SPEAKER_01 0:00

B E H C the Frequency. Good morning, Boulder County. Welcome to Friday's bonus episode of the Boulder Valley Frequency. In honor of our interview with music writer Grayson Haver Curran, we're staying inside the world of local music. Ben Sui is the founder of Holy Fool, a nonprofit helping small local musicians on the front range. Holy Fool is the nonprofit sponsor for Blucifer's First Rodeo, a DIY music festival coming to Denver next month. Ben's band, A Place for Owls, is also performing at the fest. I conducted this interview with Ben a while ago and wrote about Holy Fool for the March issue of Caribou Current. There was so much good stuff that got left out of the article, and I'm stoked to be able to bring you more of my chat with Ben. One musician I interviewed, L. Tyler, called Ben a thin place. In a thin place, she said, the distance between the physical and the spiritual world becomes very thin. People like Ben, when you're in their presence, there's something more than just what the mortal eye can see. You feel like you're part of something bigger. Stay tuned after the interview for Tenderness. A new song from Mercy Club. A local band that has received support from Holy Fool. I interviewed member Darren Thornberry for the Caribou Current article. As always, thanks for listening. So you mentioned having multiple jobs, as we know. Yeah, and a lot of money in music these days. What is your day job?

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Yeah. I have two, sometimes three. Okay. Depending upon how good things are doing. 10 and 20 hours a week teaching guitar lessons, vocal lessons, songwriting lessons, that sort of stuff. I teach at a music school that's based in Broomfield that's kind of like school of rock style. So it's like a lot of adolescents, but then I have like three or four or five adult students who are like learning guitar for the first time. I am employed 20 hours a week to be the music director at a local church in Lafayette. So I help lead the bands, all volunteer musicians that will lead the music at a church called the Table Church in Lafayette. Most of our people are like either Boulder Valley tech engineers or like the grungiest artists you will ever need. So it's a very strange melody of people. That's really good because I'm able to do music and still lead and mentor other musicians. And most of them are like, this is their main musical outlet is playing at church. And so I get a lot of uh itches scratched there. And then sometimes I do like other seasonal work. Sometimes I get paid to write for a music publication occasionally. Yes, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

That sounds really fun to keep that mentorship going because it's so nice sometimes. As I've been a journalist here for 14 years, and I always say it's like dog ears, so I've been a journalist for a hundred years and I'm tired. But when you meet someone just starting out and they're so enthusiastic, it's like, oh you're right, this is the best job in the world. What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_02 3:22

Yeah, and there's so oh my sweet summer child, there's gonna be so many things that discourage you.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yeah, that's really nice.

SPEAKER_02 3:30

I turned 40 last year, and I just sort of had a real crystal clear sort of self-awakening where I was like, I just can't build my own career or my own bank account anymore. I don't know if it's just the the reality of death feels a little bit more like present, or if it's just like, oh, I sense that sort of shift from young, I'm gonna tear the world a new one, into just like, oh, actually, I need to be a builder for like the next thing. And who are the people around me that can build with me, and then who are the people around me that needs to be invested in? Yeah, there's not enough money in any of the things that I'm doing. Uh historically, my wife has been the breadwinner. She's she's back in school, she's becoming a nurse, so she's doing a second bachelor's in nursing. So she's like down for like more part-time work than full-time. But I've had the privilege, like most musicians, either, if you're able to do it long term, you either have a day job yourself that you make enough, or you've got a partner that is able to kind of you know that you're making less, but you're devoting yourself to the craft that you're supposed to devote yourself to. Um, so that's been the last few years, that's been kind of my joy to be able to have a sugar model.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Yeah. There's one journalist left at the Daily Camera where I started who's been there, was there before me is still there. The only one still left. She, her husband is spread owner. So that's the only way you can do it. Everyone else is like 20-something and be poor.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

And you can you can be poor for a while. And you know, human beings are resilient. It's like you can be poor forever. Yeah. Um if you but you just have to either not have an option to or have the mindset to the again, the positive vision. The the work that I'm devoting myself to is so needed and urgent and beautiful that I like it would feel like a denial of my truest self to go and work a day job that made me $20,000 more dollars per year or whatever. And really, is that gonna make my life better? And more importantly, is that gonna make my community better? The world, though it's cliched, but the world needs vibrantly alive people, and there's a lot of aspects of culture that sort of just make you asleep or make you dead inside, and so figuring out a way to feel vibrantly alive yourself and be like a my dad calls it being a social arsonist going around and setting people on fire. And so it's like, can you just become the sort of like fire catcher, fire starter for other people, right? Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

There's this concept in Buddhism that I don't remember the name of, but um, and but that's basically that you like a guru or whoever awakens the energy in you.

