Blues Traveler’s Chan Kinchla – HuffPost 6.27.12

Mike Ragogna: What is your advice for new artists?

Chan Kinchla: Well, I think the most important thing to do is to get good and to get something going. You’ve got to find yourself a place you can play out on a regular basis that kind of becomes your home, your woodshedding home, so you can go out a couple times a month. With us, we played several places in New York City. We’d play Mondays at Nightingale, Tuesdays at another place, Wednesdays another venue, Thursdays at Wetlands, almost every week. It started out in one place. We played Nightingale every Monday night. What happens is, you sit in a studio forever practicing, but once you get it out onstage and you make it a regular thing, you get better, and then you start building a crowd. It becomes a social thing. People want to come down, and your friends come down, and it becomes your fun, cool thing to do. Then once you get that built in and going, all of a sudden, you’ve got something. Then you can get other gigs. But at the same time, you’re really making yourself better because until you play stuff out live and you start getting a crowd, you’re hamstrung.