indie

The Billboard staff’s list of the 100 best songs of 2005 highlights the macro-trends in modern rock from 20 years ago: veterans like Green Day and Foo Fighters were still scoring mega-hits, relative newcomers like The Killers and Coldplay were coming into their own, and bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance were helping emo reach the masses. These bands headlined arenas, earned radio play and were constant fixtures on MTV. For a generation scouring a pre-smartphone Internet, however, there was an alternative to the rock bands that were already labeled “alternative.”

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Indie rock existed for decades before 2005, but the mid-point of the 2000s was the year that blogs started becoming more ubiquitous, their left-of-center recommendations started reaching wider audiences, and artists that previously wouldn’t have believed that they could cater to large audiences suddenly started playing to them. Thanks to a “Best New Music” Pitchfork declaration or a prominent print-magazine writeup, the floodgates would suddenly open for artists signed to indie labels. This was still a few years before the mainstream fully began intermingling with the indie scene – by way of Jay-Z infamously showing up to Grizzly Bear’s Brooklyn show, but in the meantime, several artists saw their profiles balloon and their crowds swell, thanks to some of the most daring and thought-provoking indie albums released that decade.

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To celebrate Billboard’s 2005 Week, nine indie artists opened in separate interviews about the year that their lives transformed thanks to a breakthrough album release. 

These artists discussed their memories of the indie scene in 2005, shared pinch-me moments about their unplanned success reflected on how the music industry evolved in the following years, and offered advice for independent artists hoping to break big today. Read through all of the conversations below.

(Ed. note: These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

The Brooklyn-by-way-of-Philadelphia group’s self-titled debut album, a collection of joyful indie rock arrangements fronted by Alec Ounsworth’s yelping voice, was heralded as a DIY sensation by critics upon its release. Ounsworth looks back on the band’s out-of-nowhere launch, and how his feelings about the first CYHSY album have evolved.

It seemed like people were paying attention as we were playing live shows from 2003 to the album release in 2005. I was confident in what we were doing, but I didn’t think, “Everybody’s gonna love this.” I just generally don’t have much of a point of view regarding what people find attractive in music, so I was surprised that anybody showed up.

You never really know what’s gonna come of what you’re doing — you try and be honest with yourself and your work. I’m a bit of a music snob, I mean, and I was just trying to do something that stood up to my standards, you know? I really like kind of haphazard stuff — like a lot of bands, one of my major influences was Velvet Underground and some of Brian Eno’s early stuff, so I wanted to promote experimentation and disregard the minute details to a degree. So it was sloppy! A lot of the live shows especially were sloppy. But I was like, they get the idea.

I had heard here and there that people had blogs? But I thought of them like zines, essentially, and I didn’t really think of them. I was very appreciative of anybody who paid us any mind — but I hear about this term “blog rock,” and I had probably less to do with that than most people.  In a way, I wish I had been digging into that a little bit more, but I sort of preferred to be surprised to go up to New York, and then there would be a show by Menomena, or Scissor Sisters, or The National, or whoever. And I was just like, “I’ve never heard these guys!” And it was just always my own first impression, never what anybody else was saying.

We actually had the first album ready in 2004, before we had a true team on board, so we did a mini-release that preceded the bigger release in 2005. I didn’t expect my voice, or a lot of other aspects, to translate on a bigger level. I was just shocked. We were selling all of these records out of people’s apartments, and I remember packaging CDs with my mom, because we were getting a lot of orders — sending stuff to to New Zealand, and to other places in the world. That’s when we started to think, “This might have some following.”  I would go and deliver boxes of CDs to record stores in New York and Philadelphia, and they’d asked me what my position on the team was.

I remember trying to rush the second album. For me at the time, it was this stubborn naïveté — thinking, “Well, heroes of mine like Bob Dylan released albums all the time, we should just do that.” Some Loud Thunder came out of that mentality of ‘Let’s just keep going and push and push.’ We toured a bit on that, and I decided to take a lot of time off, five years between albums. I was struggling to manage the belief that I had in it. I wanted to be genuine — I didn’t want to go through the motions out there, and I didn’t think that was fair to people. I was easily worn down.

The five years off didn’t really help a lot in terms of the trajectory, and then streaming services kicked in. I still am learning to deal with that and trying to understand — not only streaming services, but the social media platforms kept shifting. We had a pretty reasonable following on MySpace, and then it switched over to Facebook. And Facebook is still in existence, but it’s sort of been taken over by Instagram. It’s a constant shift of, “How do we now rebuild, based on the services that have nothing to do with us?” I’m not so great at that, because I don’t naturally project myself into the digital world. It’s a little bit difficult for me, and kind of overwhelming, to get on track, particularly for this kind of band.

I think at the beginning I didn’t appreciate the first album a lot. I didn’t even really want to release it, because at the time, I didn’t know that you’re supposed to be, like, 60-to-70 percent happy with your album. It’s not always exactly what I have in my head, and I’ve learned to let things go. I have a lot of trouble being happy with what I’ve produced at the moment, and then a couple years later, I’m like, “Huh, that actually was pretty decent.” I am very thankful that, despite my judgment at the time, I made an album that I am still proud of, and I am not embarrassed at all to perform.

