Vast |
In this day of the disposable music icon, it's extremely rare that a writer gets to see a favorite new artist's career grow and develop. In the case of Jon Crosby and his one man project, VAST, I've been fortunate not only to follow Jon's career thought three amazing, groundbreaking albums, but I've also, literally, watched Jon grow up. I first met Jon in April of 1998. He was a twenty-one year old kid from rural Northern California, with a major-label deal on Elektra records and a newly recorded album, Visual Audio Sensory Theater, about to be released. As soon as I received an advance of the album and put it on, I knew I was hearing music that would -- as The Downward Spiral had done for Trent Reznor -- inspire an almost religious devotion to this artist. Flirting with an amalgam of genres including arena rock, artrock, industrial, metal and classical, VAST sounded to me like what might happen if Nine Inch Nails met Enigma at a party thrown by The Moody Blues. I fell in love with the music immediately and have championed Jon and VAST ever since. Though there are many and varied influences in Jon's music, with the possible exception of British prog rockers Porcupine Tree, there isn't any music like VAST's being made today. Period. I don't say shit like this very often, but Jon Crosby is a genius.
VAST's sophomore release,Music For People, was released in 2000. Music For People was an exhilarating step forward in modern rock: An eclectic mix of rock styles revisiting and elaborating on the themes of the first album. Among the layered guitar landscape, Middle-Eastern motifs and seductively gloomy trip hop riffs, Music For People included lush string arrangements courtesy of the New Bombay Recording Orchestra. Featuring the anthemic "Free," and the heart-felt ballad, "I Don't Have Anything," Music For People pushed the gothic/industrial envelope into the forbidden zone of arty, prog-rock revivalism. Though far from commercial blockbusters, the first two VAST albums initially sold a combined 250,000 copies, and continue to sell today.
In March of 2002, Crosby voluntarily walked away from his deal at Elektra in order to create something of a new paradigm in the way music can be marketed and sold.Shortly before the recent release of VAST's third album,Nude, on Carson Daly's 456 label, I was able to catch up with Jon on the phone at his home in Austin, Texas. We spoke about his departure from the major label world, the intriguing inspiration behind Nude, his revolutionary approach to selling VAST's music online, his new label relationship, and how the internet has made VAST one of the biggest underground acts in rock.
Leaving a Major Label
STARPOLISH: Let's talk about what you have been up to since touring with Music For People. Why did you choose to leave Elektra?
CROSBY: My split with Elektra was a good separation and a very mutual thing. I still really care about the people I worked with over there and the A&R guy who signed me. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be here now. By the time I left, I'd achieved a lot.
STARPOLISH: What did you learned about both yourself and the music business from the major label experience?
CROSBY:I could almost write book about being on that label; I mean, so many things happened. The highlights for me were that it was the beginning of a brand new life. When I was 20 years old, I was literally sleeping on my mother's couch with no money and no one knew VAST, at all. I was kind of a joke in my own town. I went from that to -- I think two years later -- being stuck in traffic listening to one of my songs on the alternative radio station. It was the number one requested song, and the DJ came on and said, "That one's getting a lot of requests." I went to India and recorded an orchestra. I played hundreds of shows in front of thousands of people. I heard myself on the radio and saw myself on MTV. I put out four singles. Everything was really a success.
The problem was that the label and I had different visions of what we wanted VAST to be. To me, this is my baby and it's a very artistic thing. It's about expression, while for the label it's totally a business. I felt really good about what we had done. It wouldn't have been good for us to make our third record on Elektra.
STARPOLISH: When did you leave LA and start working on the songs that would become this album?
CROSBY: I decided I wanted to make my own record and we got out of the deal in March of 2002. I knew that we could do whatever we wanted -- release it ourselves, do an indie deal, or do a combination of something. At the time I was about to turn 26, and I had invested my entire mind, body and spirit in VAST since I was 18. Literally, that's all I did. When I got signed and moved to LA, I was under contractual obligations to do things. But I wasn't from LA, even though I lived in there. I didn't know anyone in LA and all I was doing was recording, rehearsing and touring. When I finished that, I went right back into recording, rehearsing, touring and promoting. Right after the touring for Music For People ended, I started demo-ing. [By then] I had been doing VAST straight for seven years and I needed a break. I felt like there has to be more to life than being a rock star and just doing VAST all the time.
