go long, we actually just create more than one episode dedicated to your music instead.  I know right?  The horror!  The horror!  For real though…that space is YOUR space, in any interview – and the only responsibility you have is to not let that space go wasted.  I’ve had people ask me in the past like, ‘hey man, can I skip question six or question fifteen’ or whatever the case may be, and my answer is always the same – ‘yep.’  They can’t see me physically shaking my head or feel the disappointment I’ve got from their side of the screen.  I’m not going to force someone to answer something, but it’s ridiculous to me that anyone would want a blank space sitting where an answer should be, especially when you could have said ANYTHING YOU WANTED TO.  You following me here?  Make the most of the opportunity – and do things YOUR way.  It would never be beneficial to say, no, answer all ten questions or the interview is off…who would want to participate in something crappy like that?  In theory, it’d be awesome if every artist & band out there got their interview, and immediately looked to the bottom of the page, reading that there are X-amount of questions and they get X-amount of opportunities to say whatever the heck it is they wanna say.

Alas, we ain’t living in that world.  We’re living in a world where people are generally afraid to talk about their art, and I’m not quite sure I understand that.  What you don’t often see on our pages is all the time I’ve wasted on some of the best and brightest out there…artists/bands I’m positive would be great in an interview situation, only to go & spend a bunch of the precious time I don’t have in creating something for them and hear crickets in return.  Don’t get it twisted – I learned my lesson long ago that you’ve gotta get some buy-in or it’s best to not even bother.  Like, when I was young and naïve, I’d just create an interview, send it to my favorite bands and artists, and hear nothing in return.  Now I make sure that I’ve talked to them, gained some kind of agreement that the work will get done and that they’re excited to participate, and THEN I hear the crickets in return…it’s so much more satisfying that way.  I’ve got tons of names that I wouldn’t say are blacklisted, but names that I’m way more mindful of now…folks that I’ve sent out interviews to in whatever format they’ve requested, only to hear nothing back, or even worse, the never-ending pile of excuses and back & forth for months about how they’re ‘so close to getting it done’ only to never send it in.  Bands and artists I once genuinely liked and respected, like The Vrbs, Moon & Aries, Digital Escort, Jana Pochop, Angie Haze…the list could go on and on and on sadly…all folks I took the time out of my day to try and do something for free, only to waste my time.  So the result is obvious…I do so much less free stuff in that regard, because if there’s no financial aspect attached to it, it becomes way too easy to ignore and it never gets done.  Heck, even when I do things like the SBS Free Interview we did last summer, even half the people that ask for an interview don’t go on to complete the interview in time, if they ever even got it started at all to begin with.  Does it bother me?  Of course it does!  Way beyond the wasted time on my side of the screen to be honest with you – it bothers me that so few out there really take every opportunity they can find to get the word on their music out there.  That’s what rattles me.  That’s the part that pisses me off most.  Sure, I’d love it if every interview I ever sent out came back to me – I know that’s never going to be the case – but for real – someone out there give me a legitimate justification as to why the number is at a 100% rate of return?

