This is an interview I did on 12/7/06 while on Andrew Peterson’s “Behold the Lamb” tour. It took place in an upstairs loft at a wonderful youth facility at a church in Huntsville, AL. Here it is for your viewing pleasure/displeasure:

So your album, Scarce, was just recently released on iTunes, right?

Yes, finally.

So my question is, how does iTunes affect the indie artist?

How does iTunes affect the indie artist? Well I guess that the obvious answer is that it’s an avenue of music distribution that didn’t even exist when I started playing music about ten or so years ago. So the whole idea of online distribution didn’t exist when I started, much less the internet. And there’s a generation of folks who are coming up that live by that. And that’s not necessarily my generation, and I’m slow to change, so that’s kind of a new world to me. I’m old school in that I love artwork and packaging and I want to have the whole thing to hold in my hands and read liner notes and lyrics and such, so I would much rather buy a CD than download an album off of iTunes.

I’ve bought a few songs, but it would be hard for me to buy an entire record if it’s something I really wanted. I want to read to the notes and who played what. I don’t know if that’s old school or just an old way of thinking.

I think it’s just a musician thing.

Yeah. Maybe the normal fan just wants the music and doesn’t care for all the paper and plastic.

How it affects me, numbers wise, I have no idea. It won’t mean anything on the grand scheme of the charts on iTunes or number of downloads and all that stuff. Obviously it’s another way of getting my music out to people, and I have no other distribution. So the only way to get my CDs up until this point has only been off my website and at shows, just out of the back of the van kind of story. And so this is another way to get songs out there, and I think it’s cool that people who like one particular song may not want the whole record and may just download one song, and that’s fine.

So you started you playing in college?

Yeah, I was late. I was late on the boat.

What made you decide to start playing one day?

It was jealousy, really, which is hardly a noble reason for playing guitar. My brother and my dad were learning how to play guitar together. It would have been early college, and they were learning how to play guitar together. Finally, I just kind of was like “Man, forget this, I want to learn how to play”. They started showing me a few chords, and my dad bought me my first guitar and then I just got addicted and hooked and kind of stuck with it. I had a really good guitar mentor, especially early on. He was really good, and I looked up to him a lot. I could ask him questions like, “How are your fingers making that chord?” and “Show me that lick” and he was more than willing to show me and was a very patient guy and basically my tutor.

What records were you listening to at the time that influenced and shaped the way you played?

Wow. I’m trying to think. Back then, I got hooked on The Who in high school, and so I was probably listening to a lot of The Who. My dad’s old records and basically my dad’s old music that he grew up with is stuff that I really got hooked on in high school and college. Mama’s and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, The Who, The Turtles, and all this stuff. It was hardly contemporary, but it’s still some great music and great songwriting. And I was listening to a lot of that.

I went through my skater phase where I was listening to Suicidal Tendencies, Dead Milkmen, The Smiths, which is kind of funny. If you’re familiar with my music, you would probably be shocked at that. REM, early REM is beautiful, and I’m blanking on pretty much everything else.

When did you decide to move to Nashville? And why Nashville?

I met and married my wife in Baton Rouge. That was ’97. In ’99 we moved to Birmingham, Alabama. We lived there for six years, and we moved to Birmingham because we knew we didn’t want to be in Nashville, but we didn’t want to be in Baton Rouge either, so it was a spreading our wings kind of thing. We just wanted to be a little more centrally located for me to travel and do music. Finally, I toured with a guy named Andrew Peterson. He invited me to tour with him in 2002, and he and his buddy, Ben Shive, kind of started planting the seeds of moving to Nashville telling me and encouraging me that it would be good for me and that it was not what I thought it was, and my preconceived notions which, some of them are true, but a lot of them are not true. And so they started planting the seeds about four years ago. Finally, we grew out of Birmingham, and it was just time to move. And we felt like I needed to keep doing music and Danielle was all for it, and mainly she felt like it was time to go to Nashville. I had to think about it for a long time.

She seems supportive.

She’s more than supportive. Overly so. In fact, she’s kept me from quitting many times. For good or bad, so that’s the story.

I’m trying to remember my next question.

Man, it’s burning up in here.

It really is.

For the record, it’s like 80 degrees up here. (upstairs loft at the church venue)

Well, how do you think fatherhood will affect your songwriting?

<laughs>

Or do you think it will?

Yes, I think it will, and I hope it will. I thought about this question a bunch actually, and my songwriting friends have said “Just wait for the songs you’re gonna write when the kid comes”, and so I look forward to that, for sure.

How it’s going to affect my writing, I don’t know. I think I’ll probably have a better understanding of love, and a lot of times I think I do and probably really don’t have a clue about loving people. So I have a feeling my son is gonna be a great challenge to that in good ways. I don’t know how it’s going to affect my writing. For one thing, part of me wants to figure out how I’m going to write. It seems like a baby is very, especially the first few months, they need a bunch of attention. So I don’t know, and finding a quiet space to write and think, I imagine that will be a big challenge. Usually I have to be reading in order to write. That’s just kind of the in and process that usually affects what I’m writing at the moment, so I don’t know how that’s gonna work when there will be no quiet moments, so I don’t know. We’ll see how it works.