I didn't really have any good relationships, and then I met my fiancé and my priorities changed a bit. I figured, "I'm out of this deal, I'm free, I want to take a break and find myself, learn how to be a man and stop being a boy." I knew I wasn't quitting music, but I needed to put it aside for a while. In the summer of 2002, I'd planned to work on the record in LA, but I wasn't feeling it. I immediately left and went to New Mexico. Most musicians have their own Pro-Tools rigs, and I had a little studio. At that point, the record was almost finished and we could have put it out by the end of the year. I had a lot of songs that I'd done -- maybe 40 -- in the can, and I wrote a bunch of new ones in New Mexico. At the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, we started actively seeking options to release the record. It was also the beginning of a little bit of a recession as well, and being in Albuquerque was a drag. It's a beautiful place, but it's horrendously poor -- like the great depression.
Selling Online
STARPOLISH: Tell me about selling demos online prior to the album's release.
CROSBY:I think that's the most important thing about what we've done. We're basically the first band that's released a record as an MP3 and sold it at a realistic price. I've heard that Ice T did it, but supposedly he did it through a company, he didn't actually do it himself. That's the reason we did it; it was time. We'd already been talking to labels and thinking about releasing the record ourselves. Whenever our manager would be talking to a label, he'd say, "Digital rights are not on the table. They belong to us," and they still belong to us. I feel really proud of that, and that's what I think I left LA for. I really wanted to do something special -- or I should say that I wanted to continue doing something that I believe in and that I thought was special. As far as I know, we are the first to do this, and I think it's great. I think it's the solution for a lot of the music business blues.
STARPOLISH: I understand that the promotion went really well. How did fans find out about it?
CROSBY: There were a lot of people going to our website, www.realvast.com. The Internet can be pretty big if you approach it the right way. Also, [our publicist] Andy set up some advance coverage with the L.A. Times, Billboard, MTV and Rollingstone.com. We didn't really do any promotion until after we'd been selling these files. It was just [posted on] our message board. We can have up to 13,000 people a day looking at our message board, so if you release something, the fans are there. The Internet is amazing. It totally changes the dynamic between fans and musicians. I probably wouldn't have left Elektra if there were no Internet, because I wouldn't have been able to have any communication with my fans. The Internet has been a major thing for us. Ours fans are really into music and are pretty hip and web-savvy and proactive. They're into being a part of this.
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STARPOLISH: How were the songs sold?
CROSBY: We had two groups of 10 MP3's each. The first group was called Turquoise, and it was mostly songs that weren't yet mixed, but ones I wanted people to hear anyway. I wanted to strip this thing to its most basic level, and just let people hear my music. I got rid of all the red tape and it was like, "Here it is!" The second 10 songs, which were called Crimson, we released in August. We're going to continue with the color theme and release more downloads over the year. I'm not sure of the exact number [of downloads] sold, but I believe it's about eight or nine thousand. If we were selling actual records it would be a very different thing. We're basically inventing a completely new market. This isn't iTunes, which don't even sell that well. I heard the people at MTV say that the number of downloads we sold is the same amount that Justin Timberlake and Johnny Cash sell when they put up MP3's. I think that's worth pointing out, too, that out of the 3,000 items available at Payloads, the site we're doing this through, (digitalpayloads.com), we're at number two and three. The only thing that's sold more than us on their whole site is Madonna. We've sold more that Fleetwood Mac, when they were at number nine on Billboard, and we sold more that Steely Dan, Seal, Trapt, The Used and Christina Aguilera. It's amazing what you can do when you're on somewhat of an equal playing field, and it's ironic that we're outselling artists that have millions of dollars in promotional money behind them when we didn't even have a label.
STARPOLISH: It's nice to see the music doing the talking for a change.
CROSBY: I think that what people are going to find is that I'm not sitting here tooting my own horn. I'm really trying to toot the horn of what I think is going to be the next major thing to happen in the music industry. I don't think I can take as much credit as the Internet. Since the beginning of time, there have been bands and artists that people have been into, and then there have been bands and artists the corporations have been into. Often, they're not the same. There are a lot of bands that people seem to like way more than the media does. With the Internet, it just doesn't matter. People can come to you directly and see you. It's revolutionary. It eliminates that whole control factor. You can be in the smallest town, out in the middle of nowhere -- where no bands come through, and there's no interesting magazines on the stands --- and you can just type in "VAST" on a search engine and -- boom! -- you're right at our site.
STARPOLISH: Tell me about your production company, 2blossoms.
