[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

How did you go about selecting the composers whose work is heard on First Things First?
I starting seriously commissioning new works for the viola while I was still an undergrad at Juilliard. When I decided to assemble this first album, I had the great luxury of 5 years of new works from which to edit as cohesive an album as possible. The three composers I chose, Nico Muhly, Marcos Balter, and Judd Greenstein wrote works which I thought spoke really well together. My goal for this record was to make it really listenable, start to finish, as opposed to a more old-fashioned classical-type CD which might include, say, three beethoven string quartets.

Over how long a period of time did the commissioning process last? Was this album always the goal?
I started commissioning pieces for various recitals and concerts I played both in and out of school. An album was always in the back of my head, but these pieces were written with live performance in mind.

Recently on his blog, Nico Muhly mentioned you in a discussion of the scene of which he’s a part. How would you describe the dynamic of that group of musicians? Has commissioning work changed that dynamic at all?
Commissioning work sort of is the dynamic! At least for me. I am lucky enough to work with my friends. Almost all (all?) of the works on this record were commissioned over a bourbon or two. We support and work with each other. It’s fun! Also! we are more ambitions, in part, ’cause new projects mean we get to hang out more. This is lovely!

How has your work with Overnight Music affected how you view music?
I’ve been exposed to so much more music since I started work at the radio. I love just kind of knowing what new CDs are out. My tastes are always broadening; I think that’s the lovely thing about being a performer: you get to figure out what’s awesome about tons and tons of different styles of music.

You’ve played as part of classical ensembles and with groups that fall more into the rock/pop category, and with artists whose work bridges the two (i.e. Johann Johannsson, Max Richter). What do you consider to the challenges of working with each? Do you find that playing with, say, Grizzly Bear or My Brightest Diamond has an effect on your work elsewhere?
I was super classically-trained, so for a long time my work with bands was kind of terrifying (see: holishit, what even is song form?? where does the OUTRO go at??) so this work has been awesome because I’ve learned a whole different way to approach notation and the working process. I really really love working with different types of smart people who are good at what they do; it pushes me to be more flexible and the more of that stuff I can get, the happier I am.

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

While many of the stories in Captive Audience focus on music, they’re generally about peripheral, or at the very least less glamorous, people within a music scene. What attracts you to figures outside of the spotlight?
Little known artists are interesting because their motives are less obvious. Why are they working so hard for so little notice and so little money? The answers to that question are of great interest to me as a writer.

In the Acknowledgments section of Captive Audience, you cite the work of Jay Ryan and Daniel MacAdam — when creating a fictional artist (as in “Look and Feel”) or a fictional band (such as Sod Off Shotgun), how influenced are you by existing artists or bands?
Sometimes, to get some clay on the table for a fictional character, I take my half-informed or misinformed notions of a real band or a real person as starting points. I usually don’t end up doing much research about the real person—what I misunderstand or mistakenly suppose about his life is much more valuable in creating a character than what I know about him. When the fiction is finished, my characters tend to bear only passing resemblances to any real people I had in mind when I first started making them.

When I was first inventing Tim Vilinski, the narrator of the story “Postgame,� I had some vague notion in my head that he was like NBA journeyman Eric Piatkowski. But I don’t know much more about Piatkowski than that he is (or was) an NBA journeyman, and I suspect that all that he and Tim Vilinski have in common are Polish surnames and a love of basketball.

Likewise, the story “In Memoriam� is told from the perspective of a reimagined Abe Vigoda. The Abe Vigoda of “In Memoriam� shares the name and some of the circumstances of his real-world counterpart, but I’m guessing that the character and the man are not very much alike—somehow, the act of creating a piece of fiction ensures that.

