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IS THE BARTENDER HERE?
Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride posts a long interview with Tim Kinsella, a musician with dozens of albums under his belt who is turning to filmmaking using the same DIY energy he previously applied to the recording business. His debut feature, Orchard Vale, premiered at the Chicago Underground festival yesterday.
Two excerpts:
RAY PRIDE: Is the disintegration of the music industry because of evolving technology one of the reasons you decided to explore filmmaking?
TIM KINSELLA: I don’t get the impression it was ever very easy to make a living as a musician. By the late nineties, I saw my life as potentially fitting into the historical archetype of traveling bard far more so than any aspirations towards rockstardom. I think I had a pretty realistic idea at a relatively young age that those ambitions would only end in bitterness and a sense of personal failure. So to a large degree, I feel I have been able to exist outside the music industry and whether the alt-fad that year is electro-clash or folk, I wouldn’t really be fazed. I guess the music-industry life lesson that enabled me to embark on this Orchard Vale pit would be more a matter of internalizing the DIY ethics of my formative punk rock years and extrapolating that approach from hanging your own flyers to making a movie….
PRIDE: You’ve gone from the music industry, and now to narrative filmmaking, the industry support of which is being eroded, even demolished economically by the same technology that puts it into the hands of almost anyone. Is this out of the frying pan and into the deep fryer?
KINSELLA: The economic reality of it is, I’m a bartender. That frees up a lot of mental space regarding popular reception of an idea I may want to pursue, like nudging a note over here and there and straightening out the structure of this song just a teeny-weeny bit might make it more palatable to the masses and then I can pay my rent easier or whatever. But I don’t need to worry about that because I am a bartender. For years I had this small bit of money I was able to move around from project to project to kick-start different things and then when it paid itself back, I could move it into the next thing. But this was never to be confused with the money I lived on. But since record labels discontinued the old tradition of paying royalties and after making Orchard Vale, this small bundle has dissipated.
Read the whole interview at the link above. And here is the trailer for Orchard Vale.
