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My Life In Music · Caught on the Mike...

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Disclaimer The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Listener discretion is advised.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Once upon a time, I had a dream of becoming a rock star.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: After spending a good portion of my life putting in the work dynamic energy to achieve that dream, it was never realized, and was probably not meant to be.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Most of my connections in the real world are now a result of that journey, and my love of music and all things musical has never waned.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Many lessons were learned that have informed me on my everyday life and stirred my successes in my career, my family, my self-preservation, and fed the inception of this very podcast.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: On this episode, I get very candid about those things and share samples of the albums I recorded along the way.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Caught on the Mic.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is not lost on me how self-indulgent this might come across.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: But over the course of the last, I don't know, 10 years or so, when I meet new people, I assume that they already know my personal history.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: They know that part of my identity that aligns with playing in bands and doing the music thing.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I have spent several minutes to hours of time on this podcast telling the stories of other musicians, other promoters, other people in the music business, and drawing parallels to things I experienced when I was in the music business.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact is, embedded in those conversations is the same assumption I pointed out just a few seconds ago.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: I assume that people already know my past without ever fully clearly defining it.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I can attribute it to the nostalgia of the holiday season where we're at right now, but there have been several episodes and several pieces of content that I've created as of late that have focused on the music business, different people's roles in the music business, and in turn, my role in the music business.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Fact is, and it's an unescapable fact, and it's very Uncle Rico of me to focus on it so much.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: I've been out of it for over a decade at this point, but the memories still churn around as if it was all just yesterday.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: So if I'm going to assume that people know that aspect of my life, maybe I should take a few moments as self-indulgent as it may be and give a little composition to it.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe a brief history lesson that can work as a companion for past episodes, it can work as a companion for future episodes, and in some regards this might be a good place to reset the podcast before we move forward with more new episodes.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: So here's what I'm going to do.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to treat myself as if I were a guest on my own show.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to tell a little bit of my origin story and how I formed a love affair with music from a fan perspective to a performing perspective and back to the fan perspective.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to also talk a little bit about some of my perspectives in the music business, what it takes to be successful on the local level, and maybe I'll throw out a few tips on things that I observed.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: My greatest asset in all of my years being involved in music is being a situational observer.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's not my music talent, it's not my business acumen.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's basically reading the situation and reacting in a sensible manner to ensure that I had a lifeboat, a life vest, and a way to be safe in those situations, as silly as that might sound.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: The music business has always been social media before there was social media.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's always hinged on how you interact with people socially.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like, can you find your tribe in punk rock people and other punk rock fans?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say you love the misfits and you all focus on the misfits.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: In a weird way, before the internet, that's a form of social media.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: So if you quantify that across every single realm of the music business, this will make a lot of sense to you.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: But first, let's talk history.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: I may or may not have had a genetic predisposition to be in the music business or to be a musician.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: My dad, much before me, was a semi-successful musician before I was born.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: He was friends with a lot of well-known and famous musicians.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: He recorded on several albums.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: I remember as a kid growing up going through boxes and boxes of pictures of my dad with different people.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: My dad had a single that was produced by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: He had a lot of connections in the business.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: One of his best friends growing up was Kenny Pasarelli, Joe Walsh's bass player.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: His friend Jack Conrad has gone on to play on the final tours of very successful bands.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to name drop, but he's also written a lot of music for very successful musicians.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I had an exposure to it my whole life.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oddly enough, my dad quit the music business long before I was born, but he carried that burden on his back in a very similar way that I've carried it on my back, not a direct parallel, but kind of the history of it on my back for the past 10 years.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably important that I clarify that I talk about my dad and I talk about my mother in past tense because I am alienated by choice from them.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: What I will say is there's a lot of long-term trauma.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And how I would address that, it's like a pot of boiling pasta that you just walk away from and ignore.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Eventually, that water is going to boil over.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And in my life, that boiling water that's spilling all over the place represents trauma.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: But inside that boiling water is still some delicious pasta, right?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So not everything has to be a bad memory, and not every parallel has to be negative.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: So now that I've got that out of the way.