Thomas Dolby
July 12th, 2007 by chuckmo
photo by thanasim25, via Flickr.
Create Digital Music posted a wonderful interview with Thomas Dolby. You may or may not know who Thomas Dolby is… if you’re my age he was making music before you were born! But he’s still around and still playing innovative live shows instead of a whole “I was big in the 80’s” thing.
I’ve got a head-mounted camera and I’m projecting behind me on a big screen what I’m doing, people can see, oh, well, he’s programming that drum part. And they see me do it, and they hear it and it loops through the song. And then [I] go over here to a bass and they see me plug that in. And if there’s four or five elements, each they can identify where it came from. They remember the moment when I first input it, and that’s what they’re hearing, but it’s turned into a song.
But he’s definitely on top of more than just his live performances; he understands new communications technology and how to make effective use of it, just like we hope to.
I just think that piece of it is great, you know, to then put stuff out and keep it close to home in terms of knowing who your audience is, giving them the benefit of being the first and closest to the source and making sure they’re not all over the place when you’re coming through.
The feedback to the artist — my blog, my forum, knowing on a day-to-day basis, reading the temperature — it’s so much better to me than when I started out. Everything was so very insulated for the artist. It took months to basically get royalty statements and radio playlists. Yet in reality, on a day to day basis, there was stuff going on.
