SceneSC got the chance to interview Ted Leo back in August. We got a chance to talk about his new video for Bottled In Cork, which had just been released that week, and what the future holds for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Ted Leo & Rx will be playing at The Handlebar in Greenville on Friday, October 15th. We’ll see you there.
Aug. 25, 2010
You’ve been playing music for a long time. Twenty-plus years. In a recent interview you were pretty famously misquoted, or rather, quoted out of context when you were speaking candidly about the changes you’ve seen over the years. It ended being billed as a bit of a retirement announcement. That caused a pretty big stir within your fanbase. What kind of feedback did you get from your fans after that hit the internet?
First of all, it actually wasn’t quite misquoted, and this is the interesting thing about it, because it says a lot about just the power of words, “Retirement” was not a word that I ever used. But the fact that the person who did the interview, and it was actually not even the person who did the interview, it was another blog that re-hosted it, and they used the word “Retirement,” and that’s what set off all of the alarm bells because “Retirement” means “Retired.” It doesn’t mean you’re just thinking about changes and things you could do differently or even slowing down, you know, it’s “Retired,” which is a totally different thing. But, to actually answer your question, the response was pretty interesting. People were and continue to be generally really supportive about whatever comes next, like “we wish you luck and look forward to whatever shape it takes.” There were also some others that were like, “What?! Retired?! Wha… how… how can you do that?!” And that’s why it became such a big deal that I had to continue to address it.
And you did that in a pair of blogs on TedLeo.com where you addressed it head-on and very personally, saying ‘I’m gonna clear this up because this is what I need to do.’ And in the second blog, you mentioned that you’d started working in musical theater to make ends meet, which was a small hoax to promote the new video you did for Bottled In Cork, where you kind of satirize the idea of rock’n’roll on Broadway. So, whose idea was it to spin the retirement PR into promotion for the video?
Well, it wasn’t really that cynical, and wasn’t really to promote the video because videos aren’t really promotion tools anymore, and it’s not like videos help sell records anymore. It’s the era of MTV where like a video would get you greater exposure somewhere. I mean, I suppose in some ways they can be used as a promotion tool, and actually, come to think of it, this particular video has wound up getting about four to five times as many views as copies of the record that have been sold, so I dunno, maybe this one will actually turn out to have kind of an older video effect, but really the whole thing was just done for the fun of it. Tom Scharpling, who directed the video, just came up with this idea that was really funny, and it was just something that we wanted to make and were really pleased with the result and it wasn’t like the setup for the hoax about music theater was not really planned back any further than last week. All the serious stuff in the first blog post, was actually serious stuff that I’d really been thinking about, but then just like last week, when we knew that FunnyOrDie were going to premiere the video this week, I just got the idea, and it perfectly dovetails with all the serious stuff I’d been talking about and that it could just be a way to inject some levity into it and also to show that amidst all the heavy talk that people know that I’m not taking myself too seriously.
And you worked with a lot of familiar faces on the video that you’ve done other things with before. And it was really good, very tasteful and still very funny at the same time. It seemed so perfectly timed, though, that you’d almost think that if you were a big, major label act you’d wonder if it was all staged from the beginning.
Right, right, You know, that kind of why I went with the whole thing. Like, I woke up last Friday, when I wrote the big long blog post that led up to the punchline of releasing the video, I woke up knowing that I was going to something that would be a little bit of a hoax leading up to the video premiere, I didn’t even mean to… like, I just started writing. I didn’t even have it planned out. It was a pretty organic, not-really-all-that-planned-out thing. The lightbulb just went off as I was writing it about how well the video itself and the ideas we joked about in that fit in with all the things that I had been talking about on the website. I mean, we made the video back in like April or June. I just like sat down at like eleven in the morning and by one PM I had this thing written and just posted it up. Then I actually purposely stayed away from the internet for that entire weekend after tweeting that the blog post was up on the site. I wanted to just let it be, let it simmer, let people just figure it out or don’t figure it out theirselves.
Right. To say, ‘I like Teo Leo, so I’ll give it a chance’ or that ‘This is just weird’ or…
Right. And in all honesty, the one thing that I did pay attention to was, I’d asked in the post that people don’t email me about it until they see me on Monday, but of course people did and I actually started to feel a little bit like a jerk by like Saturday when I was getting some really nice emails from people who took it really seriously, and didn’t get any hint that there was something going on. So, almost anybody who wrote my during that time period, I immediately wrote back to let them know how much I appreciated it and also to say that, “While a lot of that post is true, I feel like I’ve got to let you know that it was actually a little bit of a joke.” I started to second guess the whole thing because I was like, Oh man I feel like an asshole. But by Monday afternoon, enough people were like, “Oh yeah you got me,” that it was still funny.