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a huge tradition across all religious traditions, but there's a from ancient Christianity, there's a story of a younger learner and an older, an older sage that the younger learner says, I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do. I'm like going through my prayer time, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. And the older guru says, Why don't you become all flame? The little practices, whether they're philosophical, religious, work, whatever, social good is kind of the new religion for most non-religious, post-religious people. But like, there's immense burnout in some of those activism spaces, but it's kind of the new religious space, too. And so, like, we keep going through the motions of doing all the right things, all the stuff we're supposed to do. But that word of like, why not become all flame? Like, why don't you just catch on fire with it? Because there's a wholeheartedness to when you feel alive and vibrant and on fire, that even if you're going through the motions of what the right things to do are supposed to be, it's burnout city without that aliveness that happens there. If I'm take essentially taking a vow of poverty to do music and catalyze music, um, what's the most wholehearted, whole ass way to do that? Which I'm still figuring out.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Ready to sign up, like taking a church. You're doing a great job. You're a great apostle.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

That's right. Yeah, yeah. I'm an evangelist, but it's like mutual aid in making music. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

I mean, that's it, right? Community and creating, what else is there?

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Yeah, and you know, again, rewind a a couple hundred years in culture. It's like, how did music get made? It's because you were making it or someone in the same room with you is making it. But now it just gets beams to our phones, and it's something that's either on in the background or we think that we're a witness of, not a participant in. Even most of us, when we love music, we we like going to live music, and the closest we get is dancing and singing along. And that's beautiful, that's still making music. That's rhythm and that's melody. But like there's a secondary aspect to some of the Holy Fold work, is just like, how could okay, primary primary thing calling is like supporting the people already making music that are making redemptive and good works. Secondary goal is there's so many people who have a poet's soul and temperament, who like love to stare, angsting, just brooding, stare out the window. And I'm like, my friend, you need to write poetry, you need to write songs, you need to figure out what is your creative outlet. And most of us, because we're comparing ourselves to Whitney Houston or Madonna or some of the best vocal performances in the world, every time we sing, we're kind of ashamed of ourselves because we're not that. But like again, 200 years ago, before recording music, you just had like three other vocalists in your town to compete with, and you're like, well, I'm better than Steve, you know? And so like trying to figure out um how to again think smaller in our real, like who's our community? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

It feels like the need to be good at something is so so sensitive, capitalist. And so creation is the point, not like monetization or yeah, why does it need to be good?

SPEAKER_02 9:48

If you enjoy it, who cares? I and most of the bands and artists that I know don't care about getting famous or wealthy. The primary goal is sustainability, sufficiency. I feel drawn to make music, and I have a compulsion that I I ask a bunch of people why do you write songs? And no one can ever say why. It's just like a ingrained, like it just has to happen. I'm compulsed to do it. And you just want to figure out how to be able to do that until you're dead.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

So when last, well, we didn't speak, but when last you spoke about Holy Fool, you guys were just getting started.

SPEAKER_02 10:23

Yeah, we didn't even have a website. Literally, Jesse had to link to our Facebook page. I love that. So, yes, we are official now, like website some donors, which is amazing. We were like in the phase where we had filed our 501c3 paperwork, but hadn't got the official like you're a nonprofit now, and so now we're an all-profit now.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Congrats! That could be a little bit of a process, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:47

It is, yeah. And it's for something that feels very grassroots, it was fairly expensive. It was like $2,500 to like file the paperwork, but now we have now we have donors and we can recoup some of those, uh some of those costs. But it's like a weird thing where it's like way easier to start like an LLC for-profit business than it is to start a non-profit. But then once you have the nonprofit, you're yeah, you're it's relatively easier to run. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

I think I started my LLC, I ran a pub a news publication of my own. Um, it was like $10 or $30 or something. Yeah, that's a dollar. Talk to me a little bit about the structure. Um, so obviously 501c3 makes sense to me, but in Jesse's story, you said mutual aid, nonprofit. Yes. And I know sometimes in the mutual aid world, there's a lot of criticism of the nonprofit structure, and it is something distinctly different. Some people consider it to be. Maybe you don't, but like what's the what's the structure there?