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: I would sit in front of the TV watching MTV for hours, and I would see videos from in excess, Sweet Child of Mine was getting played by Guns N' Roses in regular rotation, Nothing But a Good Time by Poison.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it, if you wanted to take it a few years back to 1984, I remember Van Halen's Jump, Hold Me Now by the Thompson Twins.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: MTV has always been a staple in my life.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: But that summer in particular, I was saving up to buy my first guitar.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was in elementary school.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: I was playing saxophone in elementary school, but I really wanted to play guitar.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think that was the summer I realized I wanted to be a rock star, but I was just an elementary kid, right?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I had saved a certain amount of money, and having the lack of patience that I have, I went to a drugstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I lived at the time.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of buying a guitar, I bought myself like a boombox tape player, tape recorder.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I became addicted, like many kids of the 80s and 90s, into recording songs off the radio.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: I would spend hours that summer listening for my favorite song so I could just record it at the right time.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing that I would do is I would play back these recordings and sit down with a pencil and paper and write down all the lyrics so I knew all the words to all the songs.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was awesome.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the start of my love affair with music, and it is a love affair that has outlasted everything.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: It has outlasted my relationship with my biological family.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: It has outlasted friendships, it has outlasted romantic relationships in my life.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: It has been the one and only constant thing in my life.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that is the biggest reason I hold music in such high regard and I have such a reverence for it.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like many of you, it has got me through both the best and worst times of my life.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, as you can imagine, that relationship just grew.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: I remember throwing myself a birthday party in fifth grade.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Mind you, nobody showed up.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was three days before Christmas.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was a hard lesson learned.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time I remember that so vividly because Guns N' Roses Paradise City had just premiered on MTV, and that was a huge deal.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I had Guns N' Roses posters all over my parents' living room waiting for all these kids to come over, and it didn't happen.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then you fast forward to my sixth grade year.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: I had a TV in my room, and I used to watch MTV for hours.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And this was long, long before the VH1 behind the music's uh MTV used to have these things called rockumentaries, and they did one on Aerosmith right around the time they released the pump album.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: They did one on Motley Crue right around the time where they sobered up as I hold up air quotes for the first time and they released Dr.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Feelgood.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: I became obsessed with not only the stories of these bands, but the people that built up these bands, the music.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't confined to one genre, it was all over the place.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was into absolutely everything.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: I loved rap music, I loved metal, I was getting into punk, I liked New Wave.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was never closed-minded as far as my interests went with music.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: When I got into junior high, I got into collecting vinyl for the first time.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: My dad and I would go to estate auctions and estate sales, and we would buy whole cardboard boxes full of records.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: People that had collected in the 60s and 70s, and then they had grown up and moved out of the house.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So their parents were selling them as part of the estate.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I built up this massive collection, and I had so many rare albums in that collection.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: I literally had thousands.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: When I moved out when I was 16 years old, my dad took all of them to his consignment store and he sold my entire collection.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's a little bit heartbreaking.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's we'll get to high school here in just a moment.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: At that time, that's when I learned I was a completist.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: That time when I was collecting vinyl in junior high.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: I not only had to have one album by a certain band or artist, but if I had one album by a certain band or certain artist, it became a hunt for everything else that band was on.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: I had to have every single Van Halen album on record.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: I had to have every single Kiss album on record.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: I had to have every single Iron Maiden album on record.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: If I had one, I had to have them all.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'd always been somewhat obsessive or borderline OCD in regards to that.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Before all of that is when I finally got that guitar, and my dad took the guitar to a auto body shop and had it painted up with a yellow and brown leopard print.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was amazing.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: But it was an old K guitar, and the strings sat like two inches above the fretboard.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was really hard to play.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing I would have rather done than learn how to play guitar.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: But my dad being the person he is or was, the guy just didn't have any patience to teach me.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: He was a really good musician in his own right, but he didn't have the patience to teach me at all.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: One lesson I have learned as a parent that if you want your kids to get into something, they need to discover it organically on their own, or else they're never fully going to develop a love for it.