Band People is part music writing and part business book, rounded out by academic research and a host of footnotes. It's a pragmatic look at the life of road warriors in an increasingly untenable industry. More than anything, however, it's a labor of love from lifelong touring musician, Franz Nicolay.
Franz Nicolay 0:12
Yeah, I mean, a footnote is a nice place to put something that doesn't quite merit a parenthetical, right, but that's or to put a little easter egg of information for those interested. I mean, I, if it was up to me, I would have put those sorts of notes as end notes at the bottom of the page and put the citations in the in the back. But the press style sheet insisted that they not only that all the citations needed to be restated, but that the but that all those notes needed to be in the back and together. So yeah, bonus for for those interested in flipping back and forth
Brian Heater 0:57
is that format a product of working effectively with an Academic Press. Yeah.
Franz Nicolay 1:02
I mean, my role with with University of Texas and and the way, particularly their American music series, operates, is that it's an Academic Press, but it's also sort of public facing in terms of the
subject material and the way that it's packaged. But it does have to follow the certain style sheets, and it didn't have to go through a kind of peer review. I
Brian Heater 1:30
noticed that just really early on into the reading that it does take a very academic approach to a lot of the subject matter, in terms of citations, and and really the way it's written, and I'm kind of curious if you were thinking of this at all, obviously, the blurbs, you know, you've got kosterman, but then you've got Sadie from speedy Ortiz, it this seems like it's really firmly targeted at touring musicians. Is that a fair assumption?
Franz Nicolay 2:01
I think that that's the audience that I want to think that I did a good job, if that makes sense, your peers, to my previous book, The novel someone should pay for your pain, which is about a touring musician. Obviously, you want to reach as broad an audience as possible, but you want the approval of the people who know the material the best. Want them to feel like I want them to feel like I captured it accurately. I like getting those, those text messages from them, privately saying, Hey, I just finished your book, and you nailed it. Yeah,
Brian Heater 2:41
it's funny, actually, with some of the quotes, I won't call any out specifically, but there's a few in there. It's like, Oh, you, I think you were able to, because of your approach in the subject matter, were able to get some things out of these people, like, there's a lot of like, oh, so and so wasn't great to work with, and things like that that maybe they wouldn't necessarily say in a standard interview,
Franz Nicolay 3:01
I think that's possible. Yeah, probable. You know, there's after you, especially after you've been doing it for a while. There are you approach talking to journalists in a slightly careful way, even a very sympathetic journalist, in a way that you might not to a fellow practitioner. And also, I would say, and I think I say this in the in the introduction, that a lot of the people that I'm talking to for this book are not used to being interviewed, and so they may not have the some of those defensive shields up, and probably have a lot of stories that they've been waiting for someone to ask them about for many years.
Brian Heater 3:46
I was considering that, especially given all of these different roles that you've filled over the years. You know, obviously I would say primarily it's you are one of the band people discussed in the book, but you've released solo records, you've, you've, you've written multiple books. Where do you kind of lie on that spectrum of giving interviews,
Franz Nicolay 4:12
somewhere in between, right? I'm not the primary interview for the whole study, for example, right? People, by and large, want to talk to Craig, and secondarily to Ted. I'm the primary interview for my books and solo records to the extent that anyone's interested in talking about them. I, you know, and the secondary interview for for the whole study, right in the in the old days, if, there was, like a college paper or something that this that Craig didn't want to deal with. So I feel like I'm pretty well practiced at talking. I don't feel like I have not as good as some of the people who do it all the time. I. Yeah, but I don't, I guess I don't. I don't have a slick answer to that,
Brian Heater 5:03
no, well, which is good, but
Franz Nicolay 5:06
I'm not. I've been on all sides of it. I
Brian Heater 5:09
partially ask, and I'm partially interested in this, because obviously the vast majority of my role in this relationship is the interviewer and not the interviewee. And I'm kind of curious what, what will practice means in this context? Well,
Franz Nicolay 5:25
I should add, I should add that I've also been on the other side of it, right? I did the interviews for these books. I've hosted a couple, you know, I've done some podcast interviews, you know, I've, I I've done some book events with people. So I'm also, and, you know, I've reviewed things over the so I'm I'm also used to what it feels like of being on the other side of the of the thing and trying to maybe draw something out of someone that either that maybe they haven't thought about their own work or aren't comfortable talking about their own work. What does well practiced mean? I mean, I think when you're really good at it, you know, and I've seen some band leaders that I work with who are really good at it, you have a ready answer for just about every question you're going to be asked, because you've been interviewed so many times, because people tend to have the same questions about you, you have a pretty slick, and I don't mean that pejoratively, but you have a pretty ready answer for things, and you're pretty have a pretty good sense of what you should say and what you shouldn't say. And I have that to some extent, but I know that I've certainly got out of, out of many interviews, thinking I shouldn't have said that, or I should have said that differently. Maybe that's just a personality.