SPEAKER_02 11:45

I think about it as kind of two simultaneous systems, basically. One is we and our so, in a lot of ways, we started a nonprofit to just formalize informal work that already happens in a healthy music scene where bands are giving each other good advice. There's gear share that just naturally happens. So there's kind of two simultaneous processes, I guess. One is very informal, just when needs arise, whether that's like I'm struggling to cut through the noise with my project and I need some help with like marketing, or I need some help with whatever. Those bands and solo artists that are a little further along and have uh some know-how, some skill headset, some best practices, can then share that information. And that happens super like amorphously, right? Like it's just relationships, people who get to, and it doesn't have to be like gatekeeped by the holy fool nonprofit or anybody that's like an official leader. So in some ways, it still feels very much like mutual aid, real down on the ground, and anything can happen there, and it's it's kind of vaguely a part of our community, but we're not necessarily like I'm not, you know, there's like me and like two or three other key leaders that I'm not necessarily even aware of all the mutual encouragement and mutual help that happens just through relationships. And then there's kind of simultaneously to that, actual donor development and going out. Our core sort of demographic of who's gonna be a donor is someone who thinks about themselves as a music person, but isn't necessarily activated as much as they want to be in a music scene. Or let's say they always had the dream of like they played guitar, but like they never like actually got a project going, or they never, you know, they never did it, but they are community-oriented and a generous-hearted person that and now they have a baller day job that they can give 50 bucks a month or whatever to like hold the fool to help out with that sort of stuff. So, like donor development work, and then what that actual like the the money that we manage then goes towards paying for house shows and shows that happen in non-traditional venues. So the structure with house shows is like we offer every artist that plays a $500 guarantee, which is not connected to how much money we make at the door, and then it's a free event that there's like a donation bucket at the door, and we go in knowing that we're never going to recoup the costs of paying the artists what we want to pay them. But it's just like you get an opening slot at the at Lost Lake or Globe Hall or whatever, and they'll you're lucky if they will pay you $50 to $150 to play that show as like a four or five-piece band. But if you can come in, we've booked a house show where you functionally don't have to be anxious about promotion. You it's still good if you promote the event, but you don't have to be like my paycheck is connected to how many people I turned out to this show, which is how normal venue shows sort of work in this day and age. A lot of times venues will do what's called consignment tickets, which is literally like the only way that you get paid is if the person who bought the ticket tells the person at the door, I'm here to see a place for owls or whatever. And so we want to be over-generous with the artists that are actually playing, but knowing that it's not like a capitalist mindset when we come into this show. We just want a bunch of people to come have a good time. We usually do like a pot-like dinner a part of the night. So we spend our donor fundraise money on payout for artists, and then we also have micro grants where it's like somebody needs a couple hundred bucks to fix a broken amplifier, or your tour van broke down in the middle of which are and you need a little bit of help. We only have around because we're still relatively early days, we got about $8,000 in the bank, which feels like a lot to me, but it's not a lot compared to other like nonprofit buzzers.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Did you say eight or eighties? Eight thousand. So eight. Yes, eight, comma. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Yeah, yeah. So it's not like it's not a lot of money to play with. Part of that is that everybody that is in leadership with Holy Fool, nobody draws a salary from it. Everybody's sort of doing it around the their other two or it's musicians, so it's your other two or three jobs that you do to actually pay your rent.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

When you talk about like the informal mentorship and things that happen in a healthy music scene, is do we have a healthy music scene locally? Is that not happening as much? Or is it just that's just gonna remain part of what you do because that's that's just what is happening?

SPEAKER_02 16:42

So we have we have fragmented music scenes in the front range. And there are little pockets that are usually sort of segregated by genre and aesthetic, for lack of a better way to put it. Uh so like vibe or like yeah, so like DIY punk and emo has a whole sub-scene where you play in the absolute dingiest building you've ever been in. It's house shows, there's shows that are at where it's like there's not a functional bathroom here, right? And there's aspects of that that are healthy in the DIY emo punk scene, and there's aspects that are really unhealthy, and then there's a whole world of like singer-songwriter in Colorado that are often kind of folk or folk adjacent bluegrass, and then there's a whole jam band world, there's a there's kind of like the indie rock that's sort of like pulling influences from all the other stuff that like indie rock that grows in Colorado often is either folk influenced or like there's just there, and then there's like a whole hip-hop world, and so do we have a healthy music scene? Well, we don't have one music scene, but there's segments that broadly I don't think talk to each other very often, and I think would benefit from feeling more connected because the skill set to have Ableton or Logic or Pro Tools, which is how you record music, have that on your laptop and record all that, broadly the same no matter what genre that you're doing. So it's like there's technical skills that we can share. There's also marketing and promotional skills that we can share. Also, I came up in a really small, tight-knit scene in West Virginia where it was a lot of cross-genre bills where there would be an acoustic singer-songwriter that would open up for a bluegrass band and then a pumpkin would play afterwards. And it was just it that's part of that being in a small town, but it's like there was actually some cross-polonization that meant not only for bands that were a little bit more genre-fluid, I felt growing up.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

