Trouble Lights’ Adrien Daller & Phil Rabalais – HuffPost 11.9.12

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

Adrien Daller: Be yourself to the bajillionth, gajillionth degree. Completely be yourself. Do it for you. Do what makes you happy, and work insanely hard at that — not spending a lot of energy on other stuff. Do whatever makes you happy and do it in a very hard working capacity.

Phil Rabalais: What has happened to me in that regard is that I have to fight against this feeling I have where I say, “I could just do something that I know will work.” You have to be yourself.

AD: You have to get in touch with that and not be swayed. I’ve definitely done that. I was in England for all of these years, performing for other people, doing what I always wanted to do, and wondering why I was so unhappy doing it. I feel like that’s a neverending process. You don’t just get there and then say, “Now I am myself.” For some people, it’s natural, there is no other choice. But for me, I’m easily swayed by the people that are around, and I can easily adapt to the scene and be pretty content in it, but it’s not real.

MR: So you know how to pull back from it.

AD: Yeah, but it’s a constant thing.

PR: We kind of wrote into the fabric of how we work — we had this long conversation about just how paramount it was to make sure that every decision was coming from us, and to make sure that every decision was accurate to how we wanted to present ourselves.

AD: We like to say, “Follow The Project.” If it feels right to do this, and then this, and then this, that’s what we do.