The Mountain Goats

Singer-songwriter John Darnielle’s musical project had been a lo-fi cult favorite for years, but 2005’s The Sunset Tree, a poignant collection of stories inspired by his childhood and the abuse he faced from his stepfather, helped deliver the Mountain Goats to a much wider audience. Darnielle unpacks the album’s place in his greater legacy.

We were on a three-album contract from 4AD — I was going to make three albums with them no matter what, and the third one was the last one on the contract. Tallahassee had not lit a fire under the world at all, and We Shall All Be Healed had been received with pretty mixed reviews. We were so proud of that record — I was micromanaging in those days, writing the press kit, committed to a sort of obscurantist vision of how to present stuff. But after We Shall All Be Healed, I was like, “I don’t really think that I’ll be doing this much longer.” 

At the same time, I had written these songs that were important to me and I thought were good. But the whole time I’m making the record, I’m thinking that this is probably the last time we get to do this. When the touring started for The Sunset Tree, I was volunteering at a local animal shelter and planning on finding a day job. My assumption was that my two-year experiment in living as a musician was about to come to an end.

I say this with nothing but love for all the people who worked for me at 4AD in New York, but they didn’t know my stuff well, and I didn’t have the money to fly from Iowa to New York to have a meeting to talk about the record. So they just got the record, and they listened to it, and they said, “Well, what does this sound like?” They’re looking for RIYL stuff on the sleeve. Well, the Mountain Goats don’t really sound like anybody at that point, but they wanted to compare it to somebody. So on the promo, the RIYL was Cake, and They Might Be Giants. The Mountain Goats are something you have to come to terms with, and if you try to compare them to other things, it usually doesn’t work out. Everybody thinks that, obviously — I don’t think we’re so completely unique that you can’t compare us to anybody. But that had been the case that, for two records, people seemed not to know what to make of us.

Usually when I’m writing a record, I’m thinking about the stories I want to tell, but The Sunset Tree was half-written on tour, and I never used to write on tour. But my stepfather died, and I was touring constantly then, and tour is an emotional pressure cooker — especially if you sleep very badly on tour, which I do. If you deprive a person of sleep, their emotions come to the surface.

Pitchfork was entering their kingmaker phase. That’s when you really would lose sleep thinking, “Are they going to review it on release day, and what’s the number grade gonna be?” It makes me feel a little sheepish to admit what a big deal it was, but it was a big deal — a very good review would literally put you into bigger rooms on your tour. 

The main thing I remember is the New Yorker story — that was the giant deal of that cycle for us. We heard that Sasha Frere-Jones was going to be writing a thing, and he talked to me, and he wound up writing about me and Craig Finn, and we had a photo shoot. The night the New Yorker piece hit the stands, we were in Boston, and it was an electric atmosphere for us. To have a piece affording our work some serious analysis was a giant deal, and to be in a print magazine — print still mattered a lot more than the web did at that point.

When The Sunset Tree came out, we were selling out shows, we were growing – but The Sunset Tree was not a hit. We joked about charts, but they were not on our radar at that time. We shot a video for “This Year,” which was great, but it wasn’t a hit. Now, that was different in Australia — “This Year” was played by Triple J, the national youth station, and it actually did quite well. And when we went down there, it jumped off — that’s when it was like, “Whoa, we are bigger than we think.” In Brisbane, I believe we opened our show with “This Year,” and it was a big mistake, because the room just exploded. We had no idea!

When I was making tapes and 7-inches and stuff, it was not my day job — so when I got money from it, that was a nice bonus. But the bottom dropped out of physical sales, and people would straight-up ask me, “Why should I buy this from you? It’s free.” They would say that to me at the merch table! That vibe didn’t go away, but it grew, and people began to think of art as labor, and wanting to compensate the people who make it, which is great. But there was this window then, when there was a very routine occurrence for someone to say, “Hey man, I got all your stuff off of Kazaa. F–k the record industry!” And it’s like, “I’m trying to make a living that industry, but I’m not gonna argue with you about it.”

But at the same time, I always thought that, if you put love and commitment into the thing you’re making, it will find its people who want to buy it. And I think that was true then, and it’s true now. If you’re setting goals like, “I want to sell 20,000 of these” — good luck to you. I’ve never thought of things in those terms. I always think, I’m trying to make something, I hope it finds an audience that connects with it. And then I will see how big that audience is on the other side of that process.

I’m always using that term, “a record finds its audience.” Over my entire life’s work, across making records and books and whatever else, The Sunset Tree occupies a unique position. It is the one that ends up telling me, “This is your life’s work, for at least the next 20 years.” This record, uniquely at that time in our catalog, was speaking to a certain type of situation of abuse that people wanted to hear — not in massive numbers, but in numbers that it reached gradually over time. 

As an artist, this is the best thing that could happen to you. It’s sort of like a light that doesn’t extinguish, that shines on wherever it needs to shine at a given time. At that point, it has nothing to do with me. I made a thing. The thing that I made turned out to have endurance. It’s an immense blessing.

The Decemberists

Thanks to the success of 2005’s Picaresque, the Portland indie-pop troubadours graduated from indie label Kill Rock Stars to major label Capitol Records for its follow-up, 2006’s The Crane Wife. Band leader Colin Meloy shares memories from a transformative year, and how a fan favorite almost got cut from the album.