Brian Heater 6:48
I think to a certain extent, it absolutely is. But, I mean, I would say, and I don't know if you feel this way as well, but I think the middle ground is actually that's, that's a spot like, that's a good spot to interview somebody, somebody who knows enough not to just give yes or no questions. But there's a level of slickness and pre rehearsed Ness that I think can be can actually like work against getting a information out of someone Sure.
Franz Nicolay 7:21
Well, getting information out of someone is not always the goal from, from that person's point of view, right? A lot of cases, they just want to get through it. I
Brian Heater 7:29
actually said that someone a few years ago, you know, at the end of the at the end of he was like, Oh, this is really good conversation. You know, I don't often have good conversations. And I said, Well, you know, I suspect that most of the people who do this for a living, like you're their fifth interview this week, and they didn't have time to sit down and listen to everything. And you know, and you know, to certain degree, certain parts of this book are testament that even the best jobs in the world at some point their jobs. Yeah, I
Franz Nicolay 7:59
think that's one of the main points that the book wants to make. Is to is to think about, especially in the 21st century, the band as a workplace and band members as workplace colleagues. Because these are, you know, we're in it. We're in a time now where the assumption isn't that a band is going to break up after 50 after five years, and that you know, a band of at a reasonable level can continue well into the band members, 40s, 50s and beyond, right? So these are long term relationships, their business relationships, their creative relationships, their personal relationships. So in a way, they're even more intimate than the relationships you have with a workplace colleague. On the other hand, those days of huge waves of money crashing over a band that can enable certain tendencies, but also shield good and bad, good and bad, but also shield bands from, you know, having to deal with some of the more mundane aspects of their relationships with each other. Those are gone. And so you really do have these. You know, there is an aspect of being in a mid level band for a decade or more that is a little bit like the office the TV show, where you know you're having meetings with various management figures, and you know you're looking over, you're trying to meet various budgets, and you're looking over various, you know, ticket sales figures and so on, while also trying to have these creative relationships and try to, you know, keep your songwriting and habits from falling into, you know, deep grooves and to sort of maintain your your personal relationships in a, in a, in a non destructive way. And I find all that really fascinating. And that's the sort of thing, you know, there is a romantic aspect, of course, the way people think about bands that I think prevents and the incentives of music journalism, to the extent that, extent that it still exists, which are very tight around album releases. And so the conversations that tend to get had about bands are between a journalist and the band leader slash front person about the new record, you know, and you have 20 to 30 minutes to talk about it. So these conversations about the long term trajectory of band relationships tend not to be had because they're pretty down, far down the list of priorities, of why the conversation is happening in the first place. Do
Brian Heater 10:48
you feel that the pragmatic conversation and the romantic conversation are necessarily in conflict with one another? They're
Franz Nicolay 10:54
absolutely not. They're absolutely not. And I think bad people from the from the inside, understand that, and they, because they, most people who get into this life are get into it out of a kind of idealism. They want to be part of this gang, feeling right. I think a couple people say that in the book, like, if you wanted to be a hired gun session Pro, that you wouldn't get involved with being a band member. You'd be very sort of, you'd, you'd, you'd, you'd always know what you charge and you'd go to the highest bidder, and you'd sort of leap frog around from these various gigs. But the people who become band people, even those of us who are trained musicians, do that because we have this romantic idea of being a part of something, of being a part of that, that gang feeling, that family feeling, but also that sort of whatever magic that is about creative collaboration. Now some of that romanticism gets burned off in the early years, and sometimes bands don't survive that. But the ones that do have a deep understanding of the fact that that core idealism is still there, even as you grow into a more mature understanding of the situation you find yourself in. You know it's funny
Brian Heater 12:16
that I think that only time you and I have spoken in person was I went to one of your solo shows. I want to say it was during CMJ. I'm not sure if those timelines, oh gosh, line up. So obviously a number of years ago, because CMJ has not been a thing in some time. But I remember we spent the majority of our conversation talking about TV Smith. I
Franz Nicolay 12:40
love TV Smith. He was a really inspirational, yeah,
Brian Heater 12:44
yeah. And specifically, you know, and I didn't know any of this, but specifically around his touring and that devoted fanbase, like an extremely devoted fan base that he has, and it sounds like he's an example. Obviously, you know, touring solo and touring in a band are very different things in a lot of ways, but he's maybe one of those people who has done a good job of maintaining some of that romanticism while being able to still have a lengthy career.