When including real people in your stories, whether they’re the focus (as in “In Memoriam”) or play a more supporting role (as in “Dancing Man”), how concerned are you with making sure that they’re portrayed authentically? And, to play devil’s advocate: why use a real person as opposed to a fictional analogue?
I did my best not to substantially misrepresent any of the real people who share names and some circumstances with fictional characters in Captive Audience—I have no interest in causing problems for anyone. But I was conscious that my characters were fictional, no matter their names, so I let them be what they needed to be. My guiding lights were Jim Shepard’s stories “Won’t Get Fooled Again,� which is told from the perspective of Who bassist John Entwistle, and “John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me.� It seemed to me that new names weren’t invented for these characters because real names better served the story and the reader, and did no harm to any real people. After some deliberation, my editor and I decided that the same things were true of the real names I used in “Dancing Man� and “In Memoriam.�

Some of the characters appearing in Captive Audience tell us a good portion of their life stories until that point, while others, such as James in the title story, are less forthcoming. How much of these characters’ histories had been worked out before you began writing about them, and how much emerged as their stories unfolded?
Almost all of my characters’ lives—their backstories and the events that unfold in the story’s real time—are made known to me as I write them. I usually don’t learn that a character lost a parent to an early death or was cut from the high-school dance team until I realize that, for the sake of the story, I must know. The question then becomes: does the reader also need to know this detail? And, if so, how best would it be revealed?

In both “Captive Audience” and “The Regular,” the protagonists live vicariously through the actions and performances of others. Do you see any parallel between this and the act of writing to evoke the daily routines of an athlete or musician?
Yes, I do. A writer can experience the emotional resonance and even the physicality of an event he or she has not lived, and help a reader to do the same.

But I think that an audience member’s connection with a performer is a singular thing. Those fleeting moments in which we can imagine ourselves on stage, playing some part in the creation of something beautiful and meaningful, are a big part of what makes live performance so compelling. Sometimes the imagining goes only so far as identifying with the performer—she’s like me somehow, or I am like her. Sometimes we see ourselves stepping out front for a solo. Whatever form it takes, that imagining gets me to my desk the next morning in the hope that some of its transformative power can find its way into my fiction.

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

In your introduction to the second issue, you mention that there will be at least one more issue — what is your overall goal for the project?
My ultimate goal for this project is to have all the issues made in to a book. That’s pretty much the plan for now though it seems never ending so I need to set a deadline and go for it!

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

Temporary People is subtitled “a fable”. I’ll admit that, initially, this threw me; given the extent to which you’ve created a distinct country and given it a visible, viable history– a degree of realism I don’t generally associate with fables. Did you know from the start that you’d be using this terminology? And if not, at what point did the book shift from Temporary People: a novel to Temporary People: a fable?
The idea to actually call Temporary People a fable came very late in the game, though the sense that what I was writing was indeed exactly that seemed to resonate within me for some time. I purposely called TP a fable as, to me, it is precisely that, though as you note, not in the traditional way people think of a fable. For me, TP has a moral center, it is a wild story of the quixotic turned on its head, with characters large and small, and I wanted there to be this sense of telling a tale. I could, of course, have left the fable reference off, but I like the association, the idea that here is a tale, modernly set yes, with factual and historical references, and yet completely separate and timeless like – well – a fable.

How much of the history of Bamerita had you worked out before you began writing the novel?
Again, like my use of the word ‘fable’ the idea of having Bamerita be this unique floating space in the world was there from the start, but the actual historical context evolved as the novel went through its many drafts.

Was Bamerita specifically based on any countries? Given its dictator’s obsession with films and filmmaking, I found myself thinking of North Korea more than once while reading the novel.
Not one specific country, no, though my vision has always been a Latin/Central American flavor, a bit of Marquez’s vision, and then with traces of Spain under Franco thrown in. There are so many countries today with madmen and despots at the helm, and as I read obsessively about all of them, Bamerita became a composite.

The novel’s treatment of revolution kept anticipating my comments on it: you’d mention popular music in the context of the novel’s revolution, I’d think “Czechoslovakia”, and within a few pages, you’d mention the unrest there in 1968; the same was true in the discussion of general strikes, which both called to mind and explicitly referenced Poland in the early 1980s. The events of Temporary People, then, seem like a kind of meta-revolution. To what extent have you found that revolutions tend to (or don’t tend to) build on what has come before?
If you mean the repetition in a single country as happens in Bamerita, the cycle is almost unavoidable because it becomes part of the culture, the fabric of the nation, sadly enough. If you mean revolutions in general, certainly there are aspects of revolution that are endemic to the process, regardless of where they take place. The eternal push and shove between powers, the internal struggle as it comes to a head, and then those cast to the outside after a revolution, begin to seed the same process again and again.

