Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins – HuffPost 4.2.14

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

Sara Watkins: Ah. See a bunch of shows. Go to as many shows as you can and try to invest yourself in a community of players who are lifers and who you can just be with and share life with and play with. It’s important to go to shows but it’s also important to learn other people’s songs. There’s a lot of songwriters who only know their own songs. A lot of my favorite songwriters are also great song collectors and they learn songs they love and there’s this great appreciation. Music is not like a painting where it just exists and that’s it and everyone has to look at that painting to appreciate it. You can learn other peoples’ songs and enjoy it within yourself. Some of my favorite songwriters, Jackson Browne being one of them, Gillian Welch, Willie Nelson, Fiona Apple, all of these people who are very active in music and have been their whole lives are huge song collectors and know a boatload of songs. They know what they love about them and they love them so much that they learn them because they just want to be able to sing them all the time. In learning them you find new ways to appreciate them and you kind of figure out, “Oh, that’s why I love that second part so much,” because it ties in with this other thing that was happening or it sends you in a direction thinking about something that will pay off in the third verse, or the rhyme scheme doesn’t make sense at all but for some reason it just feels so good. I think that is a very important thing for young artists.