CROSBY: We released those two MP3 collections before we signed with 456, and I think that might have been part of the reason they were interested in us. When I decided to make these two records available, I thought we should have a name for where they came from other than just Jon Crosby. I wanted to come up with the classic imprint to put on the record, and I came up with the name 2blossoms. I'm still not 100% sure what I want to do with it. I think what 2blossoms will be is my playground. One thing I feel pretty sure about is that I'm not interested in traditional A&R, like a label. I think that way of doing business is dead. I want to create a downloadable music community where we don't take a cut of people's downloads. Maybe [we'll] charge some kind of membership fee -- like $10 a month -- so we can keep it advertising free and pay for the bandwidth, and that's it.
Carson Daly's Label
STARPOLISH: Nude is the flagship release on 456 Entertainment, the new indie label co-founded by Carson Daly. How did you hook up with them?
CROSBY: My girlfriend was a friend of the A&R guy there, Jason Stevens. She was talking to him about what we were doing and he became interested. At first, I was hesitant to sign a traditional deal, but Steve, my manager thought it sounded interesting. Once they heard a CD they wanted to do it immediately. We had had a publishing deal [with Warner Chappell] and part of the stipulation of that deal was that our releases had to go through a major distributor. Caroline isn't considered to be a major distributor, even though they are. It was a small print' thing in my contract that kind of fucked us up for awhile. If we'd gone through 456 without getting that cleared up, the publishers would have taken money from us, but not given us an advance. That would have been a very bad thing. We wanted out of our publishing deal, but we also wanted to get our first two records back and be able to collect publishing, because I was un-recouped. [If I hadn't gotten out of that deal] I would have never seen royalties off the first two records, and they still sell a lot every week.
We knew going into the deal with 456 that it's not a traditional record deal, but a partnership. I'd much rather be with Carson at 456 than with any A&R at any label. It might seem a little tacky for me to talk about the business, but these days I think [the business aspect] is more important than it's probably ever been. A musician needs to be somewhat conscious of what's going on, because it totally affects your art. You can't do videos, make records and tour unless you have money, and if you're always getting money from someone else, you never have creative control. So, it was a very funny thing, we ended up getting the first two records back and getting out of the deal. They owed us money, so we just negotiated for the songs back and half the money.
Getting Nude
STARPOLISH: Nude, to me, sounds like the next logical step in your music. Comparing it to the previous records, it's somewhat lighter in musical tone, and more mature, but the songs seem to still be about pretty heavy subjects like love, abandonment, sex, atonement and stuff drawn from relationships. First off, what inspired the album's title?
CROSBY:I came up with the title, again, as a reference to the Internet. It struck me as a little odd that here you have a billion people online and they have the ability to talk to anyone, anywhere, about anything. You can find out anything, see and do anything, but the bottom line is that people really love sex. They love nudity and they love porn. It just struck me as really ironic and kind of funny. It was very revealing about humanity; revealing in a very dark, sad, but also very beautiful way. No matter how convoluted our lives become because of technology, we just really want to...fuck (laughs). Porn is absolutely huge online, it's way bigger that music. It's insane. I was just going, "What is this? Why is there so much nudity and porn and shit online?" Of course, the fans are always getting their webcams out and making faces, and it's so sexual. I don't think that people are necessarily more sexual now. I think they've always been that way, but through radio and TV you'd never know, because the FCC controls everything and it's so conservative. When you look at people's Live Journals and their websites, it's a big thing. It's a counter-culture I guess. The Internet is a very sexual place. I just started thinking, "What does that mean, about us? What does that say about the world?" I began to obsess on the idea: the darkness and the beauty of it, the desperation of people around the world, being naked and trying to communicate. It started to trip me out. I think the record is about love and pain, that was always an ongoing theme: romantic love and pain in life, and a combination of how something can be so beautiful it almost hurts, that kind of thing. I felt that [this idea] really fit in with the way I felt about nudity online and about what it symbolized. I think [the title is] also about this record being the most revealing about myself. On the other records, I had creative control, but this one is the most me.
STARPOLISH: How do you think Nude is different fromVASTand Music For People, as far as how your songwriting has evolved and how the album reflects where you are right now?