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: So eventually I taught myself.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: I taught myself how to play because it's something I really wanted, not something he was imposing upon me.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: So at this point, we're at my sophomore year in high school, and I know a few chords.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I know how to strum a few songs.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: I knew every rose has its thorn by poison because who doesn't know that song?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I watched U2's Rattle and Hum, the movie, um, start to finish, and my dad had a Beatles songbook, and I had a chord book, a chord picture book, a guitar chord picture book.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I would teach myself these guitar chords, and then I would find a Beatles song that had those similar guitar chords or arrangements to it, and I would teach myself how to play these Beatles songs.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Eventually, I learned how to string guitar chords together, and I started writing my own music in a similar fashion.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: At this point in life, I was in Southwest Iowa.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was in a small town of less than 2,000 people.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: There was not really a lot of people around that also played music or that I could learn from, or I could have this iron sharpens iron environment with.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: There was one drummer in my high school at the time that was into the same kind of music I was, and we became fast friends.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, fast forward to my junior year, I'm stringing these songs together, writing my own songs with these chords as I'm learning them and singing along to them, and it was just me and a drummer playing together, writing these songs.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: I guess you could say that was my first incarnation of a band.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Up to this point in life, I've never been very secure about the sound of my singing voice.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: My sophomore year of high school, I was in choir one time and I took a stab at singing a solo on Billy Joel's River of Dreams, and there were some girls that were in the choir that started laughing whenever I started the audition.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I never auditioned for anything again if it wasn't attached to a uh high school musical or stage production.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, in that regard, I was really self-conscious.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: But when I was writing these songs with Mark, the drummer, I was really confident.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that I learned early on was that I was a good mimic.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: So things that I would learn how to play, I would learn how to play covers, like I would learn how to play songs by Bush or Smashing Pumpkins or Seven Mary III, and I could play them and mimic those voices pretty darn good at that point in time.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: We played a talent show the summer after my senior year and stunk it up pretty good in front of the entire town.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And eventually I moved to a neighboring town about 20 minutes away from where I lived in Iowa.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Mark took me to a mutual friend's house, and that's where I met my friend Dustin Baird and Dustin Spainhauer, and those guys could play, and they also knew how to assemble other guys that could play.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that was where I really formed the first band, or we formed the very first band that I consider my first band, and it was a band called 40 Sunday.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh inside joke, drinking 40s, like 40s of beer on Sunday, 40 Sunday, name of the band.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And eventually 40 Sunday did pretty well.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we ended up becoming a nine-piece band.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: We did a bunch of ska covers.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: We played songs by Real Big Fish, Goldfinger, The Urge, 311, Sublime.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: We did everything that was hip at the time, like 1997, 1998.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is a really good spot to interject a footnote.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: In the formation of 40 Sunday, I got a very severe case of strep throat, like high fevers, like I had to go to the ER at one point.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Anyways, I made the stupid decision to go to a band practice one time.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a moment, and this is not excuse making, because I sincerely, to this day, 25 years later, believe that this is when it happened.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: I blew my voice out.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Our friend Eric Snyder used to host our band practices at his house.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: And remember when I said earlier in this episode that I was a really good mimic?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I pushed myself too hard, and literally mid-song, I was not able to project anything.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: According to Eric at the time, he actually saw me spit blood forward out of my mouth.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that has haunted me ever since.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because I can personally attest as somebody that knows my own body, I was never able to sing the way I was before that night.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I still carried on.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: We played a couple of high school dances in Southwest Iowa, and we had a really respectable following at the time.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: What's important to note here was how fast trends were changing in the late 90s.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like you had third wave ska, and then six months later, you have this post-grunge sound, and then six months later, new metals blowing up all over the place, and crowds are reacting to all of that.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: So 40 Sunday was upbeat, it was fun.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: We were starting to write original music, and some mutual friends of ours became ingrained with the social circles of Slipknot.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we got offered a few opportunities, and one opportunity in particular to play with Slipknot right before they signed their major label deal.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the thing is, if you've ever seen that documentary Pick It Up Ska in the 90s, one of the guys from the Mad Caddies talks about how there's like a six-month window where everybody was into ska, and then six months later, everybody's like, oh, ska sucks! New metal school.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I experienced that firsthand.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you've heard me tell this story on the podcast, but we opened up for Slipknot and got all but booed off the stage.