Franz Nicolay 13:16
I mean, I think so. Part of that is, I think there must be, on some level, an aspect of feeding the expectations of his core fan base, who tend who are, you know, by and large, people who are into, you know, 1977 UK poke. And so he has this obligation to them, on some level, to be wearing, you know, ripped bondage pants and a tank top as a 70 year old. But what I was impressed with by him, and the context, was in the early 2000s I was in a group called World Inferno Friendship Society, which is sort of a Northeast Regional cult punk band, and we did a 10 day tour with TV Smith, opening, opening for him. And he was driving around with his manager, doing an acoustic set. We were a nine piece band, but we would open for him, and he would get up with his acoustic guitar and do and do his thing. And he was at that point, you know, probably what seemed to me quite, quite a veteran at that point. I guess he was probably in his 50s, which doesn't seem quite so old to me anymore, but to see a guy like that at that stage in his career, who's, you know, in in his in his world, you know, kind of a legend, and that you could do a tour like that, where you drove around in a compact car with your acoustic guitar and got up and played your songs, and that that seemed to be a manageable kind of living, even while watching him, you know, play to quite small crowds, or, you know, in a basement Show in, you know, Allston mass with a broken microphone on. On the floor, you know, for, you know, essentially a DIY punk crowd, just to think about like this must be difficult for him on some level, but he's doing it with a kind of dignity. And this is the life, you know, once you're 20 or 30 years into this thing, and I've thought I have had the opportunity since then to tour with other people in similar situations, maybe I'm in a similar situation myself now, and to look at how these kinds of people carried themselves. I mean, he's a slightly different kind of case than the cut, then who I'm talking about in band people, because he's the front person the adverts. He was the primary songwriter. Songwriter, he but it is that sense of like a career in music, how it relates to the dignity of work, because people do have a tendency, some people do have a tendency to approach performers the same way they approach professional athletes, with the sense that these are careers that other people dream about having, And so for eat, for any of those principles, to express any sort of reservations about those careers, or express some of the difficulties of those careers can be hard for people to hear or they resent hearing it, but those questions of the dignity of that kind of work do exist. And of course, them, you know, professional athletes make a make a lot of money, even if they don't, for those who only make it for a couple of years, relative to musicians, especially these days, you know, a reasonably successful mid level indie rock, uh, a financial situation is middle class at best, and so I think those of us in that situation appreciate the opportunity to talk about what That's like, independent of what people's ideas are, of what that's like,
Brian Heater 17:23
I fully understand that I'm able to do certain things for my job that obviously I have to take stock of and and consider myself lucky that, like you know, for example, to have been able to be a professional writer, and that the only people that you can really complain to are other writers. And it strikes me that, in a very real way, this book could have only been written by a professional musician. Yeah,
Franz Nicolay 17:50
I think it has to have been for all the reasons that we're talking about. To talk about things like getting bored with your set on stage, right is something that every musician has experienced. Very few fans want to hear about.
