Steve Wynn – HuffPost 6.4.14

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

Steve Wynn: I think that the advice is no matter what you hear, what you’ve read, what you think, what people tell you, at the end of the day you’re always right. No matter how crazy your impulse is, no matter how wrong it seems, you’re right. Trust yourself. Do it. You’re going to have to live with it and probably the more people that tell you, “Things don’t work that way,” the more you’re on to something.

MR: Is that how you did it?

SW: In a way. I think that one of the main reasons The Dream Syndicate caught on so quickly is that we were doing something that seemed like the exact opposite of what was going on; we were playing raw, feedback-laden guitar music at a time when everybody wanted to hear synthesizers and wear frilly coats. I think it seemed like the exact wrong thing to do at the time and I think that’s why people liked it. And it wasn’t even calculated like that, it’s a matter of what we wanted to hear. There was a philosophy we had back then that I still hold today: If you’re making music that would be somebody’s favorite record, even your own favorite record, you’re doing okay. If you’re trying to make music because you think, “A lot of people are going to like this, this is what people want to hear these days,” eh, you might make it, you might not, but you’re not going to have a lot of fun. It’s kind of going back to that extreme thing. I think self-indulgent is a good word. I think it’s good to be self-indulgent. It’s good to indulge yourself, when it comes to making music anyway. That’s the idea. Who else are you going to indulge? If you do that, if nothing else you’re going to make one person really happy, and that’s yourself. And maybe, maybe out of millions of people in the world you’re going to make somebody else happy, too.