On the Dzanc side, you’ve recently announced the launch of online literary journal The Collagist. What prompted this? Do you consider it a part of Dzanc, or something distinct?
The Collagist is most definitely a part of Dzanc. We – Dan Wickett and myself – had discussed doing a journal for a while, and when we landed Matt Bell as our editor, we decided to take the jump. We simply want to use our platform to continue to bring the best writing to a large audience. The Collagist will have fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, novel excerpts, editorials and feature some of the best new and established writers working today. Our first issue will be out Aug 15 and when you see the material we have lined up, and the writers, I think you will be blown away.

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

The digital version of the I Was Bikini 7″ comes with an additional EP, But Rain Afraid. The file I downloaded from Flameshovel, though, was organized as one thirteen-track album. Do you consider the two EPs as halves of a larger work or as distinct entities?
The whole thing is really just a collection of all the early songs we have worked out, the idea is it is one record with many options of how to obtain it. We thought about a ton of ideas of how to get the music out there, and we thought a 7″with codes for the rest of the record was perfect, as it has an actual product with art and everything; most people are just putting music onto iPods and computers, CDs just seem like a waste at this point.

Were any of the Vacations songs written during Chin Up Chin Up’s time as a band? When these ideas came about, did you have this particular feel and use of instrumentation in mind from the beginning?
Yes, at least some of the ideas, and the general idea for instrumentation was conceived while we were beginning to write a new Chin Up record. We did have a particular feel we were going for, eventually it just made more sense to make it a new band instead of trying to push Chin Up into directions it wasn’t able to go; you really can’t force things like that to happen. I’m kind of sick of the traditional guitar/bass/drums instrumentation.

2/3 of Vacations were in Chin Up Chin Up; are there ever points where you find yourselves concerned that the music you’re making is veering too close to your previous band?
Not really, I don’t think were thinking about things like that. It seems totally different to me, but I’m sure to other listeners it seems similar and that’s fine too. Whatever it is we’re doing we’re excited about it.

A number of the I Was Bikini/But Rain Afraid songs reference community, either generally or through the “With” songs’ invocation of specific people. To what extent did you draw upon the people around you for either inspiration or points of reference?
Well the “with” songs were actually written with the people mentioned in the titles. Mahmood is a good friend of ours and me and Bobby wrote that song, and he stopped by my house while we were finishing it, so on the original take we had him play drums on a wood block thing. Same basic thing on “With Cale”. I think we’re always drawing from everyone and everything around us probably.

With an eye towards indie rock in Chicago nowadays, it seems like a number of the bands I’m listening to include combinations of members of the bands I was listening to a year or two ago, to a greater extent than I’ve seen in other cities. Do you think there’s something specific to Chicago that’s led to this sense of experimentation and collaboration?
Well I think the music world here, at least with people around our age, is pretty tight-knitand intertwined. People are always starting bands with and filling in for others, and everything kind of just evolves. I think it’s a pretty exciting thing to be a part of. It seems like in the last 2 years a lot of new bands have formed out of the remains of the main Chicago bands of the early 2000s. I can’t believe I just said ‘early 2000s’.

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

First and foremost, congratulations on winning FC2′s short story collection contest. What attracted you to FC2, and how do the stories in Museum of the Weird differ from those in AM/PM?
I’ve been lucky to work with two presses that I love and are doing something innovative. Featherproof has this pair of guys with the ideal mindset in considering content and form. Then there’s FC2, who have a history, and they anticipated and are fighting a lot of the problems you see with experimental fiction in the print industry. It seems like it’s hard to survive too many years in print if you’re unwilling to change your mission statement, and FC2 beat the odds in that sense. I think Featherproof will too, because they’re real smart guys and they have a good plan.

