COI012: Mailbag #1
I put the call out and you answered — it’s mailbag time! If you’d like me to answer your questions, just hit that “reply” button and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.
Jordan writes:
Do you earn enough Spotify royalties from Youth Conspiracy Records each month to buy a cup of coffee?
For those unaware, I run a small record label called Youth Conspiracy Records. Maybe I should say “ran,” though: It’s been dormant for the past four-and-a-half years, coinciding with when I lost my job at AP. (It’s really difficult to release records when you don’t have a day job that helps you pay for the enormous costs of releasing records.)
Anyway, a handful of YCR titles are on streaming services via Tunecore. It costs $49.99 per release to keep them listed on Spotify, Apple Music, Google play, et al every year. At best, I break even (largely in part to some rabid Australians who stream Meridian records — thanks, Australians). My most recent payout from Spotify is from April 2019, in which I made $5.16 off all global streams. However, I currently can’t even withdraw my money unless I pay a fee to a third-party vendor called Payoneer, which is a new wrinkle in Tunecore’s system I’m not happy about. So that cup of coffee (or, if we’re being real, iced chai with almond milk, because coffee is gross) will have to wait.
Jacob writes:
What is one line in a song that put you off that song or artist? Ex. Muse- Muscle Museum “I have played in every toilet....” Or Third Eye Blind- 1,000 Summers “Cause I'm a vampire y'all And we toast the blood of our enemies.”
Great question! The first one that immediately comes to mind is the terrible Jimmy Eat World song “Higher Devotion,” in which Jim Adkins sings, “Don't you feel my eye lasers hit?” Jimmy Eat World is probably my second-favorite band of all time, just behind Weezer, but that line is trash. It makes me never want to listen to Invented, one of the band’s lesser works (that still has some hidden gems at its end — both the title track and “Mixtape” are awesome). That album also has the cringeworthy “Coffee & Cigarettes” as well as the Offspring-aping “My Best Theory” (seriously, it’s the same progression as “Gone Away” — once you hear it, you’ll never unhear it).
Another example that we used to make fun of all the time in the AP office was in Angels & Airwaves’ “It Hurts,” when Tom DeLonge whines, “You dug yourself into a liar’s hooooooole.” Terrible lyricism! (But all things considered, We Don’t Need To Whisper still goes off, even if AVA has been steadily diminishing returns ever since.)
Amanda writes:
What is your top 3 favorite concerts you've been to?
Truly an impossible question to answer. I’ve been seeing live music since I was in middle school (my first big concert was Weird Al in 1995, but I know my parents dragged me to things before that), and I keep a spreadsheet of every show I’ve attended since 1997. (I’m currently at around 1800 gigs, give or take.) But these are the first three that come to mind, in no specific order:
3/12/05 - Andrew W.K. @ Duquesne University, Pittsburgh PA
What a wild goddamn show. I drove out to Pittsburgh with some friends and met up with more once we got there, and paid our whopping $1 a ticket to get in. This was AWK’s first gig since the now-legendary December 17, 2004 gig in New Jersey where the mystery of who the “real” Andrew W.K. is started (enjoy your deep dive), but the show itself was absolutely euphoric. My friends and I all ended up onstage for large chunks of the show (I appear in the above video numerous times — look for me, clean-shaven, wearing a No Idea Records T-shirt), and during “Party Hard,” I actually went over to AWK’s keyboard and began playing the progression as he had walked away from it to sing the chorus. He came over to me, got right up in my ear and yelled, “GOOD! YOU’RE LEARNING!” then went back to sing the second verse of the song. Andrew W.K. for-fucking-ever, man.
2/8/09 - The Gaslight Anthem @ Shepherds Bush Empire, London, England
It still blows my mind that I somehow managed to convince the higher-ups at AP to put the Gaslight Anthem on the cover. Granted, the band was hot at the time: The ’59 Sound had dropped the previous fall, mainstream press was fawning over them and the band was breaking out of the Orgcore slum to connect on a big level with the scene at large. It seemed like the right time to do it, and maybe had it been the AP of five years prior — the one that intermingled NOFX, the Donnas and Green Day with the Used, Story Of The Year and My Chemical Romance — it would’ve worked. But by 2009, AP was fully immersed in modern emo, and our readers were not interested in some working-class heroes from New Jersey. So, the issue tanked, but at least I got a free trip to England out of it, where I got to witness Gaslight play to their then-biggest crowd ever at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire, which has a capacity of 2,000. I’ve since seen Gaslight play to much larger crowds (their set at the 2012 Bamboozle was epic), but this show was special, and I’m honored to have the setlist from it hanging in my office.
8/20/99 - Braid @ Fireside Bowl, Chicago, IL
Growing up in Rockford, Illinois, Chicago always seemed so far away, even though it was barely 90 minutes from my doorstep. But finally, in 1999, at age 17, I began making the trek in to the big city, whether it was with my parents’ blessing (like when I saw the Hippos at the Fireside Bowl with my buddy Anthony for his birthday that March) or by sneaking out (like when I saw Buck-O-Nine and Home Grown at the Metro, again with my buddy Anthony, just a few weeks later). But nothing was more exciting than getting to see Braid — one of my favorite bands, both at age 17 and still now at age 37 — for the first time, in what was billed as their farewell shows. (No band stays broken up, but at the time, it certainly felt final.)
No Knife were the opening act for this sold-out show. I had never heard them before that night, but they absolutely blew me away, and I’ve been a fan ever since (even though I’ve only been lucky enough to see them once more since then, and that was a decade ago — if you’re a festival promoter reading this, please throw lots of money at No Knife to reunite forever, thanks). And Braid was everything I hoped for and more, putting on fiery 21-song set that had me bouncing off the walls in excitement.
My friends and I drove home that night but then drove back to Chicago the next night for Braid’s next show, at the considerably larger Metro, which was also sold out, with support from Sarge and Alkaline Trio (which ended up being Glen Porter’s final show with the Trio, but that’s another story). During that Metro show, I caught wind of a secret Braid show back at the Fireside later that night, but try as I might, none of my friends were up for a third go-’round. (And seeing as how they were my ride, by proxy, neither was I.)
But, yeah: Braid ruled, Braid still rules, and when in doubt, go to the show, because you never know when you’ll get a chance to see a band again.
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