I had the chance to interview a pleasant up and coming musician yesterday who goes by the rather uncommon name of MoZella (no relationship to the web browser). It was nice to talk with a musician and not have a time constraint for once. For those of you uninitiated, the way things work with in-demand artists is that the publicist will schedule a series of interviews back to back on the same day, giving you, say, twenty minutes with the artist to get your interview completed. What this means is that you have to be a bit wary of inserting too many unplanned follow-up questions for fear of running out of time and not being able to get in all your scripted questions.
But with MoZella it was nice to work without a time limit, which allowed the whole thing to become less interview-ish and more conversational. And I’ve found that with an audio interview, this is what you want. Ideally you’d want to chat with the artist for an hour or two and let it go in all directions and then pull out the most interesting fifteen minutes after the fact, but at some point you have to let the artist hang up the phone and get back to their life.
I’ve had a few people ask me how we ended up interviewing her on the day that her debut album was released, but that turned out to simply be something of a coincidence. I was aware that the album was coming out very soon, but when I checked out list of open dates, November 7th just happened to be the next available one we had. I did realize that this was the album release date when I was submitting the request, and I knew that was probably a good thing, but it did just sort of work out that way. Actually, interviewing an artist on the day of the new album’s release presents the challenge of making sure you’ve heard the new album before the interview. In other words, you’ve either got to ask the label for an advance copy, or wait and grab it from iTunes the morning it comes out and then spend some serious quality time with the album that morning. It was a bit easier than that with MoZella due to the fact that a good chunk of her album had already been released as an EP which I already had my hands on.
A colleague of mine posed an interesting question the other day: iProng being an iPod/iTunes-based publication, would I interview a musician whose music is not available through iTunes? Well, the answer is yes, and I’ve already proven that with the print interview I did with Peter Griesar (an early member of Dave Matthews Band) back in 2004. Peter’s music isn’t anywhere near iTunes (with the exception of DMB’s “So Much To Say” which we co-wrote but didn’t perform on), but that’s because he’s such an independent that he actually sells MP3 downloads of his albums through his own website.
I suppose the truer representation of the question is whether I would interview a major-label artist who was actively withholding their music from iTunes. Sure I would. But to be honest, half the scripted questions would probably be about why their music wasn’t in iTunes. Of course the question might have been more relevant a year or two ago, when there were still a significant number of major artists missing from iTunes. These days the list is so short I can almost rattle it off from memory. And besides, an artist who has decided to hold their music out of iTunes is probably the least likely type of artist to say yes to an interview with an iPod/iTunes publication anyway, so it’s probably a purely hypothetical scenario anyway.
In any case, you can find the iProng Radio interview with MoZella here, and you can find her new album in iTunes here. MoZella tells me I have to go to her album release party on the 14th, and since I’ll be in Los Angles next week anyway for Electronic House Expo, I just might take her up on it.
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