Brian Heater 18:09
It's heartbreaking if you know your favorite band says that. But the point,
Franz Nicolay 18:13
the point being that like even if you love your job, not every day is you know you're exploding with 110% joy, some days you're just not there mentally, but that you can you you much like, you know, a theater actor, right? Broadway theater actors have to do the same show eight times a week, right? Twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays, which is a lot of repetition. I have a friend who's in a Broadway pit band, where the and the pit band had is in a similar situation, but since they're usually out of sight, they can, you know, do the New York Times crosswords when they're not playing. Unfortunately, this show that my friend is on, the band is on stage, and that can be really difficult because they're not the center of attention. But they also have to not look bored because they're physically on stage. You know, for a rock band, you are, to some extent, the center of attention, although not necessarily that. Usually people are watching the front person, you know, and you but you acquire some of those tricks that an actor has of acting you know, as if you know what you you know what it looks like to express joy and connection physically, and you can do that even if you're not feeling it.
Brian Heater 19:27
I'm always curious what that breaking point is for people, because obviously at a certain point for some people, there's a whole financial conversation which we can get into. But at a certain point for some people, I think the joy is just completely gone, and perhaps a lot of people stay in it for as long as they do. Because, you know, this is one of the few jobs in the world that you can not few, but this is a job that so many people who do it. Have Been doing it since they were 17, and they just don't really know anything else.
Franz Nicolay 20:07
I mean, I don't think, I don't think you lose the joy of playing. I think, you know, I assume you get tired of certain if you're fortunate, slash, unfortunate enough to have one or two big hits that you have to play every night. I suspect that those get a little tiresome. And, you know, I appreciate the bands that are able to play with those you know, people talk about going to see Bob Dylan and they can't recognize any of the songs like, well, it's probably more fun for him, you know, or like Counting Crows, who will play Mr. Jones, but they'll play it in they'll rearrange it all the time. You know,
Brian Heater 20:47
it's so funny to go to show and be like, well, at least the band had
Franz Nicolay 20:51
fun. I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. I
Brian Heater 20:55
know they're not, but I've certainly had that experience before where you're like, Ah, well,
Franz Nicolay 20:58
I think here's the thing so so to when I asked this question in the book, everyone acknowledged, yeah, absolutely. Sometimes, you know, especially if you're, you know, a hired gun on a tour for someone else, where the set list is relatively unchanging, you try to sort of play mental games with yourself and try to figure out, you know, what little feel Can I add into this song, or what can I do differently? Or how can I really perfect? You know, I one of the things that we talked about in the book is this, is this dichotomy between the artist and the artisan, right? This so this sense that sometimes, if you're a support musician, it's helpful to think of yourself as a craftsperson, like as a carpenter who's in the job of making the same table over and over again, and it's a sturdy table, and it's not a flashy table, but you you improve the joinery every time you make the table, you know, and that table will please the people who receive the table, and they can, you know, Eat dinner at it for 20 years. So there can be that aspect of it as sort of like a guild pride in the worksmanship of reproducing the song. I
Brian Heater 22:11
couldn't tell you who you were interviewing off the top my head, but there is a quote from one of the drummers, where he's talking about working with a front man who is, like, notoriously stringent in in what he wants out of the song, and and, yeah, and that, but that, there is a way to give that person exactly what they want, but still find your place within that template. Yeah. I
Franz Nicolay 22:44
mean, that that was one of the other questions is, to what extent musicians who are primarily support musicians feel like it's their they do they want to, as the cliche goes, serve the song, or do they want to put their stamp on it, like, how identifiable do they want their particular idiolect, their their own sort of musical signature to be? And people have various answers. Some, you know, sometimes that goes down to what kind of musician they perceive themselves to be. You know, there are certain musicians that you call because you want their particular flavor, and they're not the kind of chameleon who can, you know, be a punk drummer on one song and, you know, a Steely Dan drummer on another song, depending on what people are looking for. You know, like Lori barbero from Babes in Toyland, she does the one thing she does. She's the only person who can give you that thing if you want that thing you call Loy barbero, right? But I think the idea is, for a lot, in a lot of these cases, you know, if you're hired to come in and fulfill someone's vision, particularly a songwriters vision, you want to give them what they want. You know, no one's no one wants to, you know, try to, like, nudge someone, elbow someone, violently out of the spotlight, right? You know why you're there, but you also want to be treated as a an actor in your own right, right, as someone who has this, a pride and a dignity in what they do. And so when people in the book are talking about things they don't appreciate out of band leaders, a lot of it, a lot of it is about respect. It's a lot of it is about, you know, don't give me the look of death when I screw up or, you know, don't act like I'm interchangeable, or that I'm a robot, you know, machine who can pump out exactly the part you're looking for and and if I haven't gotten it in two takes, then we need to get the next guy in, because you're having trouble communicating what it is you're looking for. For example.
