Glen Phillips – HuffPost 4.25.14

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

Glen Phillips: Lord, I have no idea. Make something you really care about and keep your options open. You never know where you’ll end up. It’s a strange era right now, right? The labels can’t invest as broadly as they used to. I actually tell a lot of singer-songwriters that if they want to follow in my career path, what they want to do is make it to a time machine and get signed in the nineties when the labels had a ton of money and were investing in career development. These days, you’ve got to do it all yourself. You’ve got to know how to record and mix a record, you’ve got to know how to take care of your own artwork and your own website and your own social media and you’ve got to do it. There’s this dream people walk around with that they’re going to be “discovered” and everything’s going to happen to them. Maybe it’ll happen to somebody somewhere, but basically, you’ve just got to work your butt off and learn every job you can possibly learn because you’ll have to do them all and that’s kind of the way it works now.

If you talk to new bands, they’ve got one guy who designs the merch, another guy who does the website, everybody’s pulling three or four jobs, everybody’s working really hard and hopefully you choose people you love and you want to work really hard with. But my impression is more and more like that these days. Same as it used to be, every once in a while, maybe you’ll get a placement in the movie that makes everybody know who you are. It comes down to equal thirds: doing good music, working really hard, and then just being ridiculously lucky. Or maybe it’s like twenty-five, twenty-five, fifty, with fifty percent on the luck end. You’ve still got to get lucky. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, but if you’re not working and the music isn’t good, the luck won’t matter either.