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: My dumbass thought it was a brilliant idea to bring saltwater taffy up on stage because you know I'm a bee positive ska guy and throw it to the crowd, only to have it pelted back at us like a hailstorm in the middle of Iowa.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was a hard lesson learned, and the rest of the band was ready to move on with more of a new metal sound.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't really into new metal quite yet, so I didn't get it.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: I get it at the time, but I didn't get it then, so I was holding on to the hope that you know we could resurrect 40 Sunday into being something more.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: It just never materialized.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: So where I'm at at this point in life, I'm two years out.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: High school, did a little bit of college, I'm doing the band thing, but I'm stuck in the middle of southwest Iowa.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Where I was at, pretty close to equal distance from Des Moines or Omaha.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: I knew that at some point in my life I needed to pick up and move back to a big city.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it was kind of a hard decision to make.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do I go to Des Moines where you know we are dealing with a post-slipknot world, a lot of metal bands, or do I go to Omaha where it was a little bit more diverse?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: So summer of 1999 hits, and I look at that as being a very defining touchstone moment for me musically, because I finally gave into the new metal bug.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: I got into Limp Biscuit.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: I was always a fan of Rage Against the Machine, even though they're not really new metal, but I liked Deftones.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Corn was big at the time, but I was also still into 311.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was still into red hot chili peppers, I was still into the urge, I was into the funk, and also the hip-hop side of things, because I've always been a big fan of hip-hop.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: So naturally, I want to embed all of these interests together.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right now would be a good time for me to implement an editorial footnote.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: I am about to tell the stories of my various Omaha, Nebraska-based bands from my personal vantage point.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: Not everything is gonna come out sounding like sunshine and rainbows.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a realist.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: My intent is to be perfectly honest while simultaneously being respectful, looking at the project itself and not its individual players.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: Moreover, none of what I'm about to say is an indictment on any of the players' skill set or their personalities.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: I love all the guys I used to play in bands with, like family.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And some of my evaluation is more so about my performance in those specific projects than anybody else's.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: My drummer from high school had moved out to Omaha, and so I was kind of touching bass with him off and on, and then I met a bass player on a website called slamomaha.com.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: That bass player ended up being Jeff, who was the bass player of my first real solid original band, Three Quarter Evil.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: By the fall of 1999 and early winter of 2000, Incubus's Make Yourself had come out, and that was a real defining moment for me musically.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: I knew at that point in my life that's the style of music I wanted to be playing.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: I just didn't know the roadmap to get there.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: So in February of 2000, I moved to Omaha, and that's where Three Quarter Evils story starts.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the guitarist at the time was past podcast guest and one of my best friends in the whole world, Eric Swanson, aka DJ Sweet Life.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Jeff was the bass player, and Mark Nicholas was the drummer.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the thing about that time in my life.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: I talked about me not being patient.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Just like the kid that spent his guitar money on buying a radio and tape player in the fourth grade, I put that band on stage probably a good year before it was even ready.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing about first impressions is you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: But things were so big and so boomy at the time in the Omaha music scene that if I didn't do that, I would have been missing a huge opportunity.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Three Quarter Evil that went on stage wasn't great.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't great at that point in time, and honestly, it probably took a good two years for Three Quarter Evil to be great.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: We went through some serious lineup changes.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: We recorded an album that I really don't push to a lot of people, but it's got a lot of songs that to this day I'm begrudgingly known for.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: But at that point in time, it was never the band I had intended it to become.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's always been a hard pill to swallow and kind of the demon that's chased me throughout the music scene.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you walk into social situations and you know that people are being disingenuous towards you, but you put yourself in a position where you want to be valued and you want to be respected.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you start building what I would say are picket fences around you, almost like defense mechanisms, and you encapsulate yourself in these spaces that have slight boundaries because you want to protect who you are.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately, those boundaries can be a sense of delusion in some cases.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them can be just simply to protect your own ego.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: As my acumen built, and my business acumen and my talent grew with each individual project as it came out, that wall got stronger and stronger and stronger.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: And by the time I did RSyng, my last big project, it was like a federal fucking penitentiary.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: It had 12-foot cinder block walls with barbed wire wrapped at the top.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't trust anybody.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one thing that I look back on with regret.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Regardless.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: Going back to that era of three-quarter evil, it wasn't very good, but we had a lot of really huge opportunities.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like I said, we had a lot of lineup changes.