The damage that it can cause in your relationship to the scene is immeasurable.  Your credibility as a serious artist or band immediately takes a hit by not returning a submission, and ultimately you’re cheating your fan-base out of an opportunity to get to know you better, and yourselves of an opportunity to speak about your music to a new audience, or to those that might even know you best.  The worst…I cannot stress this enough…we’re in a do or do not world y’all, so the WORST situation is where you’ll get someone that’ll give you a litany of excuses as to why it didn’t get done, and then do that for weeks and weeks…to the point where they’ll write out so many excuses and apologies that it actually would have been faster to just nut up and answer the questions sent in the first place!  So that’s always a shitty route to go…bands like Royal Ruckus and Digital Escort fall into that realm.  Then there are others like Angie Haze and The Vrbs that simply tucked tail, said absolutely nothing, and ran away without a word.  Maybe even worse still, you get artists like Jana Pochop, who I absolutely loved, who won’t even acknowledge the situation, or bands like Bees In A Bottle that will still come back for another review on their music instead, like nothing ever happened and we never even tried to do an interview.  Weird right?  It’s just shy of being one of those ‘don’t meet your heroes’ situations.  Those I don’t expect anything from usually go on to crush our interviews…and those I can’t wait to do an interview with are usually the ones to inevitably let me down by never getting it done & it’s hard to recover from that.  I want to be the guy that’ll forgive that kinda crap, but truly, it eats at me.  I’ll fully admit, I just don’t get it.  I fully understand if life gets in the way and something comes up and you’ve gotta delay getting the answers back to someone – I totally understand that…but that’s where communication comes into play.  Without any of that, it’s just more wasted time.  I’ve had people submit their answers YEARS after I’ve sent them their interview – and you know what I say to the people that do that?  Thank you.  No hard feelings, no harm, no foul…it got done & that’s all that matters.  The work and the effort has eventually been put in…that’s all that needs to happen in order to get your interview published on this site of ours.

So again…I ask ya…when did I get to be so scary?  Where was the tipping point?  When did I go too far?  When did it somehow seem like I wasn’t on your side after I put in the work, time, and effort to help you promote you and your music through an interview?  Why is it that the vast majority of those that have completed one with us still consider it to be one of the best things they’ve done throughout their whole music career?  These two things should be perilously at odds with each other, yet I experience both.

Anyhow.  Disappointed wouldn’t come close to how I feel about the lack of interviews we seem to get.  I’m nothing but elated when someone wants to talk tunes with me, and I get even higher on our own supply when we actually get answers back to an interview that we sent out.  I’ve learned to be comfortable with both things…but yeah…to be real with you now, I’m at the point where if I create an interview in any form, written, audio, or video, my first instinct is to assume that nothing will come back.  How crazy is that, right?  Sure, I get paid either way whether the work gets done or not – but you’d assume that most people would send the answers in, wouldn’t ya?  My experience tells me otherwise.  My experience is that the more work there is on someone else’s end, the less things actually get done.  All I can do is control what I can control, and shake my head over way too many lost opportunities.

As some of you would have noticed, it’s kind of been like this for at least three or four years now, if not longer.  In fact, I got so bloody desperate last year, that we offered a free interview just so that we could get a few articles into that section instead of axing it forevermore.  I’m still not convinced that we shouldn’t abandon it altogether…and I still might in the future, because I don’t really see the point in keeping a whole section up on the site if it doesn’t really have anything going on & no one’s interested in doing interviews anymore.  Fully willing to admit that maybe it’s me…maybe there’s something I’ve done that I’m not aware of…maybe I’m too intensely passionate about music that it turns people off to talk tunes with me…I’m being objective & fair in looking at all this, and I still don’t know the answer.  So please, feel free to tell me what it is you don’t like about the way I conduct our interviews if there’s something specific on your mind…sound off below, or send me an email…whatever you wanna do is A-OK with me.  We all have space to grow & evolve in what they do – myself included in that assessment.

Will we be doing a free interview this year like we have in other past years?  Probably.  Probably still a written one, as audio/video interviews take way more effort and I think you can tell I’m pretty gun shy when it comes to the idea of putting too much more in with such little return in that regard…but yeah, I’d imagine that somewhere towards the summer we’ll cook one up and put it out there for anyone that might be interested once again.  Hopefully that’s a few of ya.  In the meantime, the options are always available to you all through the site…you’re always welcome, and my sincere recommendation is to always take the opportunity.  Whether it’s at this site, or at someone else’s…that doesn’t matter to me – what matters to me is that you’re relentless with pushing your music out there into the world, that you’re passionate about what you do, and that you take every opportunity you can to share it with us all in every way that you can.  Sometimes that requires a little (or a lot) of elbow grease, gettin’ your hands dirty, and doin’ the work…but in the long run, I can promise you it’s well worth the time you put into it.

Rant over…at least for now.  Thanks so much for reading.  Love to you all.

– Jer @ SBS