Brian Heater 24:59
So I recently spoke with Mike Campbell, and I wish that I had read this book prior to because, you know, although you weren't able to talk to him for the book, like there's a lot of interesting insights, and he's I
Franz Nicolay 25:12
actually met him after the book was already in print. I kind of wish the timing had worked out a little better, because he and the petty band are one of those bands that other rock bands are super fascinated with about the higher everyone's an
Brian Heater 25:27
archetype, basically, right? And he and he, he is a particularly interesting one, and maybe, maybe the least archetypical in the sense that, you know, that he, he was, he's a songwriter in his own right. He's a singer in his own right. He says, he sings and writes songs remarkably like Tom Petty. I should say he sounds quite a bit like him, but, but, you know, they, they sort of started in, I guess it must have been the mud crutch days of being, you know, kind of on equal footing. And then, you know, Tom comes in, and it's clear that, like, all right, well, you know, I'm not going to compete with Tom Petty, but he, he Campbell, occupies an interesting position in that he, he almost like, willingly made that transition, he seemed like somebody who would have been totally comfortable being out front, and obviously he's doing that now, but was willing to, you know, become that guy, yeah, the
Franz Nicolay 26:33
consiglieri, it would be really interesting to have to talk to him at length about about that transition, because I think It must have been difficult on some level, although he has never once said that it was. And of course, some people, by their very personality, are well suited to that kind of role. And he did have all these other outlets as a songwriter, right with, with Don Henley and and others. And has been, you know, really taken it upon himself to sort of be the keeper of the petty legacy, right? He, he has Steve Ferroni in his band, and they keep a bunch of the petty crew working, working for him. But there are these people, yeah, like James Bowman with Laura, Jane Grayson against me. You know, you can come up with other John de Domenici, with with Jeff Rosenstock. They have these long relationships of just of being the loyal Lieutenant. And that's a that's also a very fascinating space to be. I think it gets more fraught if you have your if you have your own creative ambitions, and maybe that's why Campbell is such an interesting case. I think I mentioned somewhere in the book this, this other book that's written by Stuart David, the original bass player in balance Sebastian, this lovely little book called in the all night Cafe, which is his memoir of the early years of Don Sebastian, which is so fascinating because it's the story of someone who's a pretty good songwriter and thinks of himself as a pretty good songwriter and has ambitions to be a songwriter in his own right, but discovers that he's in a band with a genius And and has to come to come to some kind of accommodation with that. And in the end, he leaves the band. He can't come to accommodate, you know, he's the, he's the path not taken, of the Mike Campbell, of the of the Mike Campbell path, and reinvents himself, you know, he puts out a couple more records, but ultimately reinvents himself as a prose writer. And I find that absolutely fascinating,
Brian Heater 28:43
if I remember the quote correctly, I think he also still manages to get a bit of a dig in on the other Stewart songwriting,
Franz Nicolay 28:51
not his, not his songwriting. I think he, he's he's quite generous about it, admitting that that Murdoch is a, is a, is a more ambitious and more talented songwriter than him. It's about his prose style. You know, he's, he's sort of Stuart David has gone and remade himself as a writer, and he feels like, I think he feels like that's his territory. And so he includes a very subtle dig on Murdoch's prose, prose writing, which
Brian Heater 29:19
is funny, because I think he actually has a book coming out next year, so that'll be Yeah, I'm
Franz Nicolay 29:24
sure, yeah, yeah.