The stories in Museum of the Weird are longer, which gives me a chance to stick around with characters for a while. I screw around with form a little as well; there’s a play, some letters back and forth, and a couple lists. The subject matter is a little hard to describe in fifteen words or less. My girl at the salon asked me what the stories were about and I told her that one is about a man married to a bag of frozen fish.  She was sort of quiet after that.

Do you approach writing flash fiction differently from writing longer stories?
Unless I’m trying to write in a very specific form, the goal is to tell the story in as small a space as possible. I just wrote a story that where I took lines of an old newspaper article and wrote a little vignette after every line. I knew that was going to be longer because I had a certain number of lines I wanted to use. I can usually tell where 600 words is, and if a story is still plugging away when I hit around that mark, I usually have to re-figure the arc and start thinking about it differently. Whenever I try to force myself into a bigger arc for the sake of the word count it ends up being a huge disaster.

If memory serves, you recently wrote about teaching a class on flash fiction — were most of the students there coming from a fiction-writing background, or looking at flash fiction as an entirely different form?
This was a high school class taught by my friend Jack, and I came and talked to them for two class periods. They were learning about flash fiction that week and Jack had given them some really excellent stories to look at for reference; “Rose Period” by Jimmy Chen, “Leak” by Claudia Smith, “The Chair” by Richard Garcia. Lucky kids to be reading such good stuff. Anyway, the idea of flash was totally new to them but they were really into it. Flash fiction is a lot of fun to teach to casual readers.

In AM/PM, certain characters begin to recur as the book proceeds — did you know from the outset that you would be returning to these characters periodically?
Not at all; in fact, my initial goal was to write a different character for every story. The first draft had a lot of nameless characters because of that, and they mysteriously started sharing a lot of similar plotlines, and then I realized I was writing about the same damn people over and over again. So I figured it out and gave them names and that took about a year and a half.

How did the Five Things series come about? Do you find that your involvement in it has affected your writing (or your perspective on writing) at all?
As with most things I do, it started with me bitching; this time, about how there aren’t a ton of readings in Austin. There are just too many good writers hiding in their homes instead of coming out and having drinks and making asses out of themselves, which is what writers should be doing all the time. I was inspired by the great reading and art events happening in Chicago, namely The Dollar Store, Quickies, and the Show ‘n Tell Show. Featherproof is behind some of this stuff and they lied to me and said that it’s not that much work to put on a show, and I believed them and here I am.

Hosting the show keeps me thinking about what works on paper and what works in front of a crowd. A crowd will always push you towards the strange side of a story, and I think the strange side is a good place to be.

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

Both How the Broken Lead the Blind and The Collectors have appeared as chapbooks, and both are now sold out. What about the chapbook format appeals to you? How do you feel about the limited-edition nature of both — ideally, would you like to see both reprinted, combined into a larger collection, or something else?
What I like about the fiction chapbook is the way it can highlight forms that are hard to pull off in full length books. With the emergence of flash fiction as a popular form, there’s a need for a way to put together collections, but (generally speaking) short-shorts become less satisfying when too many of them are read in a row. A chapbook containing ten to fifteen shorts is much more palatable, and much more likely to have the kind of resonance that good books provide.  It’s also a great form for the novella, since they are so hard to publish in traditional literary magazines—I feel like that’s the biggest growth area for chapbooks, and I expect we’ll see more and more of them published in this format.

The limited edition nature of the books has been interesting. I’ve been lucky with how fast they’ve sold—How the Broken Lead the Blind sold out in pre-orders, and The Collectors was for sale for about a month total—and I’m extremely grateful for that. I do feel bad that there are people who wanted the books who couldn’t get them in time, but I think both Willows Wept and Caketrain have plans to make them available electronically at some point in the future, so hopefully everyone who wants to read them will still be able to. (That’s actually something that’s very important to me—I’d like to be able to offer free electronic copies of every book I have the good fortune to publish). As far as reprinting them in other books go, I just finished a full-length collection manuscript, and if it were to be printed exactly as it is now, there’ll be two stories from How the Broken Lead the Blind and the entirety of The Collectors within. So hopefully they’ll get a new life in print sooner or later.

