Dylan Gardner – HuffPost 5.1.14

Mike Ragogna: Dylan, what advice do you have for new artists?

Dylan Gardner: I studied like a college professor on how to make a second album. So many people put out a first album, and it has all this ambition and all this drive, and the second album is that minus the ambition and drive, and most of the time you can always hear it, and it never follows it up [the first album] in the right way. But the right way to do it is to study what made the first album special, and apply that kind of drive as if the next album is your first. You almost ignore that the first album exists – while keeping in mind that it does – and you can’t alienate everyone, so you have to work on what makes it better. For new artists, I always think if they’re really serious about an album discography and not just singles, it’d be like building your music as a story. You’ve introduced characters to people, the first time they’re meeting them, and it’s like “What are they gonna do next? Where are they gonna go?” They have to go somewhere. But the main thing is to have the same drive and focus that you had during the first album. The other thing was that I never stopped writing the entire time that the album was going on. Writing is like a muscle you have to work out, you can’t stop for a long time and then start again, because it’s going to take you a little while to get going again. I’ve been going nonstop since 2010, which is why I’m able to write so much. So my advice to artists would be just to have that energy and focus and determination, and the work will follow.