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Had a different drummer in the band by that point in time, my friend Doug Decker.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then we eventually recorded a first album.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: One of those lineup changes led into like this three-month woodshed/slash sabbatical.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: What's funny in hindsight is that the band had basically imploded at that point, no more than a month and a half after the release of our debut CD.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: But short and skinny of it is, three-quarter Evils guitarist at the time, Chris Schramm, had left the band.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: We added a guitarist by the name of Ryan Murphy.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: And while Chris was more technically proficient, Ryan was more modern and more in line with what we wanted to do musically.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it was Doug, myself, Jeff, and Ryan, and we immediately started writing our second album, which was called One From None.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: To this day, that album is still one of my most favorite things that I did because it is one of the most genuine things I've ever recorded.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: And honestly, I gotta humble brag a little bit.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's pretty fucking awesome.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Problem is it didn't get a lot of its due because of the bad first impression we made the first iterations of the band and the first group of songs that we did.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we spent a lot of time out of town with One from None.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: We played places as far south as St.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Louis, as far north as Minneapolis, and it was awesome.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: We got a little bit of radio play down in a few different universities.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we got voted into regular rotation in Omaha, Nebraska with a song called Constantine.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: She sleeps in parking lights, five sheep screw gym.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not the same never complaints about the state.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: But it just never came to fruition, even though it was voted in, it just never happened.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Having that experience of playing all those satellite shows, doing little mini tours, and really exploiting that second album really helped me build a business acumen for myself and my band.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: So Three Quarter Evil foreshortened its name to 3QE, released a second album called One from None.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: We played on that album for about two years, not quite two years.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: Jeff eventually made the decision to leave the band, Jeff the bass player, and at that point in time we reinvigorated the band again.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: This was particularly difficult for me because Jeff was so instrumental in getting me to move to Omaha, and I really felt that Jeff was very much the backbone of the 3QE slash three-quarter evil sound.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: But with Jeff out of the picture, it made room for other members to rejoin the band.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: Chris Schramm rejoined, we became a five-piece, my friend Curtis Lucas from high school joined, and it was kind of cool.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Eventually, we changed 3 QE's name to Reganera, and we became like this hard rock band.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: Velvet Revolver was coming out, Avenge Sevenfold was coming out, guitar rock was becoming cool again.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: I had all of this applicable business knowledge from failing so many times with 40 Sunday, failing so many times with 3 Quarter Evil, and almost getting it right with 3QE and experiencing all of this stuff going on outside of town and outside the four walls of Omaha, that I felt I could put something together that would benefit the greater good, not just the band I was in, but other bands.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Please go back and listen to episode 20 of the podcast if you'd like a little bit more context about No Pride Records.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: The problem for me at that time is I started serving two masters.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: We started recording Reagan Era's EP for the purpose of being able to throw two songs on the No Pride Records compilation.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: And there was some really shady and shifty business going on behind the scenes in Reagan Era, and that led to a big online explosion.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: And eventually Reagan Era also dissipated in the summer of 2005.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: Shortly before Reagan Era dissipated, we had done a bunch of satellite shows, including some shows in Minneapolis, and I had started writing a bunch of lyrics that just didn't fit Reagan Era songs in a notebook, but I had no idea where I was going to put them towards.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: My listening habits were a little bit more out of pocket compared to what I was listening to in the depths of Reagan Era as well.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I know that I really wanted to do something different, and we were in the thick of it with the MySpace age.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Literally two weeks after Reagan Era broke up, this is when Corey Wilson walks into my life, and we start the band Right Side Impact.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: He was the guitarist.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: My friend Steve Campbell was the other guitarist.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Ryan Brandt was the bass player, and Doug Decker was the drummer.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we had started churning out songs like no other.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think we had written 10 songs in two weeks.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not talking about just throwaway shit either.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of these songs lasted the duration of the whole band.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: I would say at this point in time, this is where I realized that Corey and I wrote songs really well together, and we were both in the midst of a creative renaissance.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we had already had our first show booked two months after we had formed.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: And mind you, I was really conscientious about it.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: I knew that Three Quarter Evil had gotten up on stage a lot sooner than they probably should have.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I begrudgingly took that booking so soon because I felt that confident in the material.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Steve was hungry.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: Ryan was a fast learner.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it didn't take much to make right side impact a well-oiled machine fast.