John Gorka – HuffPost 3.31.14

Mike Ragogna: What is your advice for new artists?

John Gorka: I was focused on my songs and the live show, but I’m kind of learning from new artists how they do it. It’s harder now. With Red House and Windham Hill, I was able to reach a large group of people all at the same time, so I was able to have a base to build on. For new people… Some people are great at doing the online YouTube videos and stuff like that. Antje Duvekot is one of those people. She’s kind of a next generation after me, and she’s able to do YouTube videos, she recently did an animation where she drew all of the backgrounds and created this very low-tech animation using her iPhone. The track that she recorded sounded like a record and she sang that on GarageBand through her computer. So I think the main thing is to concentrate on good material. My general philosophy is high standards, low overhead, realistic expectations. So don’t put out a record until you feel like you’ve done the best you could. Don’t put out stuff just to put it out. There’s a line in Suze Rotolo’s book about Greenwich Village growing up in the late fifties and early sixties; she was Bob Dylan’s girlfriend for a while, she was on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album, she said, “The difference between then and now is we had something to say, not something to sell.” I thought that was great. The main thing is to have something to say first and then do your best to make it as easy as possible for the world to find you. There’s a lot you can do on the internet now. I was just reading a story in a guitar magazine about an acoustic guitarist who put up YouTube videos and became very well-known, so I think that would be a good way to go. Other than that, for the acoustic singer-songwriter a few of these festivals have emerging artist showcases and contests. The Kerrville Folk Festival has that, in Kerrville, Texas, the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival has that in Colorado, the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in New York State, there are all these places you can send stuff to and then if they like it you can come and play those songs. Other than that, the thing is it’s a very different world from when I started, there were record companies and record stores and ways of reaching a large block of people in a short amount of time. Now everything’s very fragmented and it’s difficult to get known. You can make a lot of music on your own, you can make records and potentially reach a huge number of people, but since everything is kind of fragmented and compartmentalized it’s difficult to reach that critical mass of people. That’s where record companies still have a role. Red House still does what they do better than I could ever do, so I’m glad to be able to work with people who care about the music and know how to get the word out.