I realized I could be in a band and make money doing it.

I recently had a conversation with Andrew Horowitz, a member of the indie pop band Tally Hall. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a writer (a poet especially) with no real chance of earning a direct income from your art. It’s a sad thing, that the current market doesn’t value writing (maybe you disagree). Horowitz, who is the brother of a good friend of mine, attended one of my readings while I was on tour and mentioned he was formerly a writer of poetry and prose. Now he makes a living on his art, which is music.

I’m attempting to create a series of conversations with artists that were formerly writers, to explore their career choices, and maybe get a little bit closer to understanding the reasons creative writing has little monetary value in our society