When and how did you first become interested in the Collyer brothers?
I first read about the Collyer brothers in a book I ran across while I was staying in a hunting lodge in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula while I was in town for my grandmother’s 85th birthday last year. It was only a few paragraphs, but still enough for me to recognize that they’d make great characters. I came home a few days later and looked them up, and started writing the same day, with the first section of the book (probably the only one I wrote in order). From there, I did a lot of research over a very short period and then I tried not to do any more—Historical accuracy wasn’t the goal, and so a more impressionistic brand of research seemed best.

The narrator of the “4″ sections of The Collectors has certain authorial traits — particularly in terms of how he circles the action but seems to do so from a retrospective point. Did you know from the outset that the story would include this viewpoint? And how close is this narrator to the perspective of Matt Bell?
As I was writing, the authorial narrator started to appear in Langley’s sections first, and then in his own. I think this was probably inevitable, for a historical book like mine to work—The time scale is so small, and the outcome so definite. The tension in the book can’t come from whether or not they’re going to live, since anyone who’s familiar with their history knows they’re doomed, and steps had to be taken to dramatize the events around them to make up for that (this is also part of the reason for the two sections about the men who independently found the bodies of the brothers). I think the authorial narrator also allowed me to be more forthcoming, as it gave me both the ability to get closer to my version of the Collyers, since they’re separated from each other the whole book, and so there would have been no interaction without this intrusion.

The narrator isn’t very a nice guy, of course, because he’s the antagonist of the story: he inflates his own importance, lies to Langley, offers false hope and some false redemption, and accidentally traps himself in their house because he believes that the story is something he can control. Like Langley, he is defined and motivated by his obsessive gathering, and by a perhaps hopeless attempt to understand and complete the obsession in some meaningful way. A few of these qualities are reflective of who I am at times, for better or worse, but most are whole fabrications added for the purpose of making the book work.

That said, I did walk around for months thinking about these two brothers and wondering about their relationship. I rewrote lists of their possessions over and over until they were mine too, trying to see what connected the things they kept to the people they were, or—perhaps more importantly—to the people I wanted them to be for my own purposes. There were definitely days when I had trouble leaving them behind, and I think the ending of the book was written as much for me as for the story itself—It was one way to both complete the action and to allow myself to act out leaving this particular obsession behind. It wasn’t the last section I wrote, so I’m not sure it was completely successful.

I know this might make me sound kind of crazy and self-fixated now, but it really was on my mind at the time. I’m not a very autobiographical writer, so putting this kind of character in the book was something new for me, and therefore both interesting and somewhat uncomfortable.

How did you become involved with Hobart? Has your work as an editor there had any effect on your writing?
One of my very first fiction publications was in the fifth issue of Hobart, back in 2005, and I had an essay in the Games issue last year. Some months later, Aaron Burch invited me to come on board and edit the web edition (along with Jensen Whelan), and I’m very grateful for the opportunity. I’m obviously biased, but I think Hobart is one of the best literary magazines around, and it’s only going to keep getting better as it grows.

I’m not sure that working for Hobart (or for any of the other places I’ve been an editor) has had a direct impact on my writing, but it has helped me as a reader and an editor—There’s nothing quite like reading a couple hundred submissions to get a really good idea of what you like in a story and what you don’t, and to start formulating reasons why. One of the most educational parts of the process is when I get down to the last dozen submissions or so, and need to pick a final four for an issue. At that point, you’re down to twelve publishable, exciting stories, and finding the small qualities that separate them is very interesting (and hard).