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like we are a much better band at the start of the band than we were at the end, because by the end, we were chasing other people's successes and looking internally almost in a negative sense and pissing on our own project.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: Our shows became more about the drinking and the partying than it did putting forth good quality entertainment.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: We recorded our debut album, July Changed Everything over the winter, early spring of 2006.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: We released it in the summer of 2006.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: One thing that's really eaten me alive about Rideside Impact is those songs probably should have been recorded a different way.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: I've always wondered what those songs would have sounded like if we would have spent the money and recorded them at a place like Warehouse Productions.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: For those of you that are in the Omaha area, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that's always kind of eaten at me over the years is what could have been versus what was.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm proud of the songs.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not proud of the production on the songs.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like we really rushed it for the sake of getting an album out there, and everybody was being super budget conscious about it.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, sometimes saving a few dollars isn't the right answer, especially if you care about a music project you're a part of.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: I had to ruminate on that for some time.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: That was a really crazy time in my life, and we decided to get married.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: At that point in time, I decided it was time to call it a day with music completely.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: So in November of 2006, I quit.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Played their last show.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody went their separate ways, and I was done.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was convinced that I was done with music for good.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people believed it.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, local music journalist Mark Manor even told me in the very first RSyng interview that we did.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: R Singh was the band that followed, and I'm gonna get to that in a moment.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: But in the very first RSyng interview, he said when I quit, he was convinced that I was done.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: What happened to me over the course of that time was kind of crazy.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: I got married, I was gonna become a dad for the first time.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: I was trying to figure my life out.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: Life had made that decision for me, and I'm better for it because it happened.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: My daughter is awesome.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: She is me through and through.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: She is absolutely awesome, and I wouldn't change a bit of that for all the money in the world.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: But over the course of that nine months, I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch eating Pizza Hut, wings, wheat fins, and watching Scrubs reruns.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: And next thing I know, I'm about 40 pounds heavier.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Corey Wilson from Right Side Impact was stopping by and visiting me on a regular basis, and he would show me this thing he had written on guitar, and I'd be like, Yeah, man, that's that's pretty cool.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then shortly after my daughter was born in May 2007, we kind of had a talk about what it would take to put a band together again.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it was kind of like, well, no stress, low stress environment.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we'll play maybe one show every two months, yada yada yada.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get this thing put together.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the rest kind of goes full circle to the very first episode of this podcast was the history of how Arasing was put together.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: That was Corey Wilson, Lowell Owen, Tony Heeman, Matt Oliver, and myself.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: To this day, it probably remains not only my most well-known musical project, but probably my best musical project.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: In the eyes of a lot of my long-term critics.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Everything that I have done musically has a redeeming quality to it, even three-quarter evil.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: RSing was kind of the culmination of all of those things, plus that added layer of maturity.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: All the guys in the band RSing were career-minded guys that were just doing this band thing, but wanted to have this awesome band.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we all shared a common interest of making it worth our time.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that kind of skewed how we viewed promotion and how professionally we were going to handle promotion, how we handled booking, making the right choices, not just saying yes to everything, like maybe saying yes to one of every four things that we were offered, and making every moment and every opportunity count.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say that is probably my biggest critique of any bands in the Midwest or the Omaha area.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Not to say that I was the best at that, but the most successful ones get that mindset.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: They know to make every single opportunity count.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: RSyng released our debut album in November of 2008, and we were very sensible with how we took bookings leading up to that and how we took bookings after that.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: About a year and a half after the release of our first album, Corey Wilson left the band and Adam Thompson joined.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: We released a second album in November of 2010.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: Sadly for him, a few months after my friend Ryan Murphy from 3QE joined the band in November of 2011.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially, my path to music runs a span of 1996 to 2012.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: In 2012, I had another big life change.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: I became divorced, and I started to focus on music again, but it kind of didn't have the same momentum that it had before.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I did a series of solo acoustic shows in 2013 and 2014, and I really haven't done music since.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: I went through a phase in 2012 after disbanding RSyng, where I thought I wanted to get into band management and I worked with a band for a short period of time, or I attempted to.