Freelance Whales cut their teeth playing jaunty pop music on the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Recently, the Metropolitan Transit Authority granted the band a license to play in subway stations as an official member of Music Under New York, complete with banner. We spoke to one of the band’s multi-instrumentalists, Jake Hyman, about the differences between street and tunnel playing.

TMN: Tell us about your subway license. What’s better, playing the subways or busking on the street?

Jake Hyman: The Music Under New York award was quite an honor. We get to be those guys with the big black and yellow banner behind them playing in the most crowded stations, being ignored by millions of commuters, not just the hundreds we get when we play on Bedford Avenue. As a group I think we find playing on the streets and subways to be a very different experience than playing a traditional show.

TMN: How so?

JH: The reactions we get on the street are very real, very ethereal. If people don’t like it or they’re too busy, they move on. If they do like it they smile, they dance, they clap (and give us money). But either way everyone’s on the same page. The feedback is immediate and unavoidable.

TMN: You closed down Bedford Avenue during one street show. Is that your turf now? Do street and subway musicians fight for the best spots?

JH: I wish we could call it our turf! The truth is we just sort of wander until we find a good spot. Lately we’ve taken to playing both on Bedford Ave and down in the L-train station when there isn’t another band around. Other musicians have been really friendly about sharing stations with us. As long as you ask and don’t just start encroaching on someone’s livelihood, nothing gets contentious.

TMN: You’re a subway rider, what makes you irrationally angry?

JH: When people don’t wait for me to exit the train before they push their way on—it takes every ounce of strength not to strangle them. Even just seeing someone do that when I’m not involved gets me, too. I’ve verbally accosted more than one person about it (much to the chagrin of my girlfriend) and never been satisfied with an apology.

TMN: How does the band’s creative preparation begin?

JH: Before shows we get together and do our own form of meditation. We get into a circle and close our eyes and hold hands and do some chanting and harmonizing. To me it feels like we’re just sort of putting ourselves in a bubble together and really connecting. It really helps to focus and relax us; our diverse instrument setup at traditional venues can get pretty stressful and hectic.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at but wish you were?

JH: Musically? I’m a horrible lyricist. As a lifetime choir singer I can come up with melodies and harmonies like it’s my job…which it sort of is. But I have the lyrical prowess of a monkey. Non-musically? I wish I were good at a sport. Not just casually good, but had some sort of natural aptitude for applying myself to soccer or hockey. My dad and I used to play sports constantly and I used to be in all the youth leagues (though I wasn’t very good), but around the time I got my first drum set I stopped playing sports altogether.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office?

JH: I’m a writer all day, every day, so I get to sit around and type stuff. In between paragraphs and while I’m doing research, I love to grab my guitar and just noodle around for a while. I’m a drummer through and through, but I can’t help but try to practice something else for a while to remind me why exactly it is that I stick to the drums.

TMN: What’s next for Freelance Whales?

JH: Well, recently we put out our first record, Weathervanes. It’s been a long road to get it heard, get it up on iTunes, and make it accessible to everyone that wants it, and we’re going to really be playing hard to support the record at a bunch of CMJ shows this year. Hopefully a tour is not too far off. Of course, we’re going to keep playing on the subways and streets, but I’m excited that we can start to ramp up the number of proper shows we’re playing, as well. —Mike Smith, Oct. 21, 2009

Tracey Thorn is an English singer-songwriter with a career spanning nearly three decades. She is probably best known as being one half of the highly acclaimed duo Everything but the Girl. She lives in London with her husband and three children, and has recently finished recording her third solo album.

TMN: There was about 25 years between the release of your first and second solo albums. Now, two years after “Out of the Woods,” we’re getting another. Why are we so lucky?

Tracey Thorn: Well, in between the release of the first and second solo albums there was a 25-year gap, but it was filled with nine Everything but the Girl albums, so it’s not like I was doing nothing for all that time. It works out at about an album every two to three years, so in fact, not much has changed.

