The Posies’ Ken Stringfellow & Jon Auer – HuffPost 8.27.14

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

Ken Stringfellow: Wow, this is a question that is frequently asked in interviews and it’s a really tough one, because in a way what Jon and I didn’t know when we started–we’re really small-town geeks, we were just total doofuses in a way, there’s a lot about music we didn’t know. When we started, we didn’t know about Can. I don’t think either of us even had a Velvet Underground record. There were lots of things that were missing from our musical education. We had to figure it out. It could be bad advice, because we could also be talking as former members of The Strokes–insert band that’s actually sold records here–we’re the worst people to ask, but I think that reinventing the wheel as an artist is a great thing. Having to figure it all out, even the stupid stuff–“How do I do a copyright?” There’s also of course tales of people f**king up because of this and signing a bad publishing deal and things like that, that’s not funny and it didn’t happen to us, thank god, but I kind of feel like people have to figure it out.

Jon Auer: That’s like life, you just do things and you figure it out along the way. I think it is good to know as much as you can and try to figure out as much as you can and to really pay attention. I know there’s some things I didn’t pay attention to that I’ve had to learn more about over the course of time.

KS: And don’t let your domain expire.

JA: Yeah, stuff like that! [laughs] Just try to be responsible and not take for granted that things are going to happen a certain way. It’s funny because that’s how we started out. It’s so funny because people have described us as this pop band when grunge was starting to happen in Seattle. We were so against the grain of what could have been considered popular, but because we were more of a band with pop leanings some people would accuse us of being sellouts. I always thought that was funny because we were doing something that was so completely opposite of what was going on then and we were doing it ourselves. We recorded it ourselves, we made these cassettes initially ourselves, we sold them to stores ourselves, the whole thing. Where am I going with this? You should try all that stuff. Now it’s funny because the industry has come back around to that again. You have to do it yourself, you need to be out there promoting yourself, you need to be posting on social media things like this. It’s becoming DIY again. It’s got its ups and its downs, its good points and bad points but in a weird way I think that works for us because we already did that. Now all the labels are becoming independent again and it’s becoming more like that. It’s funny, back then we were doing the same thing, we just didn’t have the internet, so we had to do it in a much more old-school fashion.