I was aware that it was going to be a big record for us — I think the momentum had been there leading up. Right after Castaways & Cutouts, everything was pretty quiet, but signing with Kill Rock Stars and doing Her Majesty The Decemberists — I was really nervous about making that record. I have vivid memories of recording Her Majesty and being really nervous editing vocal takes, and feeling like there was this incredible pressure. For some reason, with Picaresque, that had just vanished a little bit. I think I was more certain of myself, more certain of the songs and the songwriting. We were well aware that we were also riding this tailwind behind us, with what was happening with the previous records and tours.

I remember the moment being really exciting. It was this nice coming together of critical and fan excitement about the band, and then on top of that, I felt like I was at a place in my writing, and the way that I was approaching the voice of the band, where I was at the top of my game. And I think that there was this sense that there was this groundswell around us — not only just like, indie writ large, but in the Pacific Northwest. We were recording with Chris Walla from Death Cab, and the guys from The Shins were stopping by while we were recording, and other stuff was happening with Sleater-Kinney and Modest Mouse. It just felt like we were at the dawn of this moment that “indie rock” was having, but also Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and that just felt really exciting.

For whatever reason, in the early days of Pitchfork, we were on their good list — that didn’t last very long. And I look back And I’m like, How did that happen? It seems so strange now — I remember they had breathless coverage of us, and people were joking about, “They’re reporting about what you’re having for breakfast.” I think they were tapped into that world, and everybody was excited to be along for the ride, to a certain degree.

When the record came out, it was just a wild moment. The day that our record release celebration was supposed to happen in Portland, at the Crystal Ballroom, our gear had gotten stolen. We had just come back from Seattle, and Jenny had parked the van that had the trailer on it in front of her house, and she woke up that morning and looked out and the trailer was gone. They had taken the whole trailer, which had all of our gear and all of our merch. So the day of our record release was spent in this place of panic: talking to the police, and then canvassing all over town to try to get enough gear together so we could play the show that night. The record was out that day — it was, to that point, the biggest day of my career, of my life, really. I remember showing up to our show with a borrowed guitar and a tote bag with some cables in it. We did all that tour just collecting gear in every city we went to.

A lot of the songs I still really love, and I still play often. “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” became this blessing and curse. The take that we kept — because we did it all live, just in front of a microphone — had Chris Walla shouting at the end of it, just out of the excitement that we had nailed it. But when we were sequencing the album, he was like, “I think that should be a single or an EP. I don’t think you should put that on the record.” But I was defiant. I was just in this mood where it was like, “I don’t care, I want to do what I want to do, and I feel like this song is achieving that mix of folk song and nerdy musical theater. This is what I’ve been leading up to, and it would break my heart to leave it off.” We didn’t really have any idea what it would be like playing it live, or if people would like it. Once we got on the road and started playing it, it became this fan favorite, and sort of a calling card. And I was like, “See? Proved you wrong, Chris! We would have been stupid to leave it off!”

I would tell indie artists today, do as much as you can —that was the advice that we were given at that time. When you’re aware that you’re in the middle of a hotbed moment like that, try to work as much as you can, although be careful, because you can also burn yourself out, which I think we also did. But it is important to capitalize on that time. I remember those times really fondly, but be aware that critical tides change. The Pitchfork 8.7s are not always going to be there for you! And I think I was aware of that. 

Even though moving to Capitol at the end of the day was a good move, there’s part of me that wonders what it would have been like if we had stayed on Kill Rock Stars and eschewed that jump to the major labels. But I think I was just going off of the bands that I loved and followed, you know? And that was what you do when you have a critical and fan groundswell — you move to a major label. You’re just following a blueprint. Maybe “don’t follow a blueprint” would be good advice? Try and do things at your own speed.

Deerhoof

After earning acclaim for their noise-pop records in the early 2000s, the San Francisco band’s 20-song 2005 album The Runners Four became their first to land in the top 10 of year-end critics’ lists. Singer-bassist Satomi Matsuzaki and guitarist John Dieterich discuss how the band’s hands-on approach has helped them in the two decades since its release.

Satomi: We were trying to make this double album, and it was a lot of just going back and forth. The Runners Four was the longest time we’d spent together up until then, and I felt so much struggle. We just disagreed on so many things.

John: Nowadays, we’re often all separate, so somebody will record something real quick on their own, and then we’ll all work on the idea that they already started. For Runners Four, though, we were really trying to get in each other’s business — the idea was all four of us would completely commit to being inside every note that’s played. We were trying to get in each other’s headspace, and it was very difficult and intense, but also really fun.

Satomi: We wanted to respect each other’s creations, and didn’t want to step on each other’s toes. 

John: The industry landscape has changed completely, but the way we operated then is similar to the way we operate now — we didn’t take tour support, we didn’t take money to help us make our records, we always just did everything on the cheap and ourselves. Part of it was to be frugal, and part of it was because we wanted to learn about this stuff. When I joined the band in ’99, they had already been going for a while, but I went out to Oakland to go to recording school, to take a recording and composition program. We basically taught ourselves how to use that stuff, and we’re still using those skills that we’ve developed over the last 26 years. 

Satomi: People would tell us, “You’ve got to come to Europe!” And I would go, “How?” We didn’t have any money to fly to Europe. We used to be an exclusive Bay Area band, for a long time — the indie world was very normal for us, and we were happy. I was going to school, and then had this fun band. But we became more serious around 2004’s Milk Man, and then The Runners Four we toured most of year — I think we were home one month out of the entire year. I was like, “Why am I paying rent?”