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: I just didn't know that our values were going to align and if they were going to be open to the types of critique I was going to offer them to elevate their product to the next level.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: One of my skill sets throughout the years of doing these projects has been to build a following around that project and getting people excited because I believe in a sense of participatory management.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: You invest in other people, so they invest in you, and it becomes a reciprocal process and it's constant.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you get people excited about things, and it just paves the way for more opportunities.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: I learned a lot of business shortcuts, a lot of do's, a lot of don'ts.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: We covered that in the last episode with Dave Campbell quite a bit, but my strength, as I said earlier, was always in being a situational observationalist.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, have you ever watched the show Psych, where Sean is able to convince people that he's a psychic because he can observe cues and he can observe mannerisms and he can observe little clues in an area that other people can't catch.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: That is a talent I feel that I've always held.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: And aligning that with my love of music gave me a better sense of business on how to make a project successful, how to get people engaged to care about what you're doing, to make them feel like they are a part of the process.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: So if I were to offer advice to new, young and up-and-coming bands or bands that are in a rut that want to reinvent themselves, here's what I would say to you.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: First and foremost, make sure your lineup is right.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: Make sure you are playing with the right people, that your values and your goals are completely aligned.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: Two, do not get up on stage before you're ready.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: You will never get a second chance to make a first impression.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you stink it up once, that's how people are going to view you from that point forward unless you put forth something pretty goddamn compelling.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: Three, if you want people to care about you, you need to project an image that you care about yourself.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: Put forth high quality promotional material, high-quality graphics.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: Have a plan.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: Don't go expecting the top-tier shows if you haven't put in the work to earn them.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: Fact is, if you want to be a part of the music business, you're gonna have to treat it as a business.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: If you want people just to love your art, well, they can do that in your fucking basement.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: Venues are businesses.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: The sooner bands and musicians understand that, the sooner everybody will get along and fair play will exist more freely.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: Your job is to sell tickets and to sell drinks, and their job is to give you the platform to do so.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: Your other job, which is your main goal, where everything else is secondary, is to sell your project in the process.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: Again, top-tier promotional materials, good-looking merch, a great sounding album.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: Put forth the image that you give a shit about what you're doing if you want anybody else to give a shit about what you're doing.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: Next point is if you want to increase your net worth, you have to increase your network.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you want other artists and musicians to support your project, you need to get out there and support other artists and musicians in their projects.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: Ain't nobody gonna buy into a one-sided relationship.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: Book sensibly.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you live in Omaha, Nebraska, and you book a show on March 20th, the next time you play a show shouldn't be until May 20th.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: You can roll your eyes and tell me that is a ridiculous rule, but don't oversaturate your market.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's the equivalent of working for free.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: On that same accord, don't align yourself with people that perpetrate that mistake, also.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: Align yourself with people whose vision, just like your bandmates, are aligned with yours.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: Group together, have an action plan, and execute it.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: Don't put yourself in the position to where a venue will question your integrity or a promoter will question your integrity.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you are going to sell yourself as the next biggest thing since sliced bread, then you better damn well have a plan to present yourself in a way that looks like you are the next biggest thing since sliced bread.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: You are competing with instant gratification and social networking.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm talking about the social networks on your phone and online.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: You are competing with things that other people would rather be doing.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: And some other people might rather be sitting in pitch pizzeria enjoying some pizzas and beers than listening to your band.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to give them a reason to come listen to your band.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Trust, but verify.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: Not everybody is your friend, but not everybody is your enemy either.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: You will find alliances in the most unlikely of places, and sometimes the most productive things happen when you take big risks with people that you don't assume are going to have the most success.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes making a fan of the underdog becomes the greatest asset to have in your back pocket.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: The radio is not the end all be all for your music, but you should treat your music as if it were.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, if you are a mainstream band, you need to know that people digest things better in short pockets of time.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: Three minutes and thirty seconds is the average time a song is played on the radio.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: So if you are writing a five-minute opus, you need to understand that your audience for that five-minute opus is going to be a lot smaller than the audience for the three-minute and thirty-second song.