TMN: What can we expect of the new album in terms of sound and style?

TT: It’s a much more acoustic record than “Out of the Woods.” It’s very simple in arrangement. I deliberately wanted to work with a more limited palette this time, and try to create a more consistent mood rather than being as all-inclusive as on the last record. So it’s not such a poppy record, and there’s a move away from programming and from the dancefloor.

TMN: Is Everything but the Girl likely to come off hiatus any time soon?

TT: My answer is still I don’t know. I think Ben and I both enjoy now having a bit of separate creative space after all those years of sharing that space with each other.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at but wish you were?

TT: Driving (I’m so bad I haven’t driven for 20 years). Swimming.

TMN: What other artists or movements have inspired or influenced the new album?

TT: I can’t answer this question. It’s not how I think. Reviewers point out influences; they’re never conscious.

TMN: What’s changed about your creative process since becoming a mother?

TT: It used to be a continuous thing; now it has huge holes in it. Months and months go by where the “creative process” does not exist for me. Then, thankfully, it reappears from time to time.

TMN: What’s your favorite object in your workspace?

TT: My little reed organ, bought for almost nothing on eBay. I write songs on it and they all sound like hymns.

TMN: On your MySpace blog, you recently announced getting married earlier this year after a “27-year engagement.” Why did you decide that this was the right time?

TT: Like many things in our life, it was a somewhat random decision, made on impulse. You know what they say, “marry in haste, repent at leisure.” Let’s hope we don’t regret being so reckless.

TMN: If you could change one law, what would it be?

TT: Well, I’d certainly be tougher on homeopathy.

TMN: What’s the best advice you’d give to your childhood self?

TT: Take up yoga. You have back problems ahead, and it’s never too soon. —Erik Bryan, Sep. 30, 2009

Frank Portman was once better known as Dr. Frank, frontman of the seminal Bay Area punk band The Mr. T Experience. Now he’s building a reputation as an author. His latest novel, Andromeda Klein, is due out on August 25.

Interview contributed by Jay Hathaway.

TMN: What do you put down for “occupation” when you’re filling out forms these days?

FP: You know, I had to deal with this recently, because I just had a visit to the U.K., and on their landing cards they make you specify an occupation. A lot of previous times going over to England, I had to disguise everything about what I did, because if you say “musician,” they assume you’re taking jobs away from other musicians over there, so you make up something else. I did put “writer” in it this time. I’ve never felt that comfortable saying that when I only had one book, because it seems like if I never manage to finish another one, then it seemed a little bit presumptuous to go ahead and say “writer,” but now I feel two is pretty good. Two, you can say you’re a writer. At least, that’s my personal code.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office?

FP: This large fiberglass hand is quite famous amongst a small number of people because it was used as a prop for the photo on the cover of the Revenge Is Sweet and So Are You album. I think its message is: stop.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at but wish you were?

FP: To sing beautifully, to be good with money, and to be able to charm monkeys.

TMN: Was it harder to write a teenage girl [in Andromeda Klein] than it was to write a teenage guy [in King Dork]?

FP: There’s a little bit of a political angle to a guy writing a book from a female point of view. You wonder what people will make of it. As far as the actual words on the page and the actual characterization, I didn’t find that hard at all. Some people could say, “It’s not a successful girl,” maybe, but I actually think it is. Human psychology and experience is a massively enormous complex thing, and the crude division of sex doesn’t even touch the surface of it. It’s a lot harder to engineer the thoughts of an introvert, per se, than the difference between a female introvert and a male introvert.

TMN: How much did you know about the occult and tarot cards when you started Andromeda Klein?