John: But we were very much a part of the community in San Francisco at that time — in the early 2000s, we basically played shows almost every week, at our venues in town, and then sometimes we’d go to L.A. for a one-off thing. We had friends that we played with a lot, and we felt like we were part of a family together. It didn’t feel like a movement — it just felt like a bunch of people who were curious, and digging weird little holes separately from one another, and curious what each other was doing. Then you would go to a show and get to see what the other people were digging up. Those relationships are really meaningful, even if we didn’t really hang out very much with other bands. We played shows, and then we went back to our holes.

Satomi: Now, there are so many artists because of social media and TikTok — I don’t know where you draw a line between what’s indie and what’s not. In a way, it’s really great that everybody can become an artist and get seen, but it’s also a very difficult time for us to to make a living from playing. We don’t get paid if somebody listens to our music. We used to go to the record store — I used to go to Amoeba and buy records all the time, and you don’t have to do that anymore. It’s easier now for everyone in the world to be able to listen to our music, but there’s this downside, where an artist cannot live without another job.

John: I think what sustains these things is community — that was true for us back then in some ways, and I think it’s definitely true now. Being self-sustaining helps, to the degree that you can, but people need each other. If you happen to have tons of money, great, be self-sustaining, congratulations! But for everyone else, you need to lean on each other and teach each other how to do things. “DIY” is such a misnomer — DIY happens by people talking to other people and learning new skills. And if your friend needs to record something and they don’t have a microphone, you loan them a microphone.

Art Brut

Led by the shout-along single “Formed a Band,” the British rock group’s winking, shambolic debut album Bang Bang Rock & Roll placed at No. 3 on Pitchfork’s best albums of 2005 list, fueling an unlikely ascent. Frontman Eddie Argos explains how his expectations for the band’s commercial prospects were quickly upended.

“Formed a Band” came out on Rough Trade, as a single — that’s the first thing we ever recorded. We recorded that to get gigs and stuff, but then it got on a CD, and then Rough Trade picked it up. It was too soon — we didn’t have an album’s worth of songs. Literally every song we had written to that point is Bang Bang Rock & Roll. I was writing the lyrics to “Stand Down” the day we recorded it. But then it came out quite slowly — it was on Fierce Panda, which is quite a small label in the U.K., and then it slowly grew through the Internet. It kept being released again — Downtown released it in America, and then we signed to EMI, and they re-released it with a double CD. 

All the bands that were coming through at the time, like Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand, were all playing these big festivals, and Christian, our old guitar player, was like, “Oh, maybe we get to play a big festival!” I’m like, “Nah, don’t be stupid.” It wasn’t even on in my brain that that would happen. The first time we toured America, we were like, “Oh, this is the only time we’re going to be here,” so we weren’t taking it seriously. I didn’t even really know what Pitchfork was — I didn’t have a laptop or anything, so I was like, out of the Internet. We were just excited to make a record.

The U.K. music press is quite cynical, and I’m quite heart-on-sleeve in my lyrics — “Emily Kane” is real. I think in the U.K., people thought I was joking or something? I’ve got a sarcastic voice, maybe. The first time we played in America, people believed me, and would say, “Oh, Emily Kane was your first girlfriend, you must have really loved her.” That’s what I wanted! In the U.K., people thought I was playing a character. 

My favorite bands are American — it’s the Mountain Goats, Jonathan Richman, The Replacements — but I had no idea was Pitchfork was, and it’s mad now looking back at it, because we were the third-highest album on their best albums of 2005 list, and only Kanye West and Sufjan Stevens were above us. At the time, I had no idea how big a deal that was. I just thought, “Oh, that’s nice to be on that list.” Then we played Pitchfork’s festival in 2006, and it was so hot that day, and I was so sweaty. I came offstage at the end, and John Darnielle gave me a towel and a bottle of water. I was like, “Did I die and go to heaven?”

YouTube didn’t exist when we started the band, and MySpace was getting big at the time, but that was right ahead of us. Bands didn’t have to have other jobs, like they do now. There were a lot more working-class bands, because it was easy and affordable to do it, whereas now it’s such a risk. Everything like streaming and Spotify happened over the course of the past 20 years, and it just feels different. Although I’m old now — it didn’t matter as much when I was younger, because I could live off noodles.

My advice for artists today would still be, just do it. I always think about how our guitar player Christian he booked us our first gig, and the rest of us were like, “What’s he doing? We’re not ready!” We were really hesitant, and I think, if it wasn’t for him, we’d still be rehearsing. You have to go do it, and don’t worry about being embarrassed about something. I worry about how much art gets lost because people think something is cringe. Ignore that feeling, and try not to be embarrassed.

Wolf Parade

The Montreal group’s debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, was an exhilarating mix of indie rock sing-alongs – Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner split vocal duties, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock served as producer, and the band started playing packed clubs in North America. Krug looks back on the unlikely ways that Wolf Parade measured their success 20 years ago.

