Alex Orbison – HuffPost 5.22.14

Mike Ragogna: Alex, what advice do you have for new artists? And what do you think your dad [Roy Orbison] might have had as advice for new artists?

Alex Orbison: I think being a new artist is almost tougher now than it was before. I would say that being able to change with the game is very important, but you have to maintain integrity through that, so that’s a real fine line to be able to do. I know my dad started as a lead guitar player in the middle of the fifties and did that exclusively and then was singing a little bit and then quit and became a songwriter and not a performer until he pitched a song to Elvis Presley and that song was called “Only The Lonely.” Elvis asked my dad if he could come by the next day. It was very late at night so my dad drove all the way to Nashville and cut “Only The Lonely” himself and ended up having the smash hit with that that changed his career forever. That kind of thing is good, to stay malleable but also have integrity and know if your position changes or whatever your creative outlet is or even your instrument or anything, I was a drummer for years and years and I had tried to learn as much as I could about the music industry and it’s really paying off now that I’m taking care of my dad’s stuff. It’s very helpful to know both sides of the coin. My dad’s thing was “Practice, practice, practice.” He told it to me, he told it to Roy Junior and he told it to Wesley. I said, “I’m practicing three or four hours a day,” I was practicing much more than that usually but he would say, “I would do eight hours a day of singing and we would have rehearsals before that,” so my dad was singing as much as twelve hours a day through the fifties and early sixties.

Practice does make perfect and for us that was the only way to get there. So I know that’s what my dad would say because that’s what he told me. I got to the point where I played the drums so much it affected my school performance. So that’s the clear-cut path to doing it: Start with that and get that strong base of really going over stuff. But it’s almost like the stock market; you need to diversify your practice, there’s practice at home where you’re practicing your instrument and your craft and then there’s practice with a band which is rehearsal and preproduction for a record is super, super important. I could hear that through my dad’s stuff, we would work on it before he would record it and really try to figure it out and then practicing the final product and going on the road with it. There’s a lot of practice involved, I think.