CROSBY:Well, it probably goes this way with anyone, that by the time you finish something, mix and master it and it gets in the stores, you're already starting to change and move on to your next thing. I finished recording this album in August (2003). We finished mixing it and it was in the can by October. So, I'm already moving on to the next thing. I still love the other records, but what I can say about the music is that the songs on this record, just by themselves, are very strong songs. There's something about it that makes it easy to listen to again and again. This is the record I enjoy listening to the most, if I just want to hear and groove to music.
There's stuff I've done on all three records that I'm really proud of, but I don't think there's any limits of how good music can be. It can always get better, and that's what's exciting. Everyone likes to say that Music For People was commercial, but I think it was one of my most creative and experimental records. To me, it was the least commercial thing I've done. As a young guy trying to impress the world, I ended up doing some impressive stuff on the first record, but it's a little too much for me to listen to sometimes.
STARPOLISH: I wanted to point out that your U2 influence seems more prominent on Nude, especially on your vocals.
CROSBYI think I'm going to hear that a lot. I'd rather be compared to Bono than a lot of other people. To be honest, in my defense...I was watching some music television last night, a video of some alternative band. The music was really pretty, but when the vocal came in it was some convoluted, processed vocal. On the video channels, it's almost all rap, so no one's singing at all. Then you have the Nu Metal bands and they're doing the Cookie Monster thing. So, when I open my mouth and sing, I tend to come off a lot more like Bono, just because I'm just singing. He's probably one of the only singers out there that's actually singing. Everyone else is doing the pretend-singing thing, or rapping or screaming. So many vocals in today's pop are so played, they're so hammy. I'm just being myself.
STARPOLISH: Were these songs inspired by one particular relationship?
CROSBY:I would say I drew from an emotional well. I think a lot of times the songs are about several people at one time, depending on the song. Sometimes they're not about a particular person at all but about a situation. It might sound cheesy but sometimes I think "Thrown Away" is me singing about my generation -- the generation that's younger than Generation X -- and how we've just been completely forgotten in every way shape and form. We're fucked. We're not even going to have Social Security. You can't afford to buy a house because every house is half a million dollars. I think our generation has been totally chewed up and spit out. That song feels more like a combination of abandonment issues from me not ever knowing my father, to maybe feelings of being disposable in general from the music industry and also feeling like my generation just doesn't matter or count. It's all those things together.
There isn't one song on the record that's about a girl, specifically. Maybe the closest one is "Winter In My Heart." I met a girl while I was living in New York and I wrote that song right after 9-11. People in NY were just like zombies at the time and kind of beside themselves. Being in New York during all that was almost like a dark, romantic time. The relationship ended just because we were so different. She was this Staten Island girl and I was this California guy. It was a sad time, but it was an important time.
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STARPOLISH: Do you have a favorite song or songs on the record?
CROSBY: For me, the song "Lost" is the most reflective of my time in Albuquerque. I was feeling like I was fighting my shadow: being in the middle of nowhere -- in the middle of the desert --and not knowing anyone. It was like I was going through some kind of personal crisis. That song really helped me get through that time. It's funny how a lot of fans say certain songs helped them get through a hard time. But those songs helped me get through that time. I think they express a lot of how I was feeling, while really trying to let go of the past and move on to the future. I didn't know what I should and shouldn't hold onto. That's also expressed in "I Need to Say Goodbye"...but "Lost" is just a very, very direct song, because I felt very lost. That's my style, lyrically, to speak directly from my heart. It's just what I do. In the line, "Going to places where my friends turn to strangers," I felt like hundreds of people I'd known in my life were gone, because I'd moved around so much and been through so many things. I felt like an ancient boy; at 26 I already felt like I was 46.
I was so insecure on the other records, I always felt like I had to do something to make up for the fact that I was a loser. Everything I did I think expressed that, in a lot of ways. This time, I feel really confident about the record I've made. Not just proud of it, like I did the others, but really confidant, and I feel really comfortable about myself. I feel really excited about being in VAST and doing this. I want to stay away from anything that's a "put on." This is real; these are songs that came from my heart. We don't need to spin it or have an agenda. Basically, we needed to roll six, five times and we did. We gambled and we won. 2003 was an amazing year. I went from being, like, broken in half in Albuquerque, literally fighting my shadow, to being in a partnership with one of the most powerful people in the music industry.
I think it's an interesting story that I decided to leave the conventional way of the music industry, took a huge chance by doing something different, and it's working. Everyone thought I was crazy releasing MP3s and that I'd be pirated to death, but it was a huge success. It's so cool when somebody takes a chance and does something different, and it works.