I’m a really naive person, and it’s only in retrospect that I realize when things are a big deal. But I think as a whole, we could tell that something was brimming. We had been signed to Sub Pop, because Isaac Brock wanted to make our record, and the shows we’d been playing in Montreal had been buzzing a little bit in Montreal. We weren’t sure why all this was happening, but as we were making the record, I think we knew that we should try our hardest at the very least, and that something might come of it. We had Isaac from Modest Mouse, right after “Float On” had come out, and he was becoming famous and stepping up a level. He was getting used to that as he was trying to produce our record — I think it was the first record he tried to produce that wasn’t his own, and he did a great job. 

Isaac wanted to record it in Portland, Oregon, and we all lived in Montreal. He was sort of working for Sub Pop as a scout, and that’s how we ended up on Sub Pop — Dan Boeckner had a band called Atlas Strategic way back in the day, and they ended up opening for Modest Mouse down the West Coast. We all knew Modest Mouse, so the fact that Isaac helped get us on Sub Pop, and then he wanted to produce our record — we understood that that was a big deal. 

So we drove to Portland from Montreal with our s—tty, s—tty tour van full of our old gear. Sub Pop probably didn’t even know what was happening — they probably assumed we were flying like normal people. I remember sitting around an apartment and watching Chronicles of Riddick, and being like, “If we don’t leave now, we’re not gonna make it to Portland on time!” We took turns driving, and arrived exhausted, but we were young enough that it didn’t matter if we were tired. And Isaac was like, “What are you guys doing here?” And we said, “We’re here to record the record!” He’s like, “Oh yeah, s—t, that’s today!” 

We definitely had goals, in terms of what songs we wanted on the album. We put out these EPs already, and we were just selling them at shows. At one point, we were just burning CD-Rs on a CD burner, writing “Wolf Parade” on them, putting them in Ziploc bags and selling them. But people were buying them, so we were like, “We’ll put those songs on the record, for sure!”

We had a very DIY ethos in the beginning, which wasn’t necessarily political — we appreciated the punk ethos of doing things DIY, but it was just that we were all super poor, honestly, and we were doing everything on the cheap. I remember pulling an all-nighter before a show so we could burn enough CDs to sell. It was fun times, and in Montreal at that time, that was just the norm. CDs were still a thing, and mini-CDs were a thing, where people were putting songs and 10-inches on mini-CDs. There was a small community of indie bands where everyone knew each other, we all jammed in the same spaces, and it was mostly supportive, not too competitive. Being in it at the time, it was hard to sense what was really going on — we were goldfish in the fishbowl. 

But after being active for maybe six months, suddenly there were lines around the block to get into a Wolf Parade show. It was just at a little club, but we were like, “Oh, something’s happening. This is weird.” And then SPIN magazine put out a piece around that time that was just about the Montreal music scene and the bands that were coming out of it. I remember looking at that, and our picture was in there, and I was like, “Well, this is crazy.” It was all about little things like that to see that our music was resonating with people. There was no metric to really measure anything against — we couldn’t, like, check our social media numbers, and Sub Pop wasn’t emailing us and telling us, “Congratulations, here are your sales numbers.” All you could really gauge it by was print media, and how many people were coming to your shows.

The indie scene got really hyped up in mid-2000s. Do you remember how big commercial corporations started investing in indie? Like, you’d go to a loft party with The Unicorns playing or something, and there’d be, like, free Levi’s on a table. “Do you want some free jeans?” Or “Do you want these sunglasses?” We’d go to festivals, and the amount of swag that was backstage at these festivals, like Coachella and All Tomorrow’s Parties, in the 2000s was so weird, because it didn’t really align with the origins of these bands that came out of nothing. You learn later in life which of your peers came from money and which didn’t, but when you’re 20, you’re just like, “We’re all starving artists.” And then you’re like, “Yes, I will definitely take some free jeans.” Jeans are expensive!

I think for any band, you could feel the ground shift underneath when streaming took over. For me, it’s gotten more and more difficult to get stuff out there. I’m always trying to gauge whether it’s the music industry or I’m just an aging artist, and that this is normal — probably, it’s a combination of both. But it’s not such a straight game anymore — put out a record, get a good review by Pitchfork, and then you can go on tour and make money, and you’ll make a bunch of money in royalties. The way that social media is the only game in town now to get people to know that you’ve done something is kind of interesting, and kind of sad. You have to decide how you’re going to navigate that, or if you’re going to participate at all.

I would encourage bands to maybe not worry so much about getting on a label, because what a label can do for you has changed so much with the way DSPs have taken over, and having a good distributor is maybe more important than having a good label at this point. DIY has always been a powerful thing — building small communities, instead of trying to reach everyone in the world all at once. I think it’s maybe a more meaningful way to work, instead of trying to go viral on TikTok or something. But then again, what do I know? I’m not on TikTok. I’m f—king 47, so I’m very wary of giving advice to young people.

Andrew Bird

The Lake Forest, Illinois native spent years tinkering with ornate indie arrangements before 2005’s Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs earned the most press acclaim of his career. Bird talks about why the album endured multiple false starts, and why, after years of distance, he’s come around to its charms.

This was definitely the album that almost broke me — maybe it did break me a little bit. It took me three tries to get it: I was searching for something that I didn’t have the vocabulary for when I started, and then I had to grope around in the dark and make a lot of mistakes. I had two fully mixed, mastered albums that went into the garbage. And in between the first and second attempt, I made Weather Systems, which I thought was going to be this little experimental EP that ended up really working. I never had a proper producer for any of that stuff, and I think that was a good thing. If someone was too decisive during that time, I wouldn’t have made those mistakes that I needed to make.