You play churches, and you play regular venues, and you play coffeehouses. I want to know, do you change as a performer? How do you transition from place to place?

That’s a great question.

Because you can’t say curse words in church.……… Unless you’re Derek.

Yeah, maybe he can get away with it.

Man, that’s a great question. I definitely don’t change necessarily what I say; I change how I say it. I don’t ever know what people think of my music. But I suspect that if they hear song and read the lyrical content, they know where I’m coming from. And my big thing as a writer is to never be obnoxious about what I’m talking about. My thing is just to tell my story and to lay it out there with no strings attached and just to let it be and for people to hear it and do what they will with it.

It’s funny because I don’t really feel comfortable in any setting. If I’m in a club, which is not often, but when I play a club, I don’t feel cool enough to be there.

That’s a great quote.

I don’t know. When I’m in the church, it’s difficult on a different level in that I feel like there are things I’m supposed to say as opposed to when I’m in a club, I feel like things I’m not supposed to say. People are the same, but their expectations are different.

Exactly.

So when I’m in a church, I feel like people expect me to say certain things that will make me acceptable that they can put their stamp of approval on. “Okay, this is Christian music” or whatever they want to call it. And maybe I’m a bit harsh in thinking that way, and it’s probably very judgmental, but that’s just the way it processes. And then when I’m in the club or a non-church venue, I just don’t ever want to be a bore. In other words, I don’t want to be obnoxious about what I believe because I recognize that people have been burned by the church, so they associate Christ with BS. And they associate it with being walked over, and, obviously not that’s at all what the gospel is about. And that’s okay, we’re believers and we’ve all got our faults and all that stuff, and we’re not good at loving people. And the world will hopefully one day know us because we love people. But we fail every day, so my thing is I just want to write the best songs that I can and I want to hopefully communicate on some artistic level that draws people in melodically, but that’s what draws people in and hopefully to have some kind of content that’s not preaching a message, per say, but that’s telling a story, and the stories that I’m most often telling are my own.

And occasionally I delve into third person kind of stuff, but mostly it’s just me sharing my deal in all of its good and bad and ugly. So yeah, coming back, I find that I speak less when I’m in a club setting and I’m less direct in setting songs up.

I read this Tom Petty quote one day, Tom Petty’s one of my favorite songwriters, who said “Good music will be heard”, and hopefully good music can stand on its own and good songwriting will eventually get heard by people, and so I’ve just kind of gone by that mantra.

What are your goals musically and how do you know when you’ve met those goals? Or have you met those goals?

Early on, I wanted to be famous.

I think everybody does.

Yeah, I mean everybody picks up a guitar and wants to write a song. It may be immature, but everybody thinks it. I thought it and still fight it and struggle with it, and for me, I remember that one of the earliest thoughts were “How cool would it be to do this for a living?” In most measures, that’s what I’m doing right now. My wife currently works, and she’s worked on and off, and so here in the next couple of months, I’ll be the breadwinner of the family. And we have a mortgage now, and all that stuff, and insurance. I mean we’ve got all the bills that everyone else has, and so none of that is different. I’m self-employed is what it basically comes down to. So, for me, it was always how neat it would be to do this for a living. And so that’s what I’m doing, and I suppose that was the goal, and we’re not getting rich like people think just because you write and play music for a living, that equates with making a lot of money. And some people have made a lot of money as musicians. When I play the comparison game with a lot of these folks, I compare myself with most of the folks on this tour or the artists at least, and it can get depressing pretty quick. [Editor’s note: at this time, Eric was on the Andrew Peterson “Behold the Lamb” Tour in late 2006 with artists such as Sandra McCracken, Derek Webb, Andrew Peterson, Jill Phillips, etc.]

But I’m learning basically to be thankful. And as weird as that may sound, it’s hard for me to process that and to accept and just to grapple with being grateful and content in my place. And sure, I want to sell a bunch more records than I do, and I don’t want every month in and out to be a making ends meet kind of thing and stressing about all that stuff, and that’s the way it is. God has given us our little plot of land so to speak, so I’m just supposed to tend it and fertilize it as best I can and till it and make it home. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I guess the goal, I don’t really know… I tend to lack goals in my life. <laughs>

That’s the most honest statement I think I’ve ever gotten from a musician.

That’s probably ignorant and naïve to be that way with the famous five-year, ten-year, twenty-year goals in life. I mean, honestly the future scares me a lot, and I’m afraid of growing old and thinking about doing this. The human body can only take so much touring, and that’s how I make my living. I have to be playing shows ‘cause if I’m not playing, I’m not selling CDs. So it’s a double-edged sword. That’s just where I’m at in life and career. I can’t be doing this when I’m sixty years old. To think that far down the road scares the crap out of me, but I just trust that God’s intentions and noble and that I won’t just drop off the face of the earth.