Can you talk a bit about recording with Willie Samuels?
I work in a town called Crockett, which is the home of the C&H sugar factory. A firefighter there went to school with Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. I thought Green Day [recordings] always sounded good, so I tracked down the studio where they recorded their stuff. I once thought you just hired a studio, but it’s not like that, you have to find an engineer. I found Willie Samuels, but he'd moved to a different studio, a top-notch studio, and I thought there was no way I could afford that.
But that's not how it works. We set up a budget, and sometimes you get kicked out. For our album The Golden State, which we also recorded with Samuels, we got kicked out for Lady Gaga. Samuels recorded spoken word with Danny Glover, with Al Gore. He recorded 20-piece salsa band. So we recorded at odd days and times.
I've recorded whole albums at once and didn’t like intensity of recording 14 songs. So we had 6 songs for a session, which was much more relaxed.
Besides he does what he wants. He doesn’t like hand percussion, so on one song he mixed it really low. I know what to expect.
How do you view the interaction between your day job as a paramedic and your life as a kindie musician?
I just celebrated my thirtieth anniversary as a paramedic.
Congratulations!
Thanks, I think. You know, if there was ever a panel at a kids music conference on being a “slacker,” that’s me. I've got to get that balance going between job, and marriage, and music.
I like the stress of my job, which is sick in a way. As a paramedic we’re used to handling very stressful situations. When I was 10, my mom got cancer and passed away when I was 12. And that messed me up a bit as a teenager. I was quiet and didn’t come out of my shell until 15 or 16. I wanted to control the situation more than I could before.
I had a band at 15 and that was a relief. The music thing was much more satisfying. Much later in the Hipwaders, we’d play at children’s hospitals and parents would be crying out of gratitude. Wow, thirty years of being a paramedic, nobody ever cries out of gratitude. The 2 things parts go hand in hand. The job is very clinical.
The performing part of the band has actually helped me. Learning to play to the room, looking around making sure everyone is calm, cracking jokes, making sure everyone is put at ease. It’s almost like a performance too, having to treat a patient.
I imagine a paramedic team is sort of like a band, everyone with their own roles and strengths.
Yeah… I like going to different people’s houses and cultures. The last call I was on had this Middle Eastern war rug hanging -- it's a map of Afghanistan with pictures of guns, artillery. When the Afghans kicked Russians out, they made these rugs -- our military would buy them, so would Afghanis. The call before that was the tackiest house, looked like something from King Louis XIV; it was owned by an elderly Russian couple. To me, that’s always fascinating. Or seeing different religious shrines. Especially in the Bay Area, which is so diverse -- Cambodians, Phillipines, Middle Eastern.
How do you integrate those two parts of your life? I was recently having a discussion online with some kids music folks and talking about how major corporations are selling only Dora the Explorer or Kidz Bop album, but also the huge changes in the recorded music industry make it easier than it's ever been to be a part-time creative.
It’s three parts, actually -- family, job, and creative life. I always have to have a project going -- in between bands in my youth, I might have had a visual arts project. Now it’s just music.
The Dora and Kidz Bop stuff -- I don’t even think about that. That’s a multimedia thing -- TV, merchandise, it all goes together, there’s no way the kindie crowd can get into that. People ask me, "Can you play Frozen?" I say no, it’s just not me. I like Frozen but I really don't like show tunes. I had a partner doing pediatric care, and he was talking about preschool theme shows I don’t know at all.
The band is happy that we can make albums, play shows, and maybe release an occasional video and not use our own money. But I’m really cognizant of maintaining the balance between family and playing shows. We can usually make a day of it as a family. I don’t want to disrupt that balance. If I were offered a two week tour on the East Coast, I'd probably say, “Ahhh, I don’t know” unless they paid us a lot of money.
I’m not big on the PR thing now -- we can’t take time from our day jobs and tour the country. So written press is not that important to us. Being a regional act is fine for me. We can get plenty of bookings; there are a half dozen musical acts and we all get gigs. I'll do it yourself and hope for the best.
You’re not going to get rich, but you’re not going to go broke, either.
Lots of people record, teach music. I’m not sure I could do it every day or every other day as a job. What if I had to teach preschool, would I have to write more preschool songs? That’s not me. Laurie Berkner is really good at it, but a lot of the other preschool songs I hear are insipid. I'm fascinated by people who do it as a job. It's not for me, worrying about [it as] a job. Hopefullly it’s working out well [for them], that they can retire.
