After the merger of their record company Capitol Records and the subsequent release of their new album "Singularity," the members of modern rock group Mae realized something: This isn't working. Despite experiencing severe debt, lack of management and a minor existential crisis, the band set out to find out a new way that did work. Drummer Jacob Marshall talked about the group's upcoming show in Gainesville, its trials with finding management and where it wants to go from here.
AVE: I just had a few questions to ask you about your upcoming Gainesville show and some stuff about what you guys are up to. Have you ever been to Gainesville before?
JM: Throughout the years we've had a lot of different friends who are either going to school there or grew up in the surrounding areas. It's cool. From the beginning of our band, we've tried to be as connected as possible to our fan base through the Internet, and a lot of students have really taken advantage of that throughout the years in a good way. But I feel like for us that it's facilitated community in that perspective. It's kind of been the strongest thing that's enabled our band to do what we've done so far.
AVE: I was looking on the forums for your Web site, and your fans all go on them and talk about shows they've been to or cover songs they want you to do, and it's really cool to see that.
JM: And hopefully that's just beginning because our whole plan right now centers around this new batch of music we've been recording. We put out two records on Tooth & Nail (Records), the "Destination: Beautiful" record and "The Everglow" record. Then our management at Tooth & Nail and the team at Capitol Records all believed it was a healthy time for us to make a move to that side of the world, and we went for it. As we were in the middle of going for it a lot of business changes at Capitol happened: There was a big merger and people laid off, and all of a sudden we kind of found ourselves in this place without many of the people that made it feel like a home.
AVE: Did most of them happen after you released "Singularity" or before?
JM: In the middle, actually. We had finished recording the record, and then the day that we got it mixed was the same day that the merger happened. So it was kind of one of those poetic timings where you can't quite believe what's happening, and sure enough, about two weeks later is when everybody left. We had our finished record and no one that really knew what to do with it. The sad thing is that we had such a good rapport with the old group of people that it would have been a much different story. But, you know, that's the way it rolls.
AVE: So you guys have been working on a new album?
JM: Well, we have. It's not necessarily even a new album, but it's just a new collection of songs. We're in the middle of still finalizing all the details of it, but the rough draft of how we want it to unfold is that what we lost in this season with a major label and the big management company was a lot of the immediate connection that we have with our fan base. It just seemed like that whole system was designed to be a buffer between us and the people that made this what it is. We actually got off Capitol Records a few months ago, and a lot of different labels were interested in picking up the next record. But we had kind of hit a low point, honestly, because we had worked really hard for 13 straight months and ended up over a hundred thousand dollars in debt. That's a discouraging place to be. Two of our members had gotten married and spent all that time away from their wives. Two of our guys ended up deciding that they couldn't continue to justify being away from their families losing money, and it was very clear at that point that without some major changes it just didn't really make sense to continue.
AVE: How has this affected the music you write?
JM: It's funny. I think that it has affected us obviously in the way that we've dealt with the music business, but the bigger picture is presented in how you look at life. When you face hardships, you can either be stopped by those hardships, or you can regroup, you can band together, and you can persevere, and you can overcome them. If there's anything that I hope people can take away from our music, it's the sense of hope that it's never too late to pick yourself up. There's a fresh perspective of hope because it got as bad as it could be. We lost everything that we had that we worked for such a long time, and at the end of it we had two things: We had our creativity, our music, and we had our fans, who had brought us this far. And those are the two things we chose to focus on, and as we approach this new season, our efforts are geared toward taking this music and sharing it with as many people as want to hear it. We're actually going to be putting up a new song every month on our Web site for all of 2009, so it's not even necessarily going to be an album in the traditional sense; it's more going to be a song-by-song project that's geared toward fan-community interaction. The songs you'll be able to hear for free through the Web site. We're going to be charging a dollar per download, but all of the money that's generated from that is actually going to be going into these different charities that are attached to the themes of the songs. What we want to show people with this next chapter of our band is that it will put our money where our mouth is. On our tour with Motion City (Soundtrack) last fall, we raised almost $3,000 by doing these acoustic shows. People would just bring a donation, and the donation was to send us to build a home for somebody with Habitat for Humanity. We'll be the first to tell you that the world has way more problems than we can understand, but we want to learn about them. The last thing we want to do is make a bunch of noise for something that doesn't really matter. All of 2009 is really going an experiment with our fan base to see what we can do together to actually make the world a little bit better.
AVE: It seems like bands are doing this more and more often, becoming more political.
JM: You know what, if that is the new trend, and we can be somehow a part of helping encourage that trend, that is certainly worth fighting for. In an age where apathy seems to be one of the predominant cultural situations that you see in people, it's so easy to be discouraged and so easy to feel helpless. What we want to inspire in our art and our music and our efforts is to restore that sense of hope and that sense of, here's a door, here's your chance to walk through this door and make a difference. It's hard for any of us to know exactly how to even begin to work to make a difference, but I think the more we focus on how overwhelming the challenge is, it gets harder and harder to take that first step. Let's see what we can do.
AVE: Are you going to be introducing the songs you release every month online on the road too?
JM: Absolutely. We plan on being out on tour quite a bit in 2009 because what we're doing revolves around the community. Encourage our fans not just to be involved in coming to a show but actually being aware of the bigger picture of what's going on here. I feel like if we can do anything with our legacy as our band, hopefully this will be the season that we're remembered for.
AVE: Do you think that it's important to move away from a record company, which is focused on making money, versus students that are just trying to create a new sound. Does it really matter?
JM: Well I will say this: This music business provides creative people with the opportunity to actually be focused on their creativity, and I will be the last person to say that that's a bad thing. Any business is focused on one thing: They're focused on making a profit, and when your business is art, that tends to strike people as disingenuous because the purpose of being a creative artist is to express truth. I feel like a lot of music nowadays is designed to let you forget, and I just feel like life is too short for us in particular to spend time trying to forget. One thing that I've been blown away by is how many people have written to tell us that they've walked down the aisle to one of our songs or listened to a song in particular when they were going through depression, and it was a catalyst to helping them get out of that. You can't put a price tag on that; you really can't. We would rather try things ourselves, and that's a choice that we've made; we don't make that choice for anyone else because that's a tough thing that requires a whole lot more busy work. Fortunately, we've been very well supported by our fans for the last six years, and hopefully that continues; if not, we'll probably work crappy jobs somewhere.
AVE: So you guys are going to keep going until the fans aren't there, until you're going gray?
JM: I hope so. There's a healthy momentum that's just now starting to regain its speed and its power. My hope is that people see the impact of the results from their participation in their big experiment with us and are encouraged to continue it.
