Pink Martini’s Thomas Lauderdale – HuffPost 12.10.10

Mike Ragogna: Tom, what advice you have for new artists, oh international cavalier artist that you are?

Thomas Lauderdale: Well, I would say be prepared to be broke for a decade, say yes to everything, work with people who are better than you, be sure to go to lessons occasionally just to brush up and make sure that you’re not becoming a sloppy bohemian. What else? Don’t assume that people are going to come to you, go to them. Like when the band first started, I realized that there was a whole sort of patron and matron set that would never go to a rock club, so I would take Pink Martini and set up in the dining hall in the fanciest restaurant in town at the time, Zephyro on Saturday night at midnight, and we’d do late night lounges in this fancy restaurant and play for all the patrons and matrons of Portland. That was very helpful, actually, just in terms of reaching a broader audience. So I think you have to be sort of inventive about how to reach people. Everybody thinks that somehow they’re going to become rockstars overnight. I don’t know why anybody would want to be a rockstar overnight. There seems to be very little loyalty from moment to moment. Our crowd is a different crowd than the pop crowd. I have a feeling that Lady Gaga in three years will be nowhere. She’ll be playing casinos. Not really, but you know what I mean? It’s all so fleeting these days. I think that it’s a good idea to have a strong base, an intensely loyal fan base. It’s the NPR crowd, the Starbucks crowd, but not just those crowds. We’re popular with both camps of Texas, the really conservative people and the very liberal people. If there’s nobody else in between, we don’t worry about that. [laughs] And we’re popular in Utah! I think what I like about the fans and what I would advise is this, “How accessible is it to people?” I think at this point, this culture could use as much music as it possibly could and can stand because we need to have these tiny moments of joy amidst a world of suffering. More people are broke and more people are hurting. It’s kind of a ridiculous culture right now.