Jon Tiven, Plus Sally Tiven and Kent Agee – HuffPost 9.19.12

Mike Ragogna: Hey, what is your advice for new artists?

Jon Tiven: My advice to new artists is keep writing and writing, keep getting those creative thoughts out there, write all the songs that are in you because you’ve got to write the bad songs as well as the good ones. Number one. If you don’t get the creative energy out of your system, it manifests anxiety. It’s better that you write the song than you have the anxiety stuck in your system. You’ve got creative energy running around your system and you can’t figure out what it is. If you’re feeling anxious and you’re feeling this confusion, you’ve got to write a song. You’ve got to get that out of your system. Put that to productive use.

MR: Sally, what is your advice to new artists?

Sally Tiven: My advice to new artists is have parents that can pay your rent for a few years. Give it a shot for a few years if you can afford to. It’s a great lifestyle if you can do it.

JT: Yes, but making money at it is very difficult in particular these days. It’s really difficult to be able to monetize anything that involves intellectual content because it’s so easily purloined by people on the web with nimble fingers. We have to do art for art’s sake as much as possible and hope that there will be some sort of sponsorship for us to do it. You can’t necessarily think there will be a record label that’s going to be able to do it. I mean, I’ve had a lot of help from the Jack Daniels people. They’ve hired me to be their musical director and MC for their birthday party at the distillery, so I’ve been subsidized by them. I’ve been able to employ people like Steve Cropper, David Hood, Spooner Oldham and Reggie Young to be in my band. We ended up backing Patti Smith, Warpaint, Plan B, Carl Barat, Juliette Lewis and a lot of artists who, otherwise, I wouldn’t be interacting with. It started out as a lark and now it’s been a very integral part of my music career. It’s not something that I sought out; it just fell into my lap thanks to Frank Black who performed the first year I did it. They film these things every year and show them on British television. I’ve done 5 different years, and they basically put the singers together and leave it to me to back them up.

MR: Kent, what is your advice for new artists?

Kent Agee: You know, it’s all changed so much since I was a new artist. Partly, now, there’s a beauty to it… there’s so much more that you can do by yourself, with the internet and home recording studios. A co-writer of mine and I, just a couple of months ago, finished writing a song in the morning, recorded in his house that afternoon, and I shot a video of him playing the song. We uploaded it to the computer that night. The new model to me for the young artist that I know is that it’s not about record labels anymore. The guys that I know who are doing it and touring who have the ability to tour like that are out in a van or a bus, they’re creating a fan base of ten-thousand people who they can talk into buying 20 dollars worth of merchandise a year — that’s $200,000 straight to them without a label. The beauty with that is that you can do so much yourself, but I think we’ve lost something, that cultural experience of music coming at you like it did when we were younger. It’s not like there is this niche like, “Oh, you’ve got to hear this new band Department of Eagles, they’re incredible,” and they are by the way. But you know, it used to come at you. It was a huge cultural experience that only a large record label could do. It’s sad that’s gone.

JT: You don’t have the repetitive play anymore because there’s so much and there’s so little of it that is really directed. Okay, like if the next Beatles came along, would we know?

KA: They may be there right now.

MR: Yeah, I think they were called U2.

JT: I would really encourage young artists to seek out people who are really better than you to write with.

KA: Absolutely.

JT: That was the thing that helped me the most. Working with Don Covay, Keith Reid, and Jim Carroll really made me get my act together. When you’re writing with someone that serious about what they do — and that gifted — and know so much more, you get a lot by osmosis and you do get a lot of knowledge even when they’re not teaching you because you’re around someone who’s learned how to do it. There are a lot of lessons that you will never learn anywhere except from people who are at that level.