Brian Heater 29:26
I'm curious about your how all of this applies to you when you're working in the hold steady, because you have co writing credits on a lot of songs with Craig, and I assume that that changes your relationship to the songs that you're playing. Yeah,
Franz Nicolay 29:44
it's, it's less about the specific songs. You know, I don't go through the set being like, Oh, this is a tad song, this is a Franz song, this is a Steve song, and numerate, nothing like that. But I did want, if I was gonna, you know. So in especially in those in the aughts when I was playing in multiple bands, some of which I had more buy in creatively than others, the whole study was asking more of my time, and in fact, exclusivity over my time. And so the question for me was, am I willing to give that exclusivity and give up all these other creative outlets in exchange for an outlet in which it seemed like there was a primary songwriting pair that I wasn't going to be a part of, and that was, you know, there were many things that went into why I left the band the first time, but that was, that was part of it. That was part of it, you know, I didn't want to feel like the George Harrison character, you know, sort of like with my nose pressed up against the glass. And I returned to a band in which now there are four songwriters, and there's a lot of creative buy in for everybody. And I think that there's a variety of reasons for that, including, you know, a more relaxed, added, you know, there's just not as much pressure on the whole study at this point. In terms of people's expectations, we sort of are where we are in the in the in the in the musical universe, and so we can play around a little more with different styles and in different, you know, bringing in all kinds of music and putting it through the whole steady filter and seeing what comes out. But it is a much more comfortable position for me to be in, in the long term relationship, if I'm going to have some kind of creative buy in? Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's, that's just a part of my own personality that separates me from some of these other people who have less they don't. That's less of an issue for them. That's
Brian Heater 31:56
an interesting case of, obviously, it's not, you know, you talk about like purely democratic bands, and the whole study isn't purely democratic in that sense, but, but that it's that it's sort of transitioned into something more akin to, as you said, a situation where everyone has a stake in it. I I don't think you mentioned this in the book, but I always think of of credence as the example of the band with the front guy, songwriter, everyone in the band decides, oh, you know, we all want to write songs too. Or Fogarty may have even forced them to write songs in a democracy, and then just a terrible album came came out of that. So, so it's really a, it's a, it's a good position to be in, in the case of the whole city, where it has become more democratic, but like, everybody does a good job at it. Yeah, I
Franz Nicolay 32:54
don't think it would be like this if the songs that Steve and I were writing, for example, didn't become core parts of the set, right? If they weren't working, the the the that that arrangement wouldn't work, but, but they do, and it does. You know, the extreme example is which I wasn't aware of before I spoke to him, but Bill Stevenson talking about the descendants, saying that they require each band member to come in with four songs for each record. So I remember that
Brian Heater 33:25
quote specifically. He says, if you talk to the average descendants fan and ask them who writes all the songs, they'll say, Milo, yeah,
Franz Nicolay 33:33
yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's the obvious, sort of naive understanding of how bands work, you know. And then in in both of the bands that I've been in that a member of where there was a prominent front person, so world Inferno with Jack cherry cloth and hold steady with Craig Finn, you will meet people who believe that Jack and Craig wrote all the music and all the lyrics for both bands in which, well, in fact, what defined both bands, and what differentiates the hold steady from Craig solo records, is that he doesn't write the music. Doesn't write the music for the hold steady. But you know, credit and that one to turn it back around, though, one of the one of the benefits of being a support person is that, well, you know, credit may accrue to a front person. Blame also accrues to front to a front person, right? And if it's much harder for a front person to separate themselves from from a sound that they've become associated with than it is for a support musician, you know, I can go off and play accordion music or Balkan music or, you know, do dance soundtracks in a way that it's much more difficult, I think for for Craig to do, he's
Brian Heater 34:41
a case of somebody who his lyric writing is like so tied to the band's identity that it's that it's hard to imagine that side of things being more collaborative. It's
Franz Nicolay 34:53
not. It's not the lyrics are all hidden Absolutely, yeah. Uh, we all, I, you know, I've always maintained that that's a that's a freedom too, that what he does lyrically and vocally is so distinctive that that gives us a kind of freedom to do almost anything that we want to behind it, behind him, because it will still, to the average ear, sound like the hold steady. You know, people's associations with a, with a with a the sound of a singer are so strong, you know, I can, I'll occasionally read reviews of our records when they come out, and you get, you get two kinds of people reacting to hold steady records. And sometimes I think we should get them in a room together, because they can't both be right. The ones who are like they make the same record over and over again, and the ones who whose complaint is they've strayed too far from the sound that made them great. It's like you You literally cannot both be correct. But I think the people who think that you know we're writing the same song over and over again are simply reacting to the fact that a man's voice sounds like a man's voice, and if you recognize that voice, then that's it's literally, it's the same person singing. I don't know what to tell you. I think if you're interested in someone's artistic develop as an artist, you should be interested in their artistic development and not ask of them to keep doing the same thing over and over again, and sometimes, when I read people talking about our band or another band, saying like, you know, they're never going to do anything as good as whatever, whatever was the first record they heard as a young person. You know, what they're really saying is they will not be able to make me feel young again. And that is true, we cannot do that.