It was a transitional time in the music industry — if you drew a graph of the ascendance of my audience and the descent of physical product in the music industry, the actual album sales, they’re totally inverse trajectories, and cross over each other in about 2005. I was not super new at that time — I’d already put out three or four records, and I’d been working and touring since ’98, on a very indie DIY level. I was very committed to that, almost to a fault — I should have probably been scaling up.

When I started off, we’d play a show and put out like a binder with our mailing list. It’s so quaint when you think about it — you get people’s names and addresses, and you’d send them postcards about the next show. It was all about making posters and going around town, and if you could afford the silkscreen ones, you’d put up really cool posters on telephone poles. And then at a certain point, you graduate to having a street team, where you enlist fans to help promote shows and stuff. It was still very grassroots. My ambitions at the time were just to pay my band, and to pay my band, I thought I needed to get 300-to-400 people to come to a show, anywhere I go. There was no world-dominance expectation.

I felt like a little bit of an outsider in Chicago, because the post-rock thing was so austere, and the late ‘90s were very anti-virtuosity. I was very fancy compared to them, and so I kind of fell in with the alt-country scene, just they were the nicest people that I found in the music scene, and more approachable. I played a lot of the shows with them, but the first band that was on a national level that I fell in with was My Morning Jacket. Jim James really championed me early on, when I was touring solo — I remember he came to a London show where I was the first of three on the bill, and he brought the whole band, and the audience was being annoying, and he just made everyone shut up. He recognized what I was trying to do, and saw the value in it, and he took me on tour with them when they were still building an audience.

Listening back to Mysterious Production of Eggs — I was kind of down on it for a while, because when you spend that long in the studio, far away from being on stage, the more the energy becomes like a bedroom, headphones kind of album. But that’s part of what’s appealing about it, too. It may not have that live energy, but there’s a lot of detail, because there are so many layers, so many attempts at making these songs. Only one of them survived every attempt, which was “Opposite Day,” because I did such interesting stuff at the barn with the loops and creating this weird melody that I couldn’t replicate again. So I just kept pulling back the layers, and then adding more paint, and then pulling back the layers. I’ve never made an album that was this obsessive. My ethos since then has grown more live and free-wheeling.

I talk to a lot of young artists that don’t want to reveal what they’ve been working on until it’s absolutely perfect. I just say that mentality is not going to work. I have this built-in aversion to that sort of codified, this-is-how-you-do-it thing. Get on stage as much as possible, and don’t be precious.

Anohni

In 2005, I Am a Bird Now scored an upset win at the UK’s Mercury Prize for Anohni & the Johnsons, which was followed by acclaim for the chamber-pop tour de force by U.S. blogs and outlets. Anohni reflects on the album’s continued resonance as a defiant piece of trans expression, and why 2005 was the perfect time for I Am a Bird Now to break through.

I knew that this was my one chance — that things were as lined up as they were ever going to be to get me through the keyhole into the daylight culture. And as a person of my demographic, or whatever you want to call it, there was a lot of support for me from from the underground and from the indie world. A lot of artists had supported me to that point, and really ushered me across that line in a way that the industry was never going to. And then the really unexpected happened when I won the Mercury Prize, and that was almost like the whim of a panel of artists and cultural figures in the U.K. that transformed my life and career with that gesture. But it was a culmination of a sort of swell of underground support for me — not really from the business of music, but from my colleagues.

A lot of the songs on I Am a Bird Now were written more than five or 10 years earlier, in the mid-90s, when I was living a very insular, creative life in New York City. One or two songs on the record I wrote later, most notably “Hope There’s Someone,” shortly before I did the record. We recorded it, and I said, “That should be the first song on the record.” Everyone was like, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah, that’s definitely the best song on the record. We should just put that first and front-load it.” And that really did make a big difference, I think. 

I’ve always talked about the album as a story about a family living inside me, that everyone contains a family of archetypes, and that they’re in conversation. I remember writing “For Today I Am a Boy” in like 1995 and thinking, “I could never play this to anyone. This is the most embarrassing song I’ve ever written, the most shameful — how could I even sing this? It’s so freaky.” And then I thought, “Oh! That’s great!” It made me uncomfortable when I wrote it, and there must be something in that, so I’ll just try it. And I ended up singing that song for the whole, bio-diverse world. I ended up singing it for nature and for every living thing. 

Those songs were all transformed 100 times over from the touring I did on those records, and because of my practice as a performer, learned from Kazuo Ôno, everything was always changing in my body when I was singing the songs. It was always new imagery pouring forth — that was part of the delight for me as a performer, to have that chance to just reach toward an ecstatic process. 

I never thought of myself as an indie artist. I thought of myself as kind of a muse to certain indie artists, but honestly, I thought of myself as a New York artist, and my international forays had always been at the invitation of other artists, like David Tibet, who’s an underground U.K. artist who’s super subcultural. He was the one who released my first album, and his support brought me out to the U.K. to do a concert with him and stuff like that. My friendship and work with Lou Reed brought me to do some concerts in Naples and Milan, and then Lou brought me on a world tour as his backup singer, and that was transformative. And then the producer Hal Willner started to promote me, and introduced me to the broader, dare I say, heterosexual music world.

