Steve Klingaman Loose Talk

On music careers

Being a musician and working at a “real” job is a hard way to go. My advice is to keep your overhead as low as possible as long as possible. It helps to be a minimalist.

The important thing is just to keep doing it.

On the music scene

I have always been on the alternative side of music, like most artists who couldn’t make it commercially. You can parade that as a virtue. Springsteen, Sting, those guys defined alternative rock before they achieved massive commercial success and came to define the mainstream. Alt Rock, or whatever it’s called in now, sounds like canned angst.

I’m encouraged by the vitality of the non-commercial or semi-commercial music scene. Greg Brown, Dar Williams, Ani DiFranco, Gillian Welch, Martin Sexton, the Nields, and Stephen Fearing are just a few examples. In this category, if you sell 30,000 albums it’s a tremendous accomplishment and you are a big star.

When the movement to self-production in home studios and third tier studios began, the majors implied that the output would all be garbage, because if there was any talent out there, they 'd already signed it. Today the indies have the artists and the majors have Clay Aikens.

There’s a tremendous amount of musical talent in Canada. I think one of the reasons for that is that there’s less mainstream economic opportunity there, which is an incentive to just go for it as an artist. You can afford to live in most of the cities. If you want to live as a musician in San Francisco you’d better have a girlfriend with a very good job.

Many people confuse validation with success. If you need external acclamation to give your work validity, and then somehow achieve it, you'll simply end up as another insecure successful artist.