There's a bunch of healthy stuff to be celebrated, and I think that there's a lot of room for improvement, certainly around young emerging bands and artists feeling like they can book a show. Because there's a lot of venues. Colorado's music state, but by that we mean kind of like going to Red Rocks or to Mission Ballroom, touring bands, or the lumineers of Gregory Alan Isaacov who have hometown roots, but they're huge, some of the biggest fans in the world, right? There's a gap between you're just starting out and now you're actually getting some momentum playing live that I think could be improved upon.

SPEAKER_01 19:44

How is Holy Fool gonna go about bringing some of those various scenes together? Is your leadership diverse? It's like, what's the plan?

SPEAKER_02 19:51

Yeah, no, not at all. I'm broadly connected to three music scenes in Colorado. So there's the sort of punk and emo scene that's kind of broadly called DIY. There's the singer-songwriter, sort of like folk RB sort of like scene that is mostly guys and gals and non-binary pals with guitars that play these quiet little like hear a pin drop sort of like set there. And then there's the world of home recording and sort of like more emerging music producers, is kind of like the three main circles that I'm in. There's enough work right now for me personally and our few key leaders to really sort of figure out what we can do to make those worlds healthy, health as healthy as they can be, and even cross-pollinate like the the punk bands and the singer-songwriter bands are not playing shows together, but the skill sets to be successful in either of those scenes is broadly the same. Now, punk bands have something going for them in that they're bands, which means you've got a built-in community to do the music. So you're not a solo artist. It's really existentially exhausting for a solo artist to try to be the songwriter, record your own music, produce your own music, mix it, master it, put it out there, then market and promote, book your own shows. And in a band, you've got a community that can you can compartmentalize some of those tasks. And even just playing with two or three other individuals helps you learn how to collaborate with other people. So one of the things that I see in the singer songwriter world that I think could use some improvement is there's less and less money to be made in music. So it actually kind of rewards solo projects because then you don't have to pay out four people at the end of the night when you play a show. You pay out one person, and those dollars and cents. Evaluations can make more sense if you're a solo project. But there's an isolation and a competitive spirit. There's so there's there's the capitalism sort of teaches us to view everybody that's doing kind of the same thing as you are as a competition to be destroyed, not a friend and a collaborator or someone that could actually bolster you up, right? And I think I see a little bit more of that cooperative spirit in the band scene that I don't necessarily see in the singer-songwriter sort of scene. To answer your question, I don't necessarily know if we can conceivably take anything more on than what are our what are our network what's our network right now, and how can we make sure those people that we actually know can thrive as much as they can. Now, I I have spent some time going back and forth of like I have two competing values of ambition and dreaming, but then also just practicality and like you gotta be humble in a lot of ways and think smaller instead of larger. Long term, it's like, yeah, if we could spawn, it doesn't necessarily have to be the holy fool empire. I'm not necessarily like trying to make franchises, but if we can inspire more and more community-oriented people and more and more generosity-oriented people to formalize a lot of the work that they're doing and use best practices, be compassionate and open-hearted, then that's a win, and then that can happen in the various scenes, and then maybe we get together once a year for like a conference or something, yeah, and we're like, what's good? You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

So, how do musicians um find the support that you are offering? I guess first is like you mentioned microgrants and then the guaranteed like your house shows. Yes. How many of those have you done? How do you find people?

SPEAKER_02 23:47

Yeah, so it's again in a lot of ways it's kind of formalizing work and relationships that like sort of already pre-existed. So we haven't honestly done a bunch of like headhunting for like new artists and projects. Um, we know enough singer-songwriters and a bunch enough rock bands that I could book house shows for the next three years and not repeat the same artists over again. The microgrants has been so far all sort of just relational as a need arises. And there's enough struggling songwriters and bands that we know already that if we just devoted on helping them, that would feel like enough work for us. So if that 8,000 in the bank turned to 80,000 in the bank, then it's like, oh, you know, we could do a heck of a lot more. But thus far it's been hyper small, hyper-relational.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

And is it similar with your donors? I don't know what your donor base looks like. Is it just people like that you already know?