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: You think that's the stupid rule until people stop paying attention.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: People's attention spans are short, and like I said, you are competing with other things on a minute-by-minute basis.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: Control your public narrative.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Every one of your band members is an extension of you.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: How they behave in public and online is also an extension of you and your band.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: So if you got one band member that likes to get online and run his mouth and troll people, know that there will be blowback from that.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: Venues may not book you, other bands may not play with you.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: I have seen this play out time and time and time again in the online forums.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, do not assume that you are entitled to anything.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter how big your last project was, it doesn't matter that your band was played on the radio 20 years ago.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: You are only as good as what you put forth tomorrow.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday doesn't matter.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that sounds like a contradiction to my statement that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but if you compartmentalize every single music project you do in such a manner that people do give you that second chance time and time again, don't take it for granted.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: Just know that you have the opportunity to be better tomorrow than you were 20 years ago.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: And don't carry yourself like an egotistical prick if you were successful 20 years ago.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because it doesn't matter now, buddy.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: So there it is.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: I have talked about my music history.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've talked about my love of playing music.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've talked about my love of listening to music, and I've offered advice based on the things that I learned as a result of all of those years of experience.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about now.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: These days, I am a career-driven man.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: I am a proud parent and step parent of four awesome children.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: I have a lovely wife.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: I have a great big house that I'm super proud of.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we have worked hard for every single thing that we got.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: And things are good.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: Life is good.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: I am so far removed from the music business, but I love talking about it.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: As my friend John says, it's like catnip.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: It is like catnip to talk about this stuff.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to keep doing that on this podcast so long as you keep listening.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: I know I have spoken to all of you time and time again like you already knew my history.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, here it is on a silver platter for you.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: And if you ever want to DM and talk to me about the music business, my time in the music business, or maybe you want some insights on how to better market your band, or you know, get yourself stage ready, or just finagle some of the business portions of booking a show and cashing out a show and making a show financially successful for yourself.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Feel free to message me.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: We don't just have to talk about podcast stuff.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: Hit me up.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: I love talking about this stuff.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like my friend John said, it's catnip.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'll close with this and let you know that my last project, Aurasyng, can be found online still.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um do a Google search, Reverb Nation, Rising, A-U-R-A-S-I-N-G, and all of the songs we ever did are available for download there.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if you want to check out a little bit more into my music career.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: In retrospect, there is a great set of song lyrics that are actually intended to tell the story of two people in a romantic relationship, but I apply it to my love of music and my ending my time with music.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it comes from Rise Against, and the song is called Savior.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the lyric goes, So tell me now, if this ain't love, then how do we get out?
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't know.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's when she said, I don't hate you, boy, I just want to save you while there's still something left to save.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's when I told her, I love you, girl, but I'm not the answer for all the questions that you still have.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: And while that set of lyrics may sound a little canned and corny when applied to this situation, I think to me, applying that to my life, that was me making peace with it when I walked away and stating that peace to you now.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening along.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: This has been a fun but long talk.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I look forward to sharing more stories as we go down the line.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: And as you listen to past episodes or future episodes, feel free to bounce back to this one so you have a little bit more context on the origin story of your favorite podcast host.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: Have a great day, everybody.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: All of those clips are from past projects.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: Just message me if you want to learn more.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, friends.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoyed that.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: Make sure you give me a like, a follow, a subscribe on all forms of social media TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: Hit me up at www.cotonthemic.com.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: You can send me an email at caughtonthemic at gmail.com.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: And for anybody that has any guest inquiries, please feel free to shoot me a DM in any of those social media platforms or send me a message at that same email address.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: This has been Caught on the Mic with Michael Clark.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Michael Clark.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, thank you.