How do games and gameplay factor in to your writing? “Mario’s Three Lives” comes to mind, as does — in a looser sense — “Hold On To Your Vacuum”.
Games are a rich source of inspiration, in so many ways—They provide forms and structure, like all storytelling mediums do, and they also offer new examples of how people interact with stories.  I think older video games appeal to me partly because they’re so often blank slates attached to the mythic framework of the hero and the quest. The stories are so minimal, and often they were relegated to the instruction manual, or didn’t make any sense whatsoever. For instance, to find out the story of the original Donkey Kong, you had to read the side of the arcade cabinet, as there’s absolutely nothing in the game itself. Games also have a Sisyphean aspect to them, where the character and the player are both asked to do the same thing over and over again. “The princess is in another castle!� and so on. And then of course there’s the free will problem, at least as it appears from the avatar’s point of view—even a modern video game character with a fully cinematic storyline meant to evoke real emotion from the player is still just a shell, incapable of independent action—which is much like a character in a novel, with the only difference being where the inputs are. In a novel, it’s the writer’s job to bring a character to life, while in a game it’s the player’s. (That’s an imperfect distinction, obviously—both readers and game designers have big roles to play in these relationships as well.)

In “Hold On To Your Vacuum,� there’s obviously a game involved, but it’s a fairly sadistic one, both physically with Teacher’s repeated drilling into the narrator’s skull, and also because the game revolves around something that isn’t fun (and shouldn’t be): the letting go of guilt and shame, and being freed of both of those things whether or not the protagonist has earned that freedom. For me, part of that story is the protagonist learning that the game is wrong, at least as it’s being played—he doesn’t want to be freed of his guilt, but to redeem himself for these things he’s done, and so he starts to play the game in a way that he thinks will help him do that.

To link this back to games and gameplay, I think it’s an example of another quality of games that only a certain percentage of players ever take advantage of: The freedom to play the game in any way they choose, whether or not the makers intended it. There are consequences, of course—often the game punishes players who don’t play by the rules, even if it’s just something as mild as the absence of a visible score by which to gauge their “progress.� It’s in places like this where I think video games reflect life best: There are rules you’re meant to play by, but they’re not absolutes, and sometimes the best times are when you play the game your own way, regardless of whether anyone else understands or appreciates what you’re up to.

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

Where did the idea for MBV come about?
Last year I started noticing a total spike in the number of “entities” (for lack of a better term) suddenly becoming interested in music blogs. I won’t name any names, but there are a number of organizations out there now approaching music blogs with nebulous offers of “partnership” or “working together.” They say they can “help grow” the blogs; help to “promote” the content, and so on. But in fact, the only thing these companies are actually proposing is to slap some ad banners on your site, and to siphon off your content to re-use on their site. They have no real interest in “growing” the music blogs they deal with; no interest in the health of those blogs, no plans for the blogs for the long-term. They simply want to leech for as long as they can, to grow their interests. They appear to offering to bring these blogs into a carefully-tended private garden, but in reality, they’re just practicing slash-and-burn agriculture.

I noticed that this was happening. And the thought occurred to me that if, in the future, music blogs were indeed going to be something “important” moving forward, why should that future be defined by the clueless, just-don’t-get-it heads of these large media companies? If music blogs are going to be an important part of music’s future, well, hell, I can’t think of anyone better suited to define that future than me and my MBV kin. We’ve all been at this 6, 7, 8 years now — and our experience, our perspectives, our contacts, our audiences — this is all stuff that some biz guy from the music-focused Social Network du jour can’t touch. And I believe that we can accomplish a whole lot more working as a team than we can working as a vast army of little “one-man shows.”

And do you find that more people are reading you there or on the Catbirdseat?
I don’t know who’s reading more where, but I can tell you that after 4 months, I’ve gotten the traffic on MBV to the same level as The Catbirdseat, which has been around for 7 years.

Do you find that the presence of MBV changes the way that you write?
There’s really only a minor effect. Of course, the criteria for posting to the two sites differs… The Catbirdseat is, always has been, and always will be a site where I write about the music that I really like a lot. It’s a very subjective view of things, based very specifically on my tastes. With MBV, though all of the subjective tastes of the entire team come through, the majority of the daily posting I do there represents a much more holistic view of the “indie music” sphere. I post about items that are not necessarily specifically relevant for me, but rather, stuff of interest for the greater community as a whole.