SPEAKER_02 24:41

Yeah, primarily, yeah. So um I just have felt like, oh man, I want to be way more ambitious about this, but there's also just like shit, I gotta go to work. You know, like there's there's that tension that sort of exists because there's no staff functional. And that's been the sort of like angst that I've experienced of like, if we had several million dollars, I would love to own a home in the Denver Boulder metro area that could be a site for house shows, it could be offices, it could be recording space, and it could be hospitality rooms for bands that are on tour. So people that are coming through that they can stay for free, and it's not just somebody's like floor that the cat is crawling in your face all night while you're trying to get a good night's sleep to drive to the next city.

SPEAKER_01 25:31

Is that what it usually is?

SPEAKER_02 25:33

Yes. So if you're in DIY spaces and you don't have budget for a hotel room yourself, you're you're fr staying at a friend of a friend's house, especially in punk and emo circles. It's the literally the grungiest place you've ever stayed. I when we did uh our West Coast tour a couple years ago in Portland, it was just cat pee everywhere. And uh and two of us are like hyper allergic to cats too, on top of that. So no functionally nobody got any sleep that night. Sweet sweet guys that were in one of the other bands that we played with, but it's just like musicians typically are more chaotic than your average bear. You're staying at your buddy's band's place, and so that's uh yeah, that's what you gotta do. You sleep in the van, you you kind of do it. But for us that you we're in a rock band in our 30s and 40s, it's like you can't be sleeping on the floor, my microphone has to be like, Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. And so figuring out, okay, that kind of makes touring make no financial sense to us anymore. Because if we're getting at most a hundred or $150 payoff at each city, and we're dry and when you're in Colorado, the nearest market is Billings, Montana or Salt Lake City, Utah. Those are both nine, eight hours. If you're touring in the winter, it's functionally you're taking your life into your own hands to go 70 or 80. And so more and more bands, even young bands who would normally be road dogs and just be playing across. It's like there's less and less money there. Now, that used to be the lifeblood of like you put out a CD and you gotta go on tour, and that's how you get fans. Right. Whether you're signed or unsigned. It's that that classic quote of the old world is dying, the new world is not come to be. Now is the time of monsters, right? There's a lot of luck into who makes it, but it's like mostly connections of like how are you gonna get into that next threshold of success? Whether that's opening up for a band at the Ogden, that's primarily relationships, or how can you get on radio or whatever, right? Just um not to doom and gloom it, but there's there's a myriad of issues facing the modern working musician, right? If more and more bands and songwriters did not feel constantly like one missed paycheck away from homelessness, and if more and more normal people just viewed participation in the the creative work as like that's attainable to me, and it's also not financial suicide, then that would be great. I would love that.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Well, we already did the hope part.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

Yeah, that's right. Now we gotta we gotta go the art. And now now if we're really gonna do a three-act, we gotta we gotta figure out.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

We gotta go back up. How do you get back up? Yeah, yeah. As above, so below.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

Yeah, so yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

Well, I could just go straight at it. One thing I'm trying to ask all my guests this question, but I'm really bad at is like what's giving you hope or inspiring you right now.

SPEAKER_02 28:32

Yeah. I am getting a lot out of, I mentioned that I teach guitar lessons and I teach songwriting lessons. I really get a lot of energy from just even that question of like, what do you want to say? However, they would decide to answer it. But it's really just it's giving it's giving yourself permission to just like say the unsayable or say the thing that feels awkward, or like what's the deepest held thing that's like kind of in me. And that's the stuff that songwriting just naturally touches on. I am not interested in the kind of music that's like music to shock to, you know what I mean? Like music that just sort of exists to perpetuate the world as we as we know it and as we have it. This is maybe a little bit harsh, but it was like if you watch the Grammys, a lot of the music that like sort of gets reinforced in that major sort of industry is just primarily it's it's propping up what we already know or what we used to believe. There's not a real heart to it. But when you go back to like the unknown songwriter that like is way too weird and way too angular for like the mainstream stuff, it's just like, oh, there's something really vibrant going on there. So yeah, more and more just as I witness anime and friendships and community with songwriters you've never heard of and probably likely will never hear of, because it that it normalizes that value of like the arts are supposed to be participated in. It's not for these sacred anointed people over here. It's just like for it's for all of us, for normal folks, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:12

You might have already done it because you've you've said so much already. But I'm gonna ask you your same question. What do you want to say?