A lot of those artists heard me sing and embraced me, and as a trans artist, identity hadn’t been pecked apart in the public sphere in this kind of Roman Coliseum way that it has now, so people weren’t necessarily perceiving my identity as grounds for not listening to my music. They were just curious about the music. So I Am A Bird Now was very interestingly marketed to the general public, whereas the album I just released, My Back Is a Bridge for You to Cross, it’s very difficult to convince anyone not to market it solely to a queer audience, just because that’s the way that demographic commercial marketing has taken this ugly turn. It’s crude and myopic. I’ve been writing albums about the environment and our relationship to the natural world, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that listens to PJ Harvey or Nick Cave still listening to my music, because they don’t think it’s their lane. I find that really perverse, and it’s been mostly true in the U.S., but it’s less true in Europe.

My experience with I Am A Bird Now has been my lifelong experience – which is that, as a person like me, your survival depends on the kindness of strangers: your own family, your own community, your own church decides if you live or die. They decide if they’re going to “tolerate” you, and the extent of your freedom in the community is based on the extent of the space allotted to you. And that’s true of many minorities, but it’s particularly stunning when you’re a minority within your own family, your own like racial, ethnic, economic demographic. It’s a very specific experience, which a lot of LGBTQ people could relate to. 

I would say 2005 was kind of a Goldilocks zone for something like my work to emerge, and I don’t think my work could have emerged at any other moment. It was post-AIDS enough that people were willing to entertain androgyny as a component, and even the addressing of some gender stuff. It was pre-#MeToo enough that there could be feminist concerns that hadn’t been weaponized yet. Look at where we are now politically with Trump — I mean, it’s like everyone who’s ever been canceled has been released from prison. It’s a full pardon for every canceled rapist north of the Equator. 

And that’s all part of this — I Am a Bird Now was a moment on the other end of that pendulum when a conversation was tolerated, entertained and considered in the heterosexual media. Are we going to let this in? Does this pose a threat? And it was before the hibernating powers that be saw a rejuvenated opportunity to take massive power from a public conversation gone awry about the existence of trans people, to a point where a president literally got f–king elected off of like, perverted, disgusting anti-trans ads.

I feel very privileged — I had that upswing in my career when I was able to buy myself an apartment on the back of I Am a Bird Now. If that album came out today, I don’t think I’d even make 10 cents, because the tech industry hadn’t yet mobilized to upstream all of the income of the music industry, in such a way that music just became a pheromone inside everyone’s device. People in 2005 were still buying an artist’s work — there was still a transaction that was meaningful around the recording and selling of music that allowed musicians to to support themselves, and that’s disappeared now, pretty much.

I would say income is probably an eighth of what it was — maybe a tenth? You probably earn $1 for every $10 you would have earned in 2005 as a recording artist. Everyone’s just comfortable with that, and has been gently boiled in the pot, and accepted the terms of engagement from Apple and Spotify and whoever else. As musicians, we had the privileged seat in 2005 of watching that transfer of agency, and riding the last moments of an old view of 20th century agency as a recording artist, and watch that be replaced by something just way filthier.

I don’t actually talk to many young artists — my circle is pretty closed. But I’ll give the advice that Lou would have given me, which is, just don’t trust anyone that wants you to sign anything. Understand everything that you’re signing, understand what you’re giving away. That sounds very proprietary, but Lou was the one that prevented me from selling all my publishing for just a few dollars, at a moment when I was desperate. He just said, “Never, ever. Even if no one is telling you that you’re valued, continue to retain knowledge of your value.” 

Whether or not it ever translates into money, according to the culture and the temperature of the era, your value is eternal. I turned down a lot of opportunities before I finally did what I did — I Am a Bird Now came out when I was 35, I wasn’t young. I was 10, 15 years older than most of the other people in my peer group who were coming up that year, and I was worldly in certain regards, but I wasn’t worldly traveling through the media and understanding what that transaction was. It took me a long time to understand how a culture eats an artist, and now I am very clear about it. 

That’s what I would talk to young people about — to understand that this is not a world that has your best interests at heart. You need to consider the structures that support you, first and foremost, in any level of disclosure or spelling of interior value. You need to fully vet and understand the consequences of that, to the best of your ability, before you throw yourself into it.

I’ve become much more aware of how meaningful the music has been developmentally for young trans people, in the same way that Boy George’s music was meaningful to me when I was 14 or 15, and I’m super grateful to be seen as representation of difference in culture. At the same time, I also resent the quarantine of the messaging — I resent that the music isn’t heard because of the algorithm, because of the way that culture is contained. I got a career because a bunch of heterosexual musicians said I was a musician, and because a bunch of straight, respected guys decided that they were gonna force the issue, that I should be allowed to participate in music. 

That’s what happened with I Am a Bird Now — everyone heard it at the dinner table, because it was thrust into the imagination of the entire UK after the Mercury Prize. During the tour in 2005, there would be gangs of football players singing “For Today I Am a Boy” in Spain. It was nuts — heterosexual kids were listening to it too, because it was just considered part of the fabric of the year.

