Devil Wears Prada’s Mike Hranica – HuffPost 11.16.11

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Mike Hranica: It’s really just be honest and express something. Now that I have been here for years and years, I can say that I’ve become more jaded than I’d like to admit. I see these bands and I see their intentions, and it’s absolute garbage. For us, when we started the band, we had something we wanted to say, and we wanted to play every show we could and just get to play the shows, all of the local shows we were already going to, because we loved all of the local bands and (I) have all my favorites. I would see them every weekend…I would drive an hour or two every weekend. We just wanted to play those shows and we wanted to make music too. We did that and it was never about trying to do Warped Tour or have as many Twitter followers as possible or become these empty false celebrities. That’s really what I see in young bands now is that it’s always about taking photos and trying to come up with an internet presence before writing good songs. It’s something very easy to fall into.

I’m not trying to say that we had the most perfect intentions; we made mistakes when we were young. The way I word it is that if you come up with the band and it sells a thousand records and you never get to tour full time, if you can be proud of those songs and you feel that those songs mean something to you and express who you are, then that is way better than selling 50,000 records under lies and music without any purpose, reason, or true content. I try to explain that to young fans and people wanting to picking up guitars or start playing in a band. Just remember that it is music, and music is not a look, it’s expression and it’s art, which is even hard to say nowadays, because I think the music scene has raped all art out of music. But that’s a whole different story and I could rant about this all day.