As of a few years ago, Catbird Records was funded via ad revenue from the blog; is this arrangement still working out?
That was true in a literal sense for a very short period of time, owing to the totally anemic ad revenue the site generates. And being that I’ve never held any ambition to try to actively “grow” the site, that’s been a constant since the ads were first implemented. It remains true in the sense that the “digital pennies” that do trickle in go into the greater pool of funds that are used on the Catbird Records projects– you know, those funds that come out of my pocket.

You’ve been a pretty staunch advocate of print-on-demand technologies for media. Do you see this being used more on a mailorder basis, or — given the recent press for the Espresso machine — being something that people will interact with in stores?
Yes, I think they can be used in stores just as much as they can be used to fulfill mailorder. The point is that we have the technology now to do this, and it has so many upsides: less cost, less waste, less everything. Whether we’re talking about books, magazines, DVDs, CDs — these are all things that, for the most part, have a pretty standardized format. A CD for example: you’ve got a case, a disc, and a booklet. Book: bound pages, a thicker cover. It makes much more sense to me for a store to keep a stock of “blanks” of different products, and when the customer comes to the register, holding the demo copy they picked up off the shelf, the clerk can just fabricate a copy on the spot.

How has running Catbird Records affected your perspective on the current environment for artists?
It’s been incredibly valuable and educating to experience things from a label perspective these last few years. I feel like I’m able to see a lot of things in the music sphere from all sorts of different angles now. I’d say the one big thing that I’ve come to realize in recent times, something that I try to convey to the artists, is that you’re no longer “selling an album.” It’s great to put all your hard work and energy and money, if you’ve got it, into creating an album– but you can’t look at that as the end goal now. It’s not “make an album, then sell the album” anymore, it’s an ongoing, neverending process of simply “being an artist,” and putting out an album is just one small part of the overall thing. And that overall thing includes things like the old stuff, such touring, getting reviews and interviews, and new stuff like communicating with the fans online, posting new songs and videos, keeping a blog, and so on. And whether you decide to commit fully to that, or to just dabble and release albums every once in awhile, one thing is certain: you shouldn’t *expect* to make money from selling your albums. If you do, that’s great– but your primary goal should be to take the long view, and focus on just getting the music to as many people as you can. I mean, isn’t getting your music heard the whole point?

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

Sunburn‘s packaging struck me as extremely utilitarian, with the CD itself serving as its own artwork and liner notes. Ghost Town, by contrast, has a much more abstract approach; was this something you had in mind from the start?
Sunburn‘s whole feel is pretty utilitarian. I tried to make the best looking package I could make without any actual packaging. Just a simple way of getting music to people’s computers/iPods/etc without waste or bullshit.  Fun fact: my friend who released it got several hundred of those used jewel cases from CDs that were being thrown out by Pitchfork.

With Ghost Town I wanted something that represented how busy and bright the album came out.  Shawn Reed’s art always struck me as being its own universe with its own language, and I was shooting for that level of cohesiveness with the album.

How would you describe Ghost Town‘s overall sound in comparison with Sunburn?
Ghost Town is a lot more dense and more purposeful, which is not tosay that I like one better than the other.

At this point, at least three of the members of Parts & Labor also have solo projects. Do you find that having more of a presence for your own music affects your part of the songwriting process for Parts & Labor?
I find that the two processes feed into each other really well.  I have a pretty short attention span, so I’m constantly burning out on either the all-electronics mode, or the rock band mode, and falling back on the other.

Do you view the sample/field recording-based songs of Receivers as a one-off experience, or has this had a permanent effect on the way you conceive music?
I wouldn’t do the same thing for another record, but I would consider some comparable participatory theme for future records.  That collage style has always sounded good to me.  It was really fun getting to hear what people sent and interacting with friends and fans and total strangers in that way.

Besides your work as a musician, you’ve also been involved with releasing music via Cardboard Records; how has that affected your experience of being in a band?
Hmmm… I don’t know that it has. Maybe it’s given me a little bit more sympathy for all of the long running indie labels that are going under these days.