I’ll always be grateful for my life — I can’t believe I got a chance to do it, because so many people of my demographic could never get a chance to do anything like that. I really was one of the very few that’s had a chance to fully express my feeling. I’m able to mirror and voice how it feels to see the world through eyes like mine. And that’s a miracle.

Okkervil River

Will Sheff’s indie-folk project spent seven years trying to find a larger audience in Texas before its third album, Black Sheep Boy, finally broke Okkervil River on a national level. Sheff explains why his group’s “ramshackle” third album was their last chance before he called it quits.

We started in 1998, and it felt like we had been slugging away in the shadows for forever. When I made Black Sheep Boy, I was in a pretty low emotional and psychological state, because it was like a permanent cloud over me. Half the time I was thinking, “Once I finished this, I’ll just hang it up, and I’ll be proud of myself,” because I knew that Black Sheep Boy was the best thing I’d ever done. At least I’ll know that I made one good record, and then went out on a high note — that was the best I could see for myself at that point. 

That album came out without very much fanfare. When it came out, it really felt like I remember that my publicist accidentally CC’ed me on an email that she had written to the label with a spreadsheet of press reactions, and she said in the email something like, “This has been really hard and frustrating. I’m sorry we’re not getting more pick-up.” The spreadsheet that was included was just like, so-and-so passed, passed, passed, they liked the second one better, not his thing, passed. I was feeling really despairing, because I felt like, “If people don’t like this, then I’ll never make anything that anybody likes.”

It wasn’t until halfway through the touring cycle that Kelefa Sanneh wrote a big piece about us and the Decemberists in the New York Times, and that was when things started to turn around. It was just a wild year, because I put out this record that was maybe my last statement, and then I dutifully toured on it — we weren’t playing very well, and people didn’t seem to care. And then midway through, word of mouth made that album resurface. Suddenly, after seven years of chasing, we kind of caught the car.

I was a lonely, unhappy child who fell in with a group of artsy kids, theater and band kids, in high school. And I really felt like art was spiritual to me — I felt like it had saved my life, but I felt like there was a second part of the equation, which was that I had to prove myself in the arena of art, or else it wouldn’t have meant anything. I started Okkervil River with those same high school friends, but then they gave up on it. The drummer didn’t think it was going to be successful, and then the bassist was like, “I need a real job.” I had to hire all new players, and I was just slugging away, and I didn’t have a backup plan. 

That was part of why I was so f—ked up in my head when I made Black Sheep Boy: in the pursuit of this, I had torched all my relationships, I had no money, I was not getting any sleep, and I didn’t have a place to live. I felt like I just had all this ambition and all this need for it to succeed, and I also was not psychologically getting the care that I needed to be a balanced human. Sometimes I would be like, “This is gonna make me a star,” but then other times I would be like, “I’m just gonna go back to New Hampshire and become a school teacher, I guess.” I look back on it now, and I think that relentless focus on this need for success meant that I didn’t really appreciate what good things had happened to me in my life to that point. 

When I look back on it now, I’m like, “What a lucky window that we we ended up making our way through.” In the ‘80s, everything was big business in the music business, and there were bands like REM, but there weren’t that many of those bands that were really succeeding financially. In the indie rock boom, it felt like there were so many bands — because, I think, of the holdover from the ‘90s, where people were really prizing anti-corporate, alternative, independent, not selling out. And also the critical apparatus was still very whitewashed, and so a “musician” to a music critic looked like a white guy with a guitar, and really prized intelligent songwriting. 

The reason that I made it was because I put in a ton of work, I looked more or less like what you’re supposed to look like, and I was doing this thing that we all were very interested in. There was the Hold Steady, the Mountain Goats, the Decemberists — and we didn’t compare notes, but we were all making vaguely literary smarty-pants rock, and we had all independently arrived and some of these values. 

Now, it’s just a different landscape, and a band like Okkervil River or the Mountain Goats or the Hold Steady or whoever just wouldn’t break through in the same way, because the hunger isn’t there. The culture had a hunger, but then I watched that hunger intensify to where, suddenly Bon Iver was collaborating with Kanye West and appearing in a Bushmills ad and winning a Grammy, then being on Saturday Night Live and being satirized on Saturday Night Live. And then Zooey Deschanel was like, “I want an indie rock career, too,” and suddenly everybody had her haircut. The way people would talk about Vampire Weekend when they were first coming up, it was like they were talking about a particularly promising college basketball player. It started to seem like, instead of the alternative to mainstream corporate rock, indie rock was like the minor leagues.

I remember riding in a car with my sister, and she was listening to a bunch of songs on shuffle, and she had a song from Black Sheep Boy playing, and then right after that, a song from the Killers came on. The Killers made us sound like our record was recorded in a garage, which in fact it was. And I just felt really insecure. And so for a period of time, I was like, “I have to sound like I’m real” – like, a real musician. 

And now I look back and I think the opposite is true. I love that Cindy Lee record from last year, and part of what’s cool about the record is how f—ked up it sounds. That album just goes to show that you don’t have to sound any way at all. If it’s good, it doesn’t f—king matter how it sounds. And I think that Black Sheep Boy doesn’t really sound like any other record. It’s very odd, it’s ramshackle and acoustic, and very dark, and a weird mix of electronics and acoustic guitars. It sounds pretty handmade to me. And at the time, those were all things that bothered me. And now I’m like, that’s really special.