The video itself is very funny, and having a great video to go with the lead-up made for something that worked really well together, and I’m sure that’s why it’s got so many hits.
Thanks. And, yeah, that was another thing: in rewatching the video a couple times when it actually premiered on Monday, I was consistently blown away with what all the comedians and people who worked on the video did and what great stuff they brought to it. I was kind of like, ‘Man, thank god this video is as good as it is,’ because if it wasn’t that whole setup would’ve been really stupid, and it wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been something that I think most people seemed to have appreciated at the end of it all.
In that blog, you do talk about some absolute truths about the state of things for you and about what you’ve done and raise some serious questions about where you’re going next. You have really toured relentlessly for years and years, even spending your holidays in clubs playing shows. I know you played here in SC on either Thanksgiving day or the day before in ’06. Now, you have this tour coming up, which starts in about a week, and you’ll be stopping in Greenville, SC on Oct. 15th, which I’m excited about seeing. But, after that, is there anything planned?
We’ve got another week of shows in the northeast before the end of the year, but other than that I’m just taking some time to reassess my future plans for everything. One of the points I was making in the blog post was how far out in advance you have to plan for things. There are just so many bands on the touring circuit these days. Literally I was actually working with my booking agent looking at dates in December somewhere where one of the days had thirteen holds on it, meaning there are thirteen bands waiting to get a show on this one day. And that’s for December, which is like four months away at this point, and that’s just how jammed up it gets even four months away. That’s why you have to book like eight months out. Sometimes ten to a year and if you don’t put the brakes on at some point, you’ll never get the chance to get a breather because you have to plan so far in advance. So I actually am purposely just trying to take a break for the winter and see what happens next. Try to get my head around some ideas and actually enjoy not knowing where I’m going to be a year from now for a month or two.
And it’s good you’ve got a realistic expectation of things, though it may be slightly fatalist, that’s sadly just the state of things in the music world for any bands that aren’t selling out arenas.
Well you know, I’m trying not to be fatalistic, I really am just trying to be realistic and one of the reasons why I’m talking about it so much is because I don’t think anyone else out there is really talking about it.
Exactly.
You know, nobody wants to come off as a whiny, woe-is-me type person, and I don’t either, and I don’t feel that way, but I also think that we’re doing a disservice to everybody involved in the independent music world in not being a little more realistic about it in our discussions about these things.
Right. And I know I’m always really bummed out when I’m into a band and they just drop off the radar and the website just goes dead and you only find out months later in the what-we’re-doing-now blog post that they’re even officially broken up or that they were ever struggling.
Exactly. And the other thing is that some people are like, “Oh god, just please shut up about it,” but if I didn’t think that it was worthing talking about then… And I really do consider myself lucky to actually be in a position where people care want to know what my thoughts about this are, so I feel like it’s actually more incumbent on me to actually talk about it and let people in on the processes that someone like me goes through over the course of their life and career. But if nobody cared, then I would be writing about it and I really do feel lucky to feel compelled to write about it, and I only feel compelled to write about it because it seems like people care.
And it’s refreshing to get that direct of an approach, and I know I really appreciate that as a listen and as a fan. So, you’ve done a lot with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists over the years, but are there some big goals that you still have and things you still want to accomplish before you hang up your guitar?
Hmm… well… I fell like so much of my focus for the last decade has been on the United States, and that’s for a number of reasons, like I’ve just been saying a lot about life in America in current times and I’ve always felt like it was important and there’s a lot of work to be done here and that’s where most of our focus has been and I find myself at this point when there might be… when I would actually… like, I’ve played around the word, but I’d like to play around the world some more, and I feel a little bit like I’ve missed my window for doing that. It’s not really financially feasible for us anymore. Even in Europe at this point, you just bleed money. That’s one of the things about being older is that it’s not as easy to suck up those losses when you’re pushing forty as it is when you’re in your mid-twenties.
Well we definitely appreciate your time and talking to us about everything going on with you and we’re looking forward to the show.
Here’s the video for Bottled In Cork:
