Macy Gray – HuffPost 10.27.12

Mike Ragogna: So what is your advice for new artists?

Macy Gray: For new artists? Like as far as what?

MR: Like as far as people who want to be on American Idol and maybe other talented folks who are out there doing it right now.

MG: Okay, I would suggest, not advice because I don’t like to give people advice because I could be wrong, but I think the best way to do it is to lock yourself up at first and really master your craft until you get good at what you do to the point where you’re sure of yourself and you’re confident about what you do. If you’re a singer, you should be taking really good care of your voice, you should be hanging out with a coach once or twice a week, you should sing every single day as much as you can and then when you’ve got it down and you listen back to yourself and you love it, then you go out. And once you go out you go out as much as you can. If someone says, “Come here and play on top of my toothpick, two people are going to show up,” you’ve got to do it because you never know who the two people are. That’s what I did anyway. I played every night and then a guy from Atlantic Records just happened to be there and that’s how I got my first record deal. All those guys, all those industry guys, go out every night looking for people, because that’s their job. So I would just say get out there as much as you can and of course, this generation has the blessing of the internet, of Twitter and Youtube, so I would get very good at that. There’s a lot of indie artists that show up number one on iTunes now because they’re so diligent about their internet presence. It’s possible, there’s all kinds of avenues in you. There’s all kinds of different ways to get there. I would just use all of them until you get what you want.