SPEAKER_02 30:21

Um I'm I'm writing a bunch of songs about how kind the people around me have been to me. So my spouse, some of my best friends, because Kate and my wife has been to down to part-time work, it's just like things have been way more financially tight for us than they have been. We've been like double income no kids for a while, and that was great. We loved that, but like there's less of that, and there's been a few folks that just like showed up with like how much is your rent and then just wrote me a check for it, or like showed up with King Super's gift cards or whatever. And it's like it feels in America, it feels so shameful to have need. But it's just like in a normal community, it's just all of us have at various points we go through I'm able to give more, or I'm I'm in a period where I need to receive more. But I it's strange to try to articulate that in song in a way that's not just like I love everyone, and that's literally you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

Yeah, it's the theology of a slumber party. Yes, yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I love you. Are you asleep? I'm pretty sure Christopher Nolan has made more than one film with that as essential theory. Like, yeah, love.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

Yeah, for real. I know. Well, it's it's if you struggle with feeling like self-conscious about being as earnest as you can be, which I think a lot of aspects of culture sort of teach you to be ashamed of that sort of pure-hearted spirit. Like, I'm like, I love the people that are around me, and so many people love me, and I should never kill myself. You know, it's like just you know, like that's functionally like what the songs are about now. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

This I guess is not much of a pertinent question now that you know everything you're doing is still relatively insular. But I was wondering about like just given the state of the world and how much need there is, and how much how many issues are competing for attention. Like, how are you finding traction or are you worried at all about finding traction in the larger community of like music? You know what I mean? Yeah, it's hard for everyone to get help right now. All the food banks are under homelessness, everything. So, like, how do you Yeah?

SPEAKER_02 32:34

You're right, there's a hierarchy of need, and some needs at certain points feel like luxuries to even talk about. But you know, I think a lot of these issues are interrelated. And as it I think I said earlier that, like, if we just solved the problems of affordable housing and living wage and all that, then functionally we wouldn't need to exist as an organization. Everybody would be self-sufficient in their creative projects. We could still exist relationally, but it's like we would it wouldn't be, you know, every time I tell an artist that they're gonna get paid 500 bucks to play a show, it's like there's tears now. Because it's like you're used to you're used to begging your friends to show up and then you get paid 100 to 150 bucks, right? That's why I get small and I get local, but you think about influence and agency. Like, what do I actually have agency to fix or to solve or to even encourage my friends to like think about something? And broadly most of the things that that make the world feel on fire, it's like that's I don't think I have anything functionally that I can do about any of that, other than empathy and if there feels like a an actual social movement that I can be a part of that can be on the right side of history with some of that stuff. That's great. Anyways, I don't have a good answer to your question.

SPEAKER_01 34:04

Well, it wasn't a good question to be fair. I guess what I meant was like, is it a hard sell to be like, hey, you should support this when everything is on fire?

SPEAKER_02 34:14

Well, and and well, yeah, and even I think most people that would be our core donor would be music people, fans of music, who want to think about themselves as I'm no longer just a consumer where I pay Spotify and then maybe Spotify pays the bands, but I'm gonna move towards a patron mindset where I'm like, oh, I'm gonna buy the merch, I'm gonna, you know, buy the CD, and I'm gonna, you know, give to an organization that would be able to do something good with that money in the music scene, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:41

Well, thank you for another stab at that and give me another chance to frame it differently. And also this next question, too. I like to give people an action. I guess because it helps with the helplessness feeling of like, okay, you know it, now what? Now what do you want to do about it? So what's the like action item of this this piece? Like, what do you want people to do? Yeah after they do it.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

I think if if somebody has been moved by music, like if you felt like you've listened to a song that's changed your life, think about the person who wrote that song, then go to their show and buy their t-shirt and the compact disc. Even if your vinyl or the CD or the cassette tape just sort of collects dust on your shelf, you still spend 10 to 20 bucks to support a working musician to be able to make it to the next city or make rent that month. Also, there's a narrative, and it's true, that live music is so expensive now. And I think that that's true if we primarily think about going to see uh the Food Fighters play Ball Arena or Gregory Allen and Isaachoff play Red Rocks, which I love both of those bands, right? But there's an immense world of shows that cost between 10 and 30 bucks for a ticket to go to, and it's bands that you've likely never heard of. Some of them may in fact be good, you know? And so if you're a music person and you find yourself moved by music, consider like actually spending the money to directly support whatever artist that m wrote a song that actually meant something to you, and then go to a show.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Tanderness. Tanderness, the only way to make it with you Tandernas.