FP: It’s like a lot of things, where you think you know a lot about it before you really have to put yourself on the line and present it. It mostly involved a lot of reading of a lot of very crazy books. The contents of my library are radically different, and very, very, very much weirder than they were two years ago. In King Dork, I thought, “I know something about the experience of being a socially unsuccessful high school dork type,” but that’s a common theme in movies and books, and certainly teen novels. I wanted to take this stock thing and present it in a way that’s a little more resonant and a little more interesting, not just Napoleon Dynamite Plus. A similar thing to the high school nerd is a teen witch. So I just thought, “What would a more interesting version of that be?” I wanted to make sure all of the stuff she was involved with was real stuff. I think that’s the main failing of a lot of novels and movies about the occult. It’s someone’s idea of what that material maybe ought to look like. I took it pretty seriously, figuring out what a person like her would be doing.

TMN: Does being a doctor matter as much in the literary world as it does in rock and roll?

FP: I don’t have an advanced degree. I have a regular old bachelor’s degree. People just think that because of my curmudgeonly and pedantic manner. I graduated from college and had a hard time finding a job, so I decided to be a pretend rock star, and that was the way my life went. But no, I think that there are annoying, pretentious writers out there for sure, like there are in any endeavor. Music has its share of people with that sort of self-regard. Most writers I know are pretty down to earth. There’s a shared terror of the world and how it is going to pounce on and crucify your writing every time you put it out. There are some exceptions, and some writers who think they’re God, but there’s nothing like writing a novel to teach you humility.

TMN: Who is your archnemesis?

FP: I have thought long and hard on this one, in hopes of arriving at an answer that would not be career suicide. And that answer is my cat, Matilda, who appears to spend all of her waking hours—admittedly a very short span of time—plotting my destruction. —Jay Hathaway, Aug. 18, 2009

After launching a music career built on positivity and partying, Andrew W.K. keeps busy by going in several directions at once. He is co-owner of lower Manhattan’s Santos Party House, has appeared in and supplied music for episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and recorded an album of J-Pop covers. He currently hosts a game show for teenagers called Destroy Build Destroy on Cartoon Network, and is putting the finishing touches on a solo piano album, ‘55 Cadillac, due in September. (Interview edited from a recent phone conversation.)

TMN: How much were you involved in developing Destroy Build Destroy?

AWK: The show’s creator is Dan Taberski. We met a long time ago, when he was working at the Daily Show; he was producing a segment about college students not partying enough. It was a lot of fun, and it was really special to me that after all these years—that was probably six years ago—he was now running his own production company and had moved to Hollywood and was working with Cartoon Network on a new show.

I had been working with Cartoon Network for several years developing different show ideas. When this show concept came up, I met with some of the people involved and was just blown away by the idea of combining explosions and teenagers. It really hooked me. They were looking for a person to sort of pull it all together and I must say I was extremely honored to be given the role of the host, of the cheerleader, the main guy on the show, running the show, sort of the ringleader.

TMN: What was the most terrifying moment of your childhood?

AWK: That depends on when you define childhood starting and ending. What age is childhood—is it until 21? I mean, the most scary moment of my life was September 11th. I was still pretty young then.

TMN: How did you pick which songs to use for your J-pop album?

AWK: Well, we actually asked my fan base in Japan to vote for their favorite songs, the songs they would like me to cover. What really appealed to me was that I had never done an album of cover songs. I’d only released a few cover songs before that and they were primarily released in Japan. I did a cover of the Mickey Mouse club theme song march—[singing] M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E—I did a version of that and I liked that, but I had sort of stayed away from doing covers because when it came to songs I really loved, I was happy with the original recording or the recordings that I’d already heard. It didn’t occur to me until later that even if you love a song and love a recording, that you can add something to it, or just enjoy the process of recording it.

And I liked the idea that I was hearing these songs for the first time. I didn’t have a relationship with them yet. I could approach them from a fresh point of view, which has been very rare for me. So, just being able to discover all this new music and dive right into it was really exciting.

TMN: What’s your favorite object in your studio?

AWK: I don’t have favorites. It’s just a really stressful feeling to me to try to pick one thing in life, whether it’s a favorite song, favorite object, favorite person, favorite place, favorite experience, favorite restaurant. Why cut things down like that?