Brian Heater 36:41
I think the most interesting thing that came out of my, as I said, recent reading of the footnotes, and it really, it really struck me, because I'm sure that this is, to a certain extent, a universal experience, or at least a universal experience within the people you describe in this book, is that reading stories about you leaving a whole city was like reading Roman obituary.
Franz Nicolay 37:06
Yeah, that was my experience on that day when the news became public. Is that people were putting up any you know, this was in a heyday of music blogs too. It was if it was this, as if I had announced my death. And from my point of view, it's like, well, yeah, I have all this other stuff. I'm gonna go, do you know which is interesting to me and maybe to you as well. I
Brian Heater 37:30
know this is in the book, but you know, for people who haven't read it, or at least haven't read read the footnotes.
Franz Nicolay 37:37
What the lesson here is, read the footnotes, yeah, gold in those hills.
Brian Heater 37:43
Have you never read Infinite Jest before,
Franz Nicolay 37:46
or pale fire?
Brian Heater 37:47
What did you mean when you wrote that? It felt like your your own obituary. What was it about those pieces that was so kind of Stark for you
Franz Nicolay 37:56
that that that people writing them, the summary quality of them. It's like, well, now we, I guess we can look back on the what this person brought to the music world, and sum it up here. There was a finality to
Brian Heater 38:16
it. That's kind of what I'm getting at. Is the finality is is both in a
Franz Nicolay 38:21
critical way and in a, you know, in a certain like, there were compliments and there were criticisms. Is, you know, just sort of like attending your own funeral. What do people say in the U of H? Some people, some people hated him, some people liked him. Anyway, he's gone. Now, that's
Brian Heater 38:36
what I'm saying, is it's, he's gotten that part of, like, all right, well, he's done with this band. We'll never hear from we'll never
Franz Nicolay 38:42
hear from him again. Yep. Wasn't that a wild ride?
Brian Heater 38:47
I'm always really curious. And, you know, obviously, again, every case is different, because you've played with a number of bands and you, you know, rejoin the hold steady. But I want to tie this back to TV Smith, in a sense of when, when you did that, I know you done multiple solo records, but when you sort of did that post hold steady solo record, and obviously knowing going into it that you're not going to be drawing the crowds that the hold steady draws there the respect, as you said, that you had for TV Smith, even though some nights he was playing to like four, four or five people. What was that experience like for you? It
Franz Nicolay 39:27
was what I wanted. I had it. I was the sense of trying to, you know, I've said this before, but my of thinking about myself as a performer and one and feeling like the next challenge was to go, was to see if I could command a room by myself, and particularly a room full of strangers, right? Because there's something about traveling with a rock band where you are protected by the group. Put people that you're with and also by volume, right? You see what I mean. If you go into a skeptical room, if it doesn't go well, well, at least you're there with your buddies and and you're going to be loud enough that everyone's going to have to pay attention to you on some level, or else leave, whereas, you know, sort of like, stand up if you're going into a room, if you're standing up or or teaching, I found when I started teaching as a similar experience, you're walking into a room full of skeptical strangers and trying to make them feel like it's you're worth their attention for 45 to 60 minutes and to keep their attention and that, that was the next challenge for me as a as a performer. I've known the blade blossom and the fruit now I know they're withering. There are mountain owls take all day to climb down hill days decent singing. What I eye on the crowd. I.