Here, I found a thing: it’s a life-cast—a real life-cast—of Jimmy Durante’s nose. It was given to me by a Hollywood make-up and special-effects artist. It’s definitely an intense object.

TMN: You recently gave your first spoken-word performance—

AWK: I never liked the term “spoken word.” I like to call it a vocal performance or a non-musical performance. “Spoken word” to me sounds so dry. Like you’re just going to see somebody speaking, but it’s so much more than that. I mean, it’s performance. Is a comedian doing spoken word? It’s just a different mode of performance where I’m maybe going up on stage without instruments or going up on stage without any sort of particular plan. I mean, I really try to go in spontaneous—that’s what makes it so much different than singing a song.

TMN: What can we expect from ‘55 Cadillac?

AWK: I can say right now that I’ve spent more time on the artwork than I did on recording the album. That was the whole point—to take a very scary step to see what it would be like to record something where you just sit down and play and you put that out.

I recorded for about two hours, then I picked the best of those two hours and edited it together. Normally I’ve recorded albums where I wrote songs and worked on writing the songs for a long time before even beginning to record them, and then the recording process would be very long and involved with lots of overdubs and fine-tuning and fixing and redoing. I mean, just a very painstaking process. That’s how I enjoyed it. But I wanted to see what it was like to do a totally different album. I’ve played piano—that was the first instrument I ever learned—I guess for 26 years now.

When there’s that feeling of someone just playing for their own pleasure, that’s what I wanted to get in touch with. This one is just Andrew W.K. playing piano and seeing what happens.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at, but wish you were?

AWK: I would like to be able to ski or snowboard better. My wife is a very, very advanced snowboarder. She used to be professional, she was very good, and I would like to be able to do more of that with her.

TMN: What makes you irrationally angry?

AWK: Feeling short on time. It’s been, like, the worst feeling in my life, and I’ve noticed that almost every bad day or moment of stress I’ve ever had, it’s all come from a feeling of not having enough time. Any other big issue or situation or ordeal I had to go through, any sort of bad news—it’s never caused me the anguish that that feeling of not having enough time has had. Like that feeling of not even having the ability to start thinking about what you want to be thinking about. It’s been really torturous.

There’s a point where you’re either going to feel awful or sick from stress or you just let things go as they go. I try to have more faith now that I’ll finish whatever I’m meant to finish and that I’ll do whatever I’m meant to do and whatever falls by the wayside obviously wasn’t meant to be.

TMN: You recently turned 30. Did it signify a turning point for you?

AWK: Oh, it was massive. Everything changed. I didn’t really notice it happening until it happened, but there was just a lot of baggage, a lot of fears, a lot of hesitations, nervousness, mindsets that were not helping me in the world; they just sort of stopped right after my 30th birthday, and I mean right after, like that day even.

It seemed like everything that I used to think was really hard just wasn’t hard anymore, and it wasn’t like it was easy but—it’s just, like, you just do it. I’ve also reinterpreted the feeling of what it is to be nervous or scared as not being a bad thing or not being a scary thing or not being something to avoid, it’s more like just getting yourself prepared.

The way I guess a lot of people put it, and I totally agree, is that now I officially feel like an adult—in the best way. There are these phases that don’t really mean much, but we can put labels on them. You’re a child, then you’re a teenager, then you become a young adult, and then there’s this period between 19 to 29, those 10 years when you figure out how to become an adult. And it doesn’t have to do with being responsible or being boring or being resigned from having fun or giving up on things. It’s just—you realize you can go fully into the world with a clean slate as yourself, and you don’t need to have anything to do with those earlier versions of yourself that would’ve held you back. My fears and my reservations about life—those don’t exist anymore. I’m not that same person. And none of us are the same, even day-to-day. Something about turning 30 really made that clear to me. —Erik Bryan, Jul. 22, 2009

Back in the formative days of the mp3-blog world, Ryan Catbird was king with The Catbirdseat. Since then he’s started his own label (Catbird Records, with a slew of new releases) and founded MBV Music, an amalgam of music blogging’s finest that recently won an Eddy.

TMN: What was the impetus behind developing MBV?

RC: Everyone knows that the media landscape is going through some very dramatic changes. I’d say this has been especially true of the last 18-24 months or so, and it was during that time it became apparent to me that blogs were starting to be viewed as more credible media outlets (as much as I still want to punch someone in the face when they refer to me as “blogger”). It seemed like the industry was beginning to see many potential opportunities in the music blogs. This was manifested most clearly in aggressive music-blogger courting from ad networks and entities like Buzznet and MOG (in my opinion, all ostensibly the same thing; they look at the blogs and all they see is built-in traffic they can slap some ads on). I mean, it struck me that none of these entities really seemed to give a damn about the blogs themselves. It was as if they had come across some wonderful plants growing in the wild, and were content to pluck off the fruit—as long as the fruit kept coming. No need to worry about the actual plant; it could take care of itself, right? And if it died, so what?

So rather than sit back and just wait for the ad guys or social networks or old media publishers to define what the future of this online music space should be, I decided that we (the guys who had been waist-deep in the “music blogosphere” since it first arose) should take a bigger role in defining that future. I think a music blog can be so much more than just a guy sitting alone in his apartment, posting mp3s. But it’s not gonna happen until someone acts to make it happen.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at but wish you were?

RC: Tanning.

TMN: Why did you start a label?

RC: Oh, I had thought about doing it for a while, but it was a combination of two things that finally cinched it for me in 2005. The first was my discovery of a little unknown band from Springfield, Mo. (Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin), and my intense desire to get them into the ears of more people—this was May of 2005, and their album Broom didn’t get rerelesed on Polyvinyl until October 2006. The second factor, believe it or not, was implementing advertising into my site. Back in the day, it was looked on very unfavorably for a site to have ads (“Their integrity is blown! They’re just jockeying for ad dollars!”), and I had resisted it since my site’s inception in ‘02. Truth be told, I probably would have continued to resist, were it not for a long phone call from a very persistent ad network that finally convinced me to give it a go. I mean, I myself was totally hyper-conscious of the “ad dollars vs. purity of intent” dynamic, and so things really only clicked after I realized that I could stick ads on the site and then “Robin Hood” that ad money directly into releasing records by bands I wanted people to hear.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office?

RC: The painting in this photo. “Untitled” by Richard Aldrich.

TMN: As a label, would you like to compete on the level of a Matador or a Sub Pop? Or bigger?

RC: All I’m trying to do is just nudge these bands out into the water, maybe teach them to swim a little bit—but ideally, someone with a big ol’ boat will eventually come along and pull them onboard. I mean, Catbird Records is really nothing more than a logical extension of what I’ve been doing with the site since the beginning; it’s just another way of me saying, “Hey, I think this music is pretty great; check this out!”

TMN: So, why fatherhood, and why now? Will you try to persuade or dissuade baby Catbird from following in your footsteps? What are those footsteps, as you see them?

RC: Dude, I find this question so incredibly strange! I’m not really sure how to answer other than to say that sometimes in life, when things are right, they’re just right—and this was one of those times. I mean, wow, how does one answer the question, “Why did you want to be a father?” I think I’ll save the unpacking of that one for my upcoming Psychology Today interview.

TMN: What was the most terrifying moment of your childhood?

RC: Riding the legendary “Beast” coaster at King’s Island in Cincinnati. Actually, that’s a lie, I must confess. I was always too terrified to ever actually ride it.

TMN: What makes you irrationally angry?

RC: “SEO Wizards,” “Social Media Experts,” “Personal Brand Consultants,” “Twitter Strategists.” I could go on, but I’m getting irrationally angry. —Erik Bryan, Jun. 23, 2009

A native of New York City, John Schaefer has been a WNYC radio host and music curator for more than 25 years. His long-running show “New Sounds” explores a diverse galaxy of genres old and new, and his program “Soundcheck” interviews artists and covers industry news. “Soundcheck” also recently began live broadcasts from the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space in Manhattan.

TMN: You recently broadcasted live with Lou Reed and Santigold. How’d it go?

JS: The first broadcast from the Greene Space was, like most live “remote” shows, a case of barely controlled pandemonium. We might’ve been a little too ambitious, but we wanted to try everything at once: live acoustic music, live electric music, live phone calls, live comments from the audience in the space, a slide show (also available on the web site to radio listeners), and several audio clips that would be audio-only on the radio but which we thought needed to be video clips as well for the live audience. Also, we had commissioned a work whose premiere came down pretty close to the wire, which was nerve-wracking. And we had Lou Reed, who needed to be treated like, well, Lou Reed. You can’t just say, “Sit over there for a while and we’ll call you when we need you.”

Anyway, almost everything worked. Santigold’s clip from the music video “L.E.S. Artistes” ended up being audio-only; we don’t know what happened to the video. Lou did a version of “Romeo Had Juliet” which included a little surprise: two f-bombs that are not in the original. But the engineer was alert and able to catch them before they hit the air. Thankfully, our on-air delay system was working too.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at, but wish you were?

JS: Soccer. I try to play every Sunday. Playing soccer in New York is like a magnet for immigrants who miss the game. Mexican, French, Italian, English—the game has become a Benetton ad, and the level of play has risen way above my very mediocre skills.

TMN: “New Sounds” has an eclectic approach, but tends toward the obscure. How did the format start?

JS: “New Sounds” was never intended to be willfully obscure, and in fact some of the composers who were still pretty obscure when I started the show are now well known. Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Reich are just a few examples. Ravi Shankar, Keith Jarrett, Yo Yo Ma—these are top-drawer musical talents. But the show was specifically started to play types of music that were falling between the cracks—the cracks between rock, classical, jazz, folk, and world music, and the cracks between the ever-narrowing radio formats out there. So almost by definition you hear a lot of music you won’t hear in many other places.

But “obscure” is a funny word, because if you’re not in a certain musical circle, even the best-known names are obscure. If I described someone as having the street smarts of Jamie T and the no-holds-barred stage presence of Girl Talk, well, those are absolutely obscure names to the millions of people not into the UK indie rock scene or the mashup/sampling scene.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office?

JS: My favorite thing in the office is the acoustic guitar that Moby left in the studio one day a few years back. I don’t think he was intentionally donating a guitar to us, but when we told him it was still in the studio he didn’t want it back, so I now keep it in the office, where it’s available for emergency use if a musician needs it. I use it myself because it’s a hell of a better guitar than the beat up old Epiphone I have at home.

TMN: Has the digital revolution had a significant effect on your program?

JS: The digital thing has been great from a purely practical point of view. Composers can send links instead of CDs, and if I am putting together a program of pieces that are thematically related, and suddenly think of something that would fit but that may not be in our library, I can usually find it and grab it somewhere, either through eMusic, or by contacting the musicians and having them post something online, or in the worst case scenario buying it from iTunes. Actually, with the DRM-free iTunes, that’s no longer a bad option.

TMN: What was the most terrifying moment of your childhood?

JS: This is sort of like the old “wow, you’re from New York—were you ever mugged?” question. I never know how to answer it because there are so many episodes. Growing up in New York in the ‘70s was proof that what didn’t kill you made you stronger. But once, when I was in second grade, I got out of school, went to the bus stop, and waited for my younger brother to come out from his first grade class. He never did. He was, for some reason, off early that day, but I either didn’t know or had forgotten. All I knew was that my job was to get my brother home on the bus—a city bus, not a school bus. After awhile, it started getting dark, and the school was dark and deserted. I was really scared and didn’t know what to do, and finally realized my brother wasn’t coming out of the school. I got on a bus, went home, and found police at the house and my mom a wreck and my father out scouring the neighborhood. I think I might’ve been more terrified at that moment than I was standing alone watching the buses go by. —Erik Bryan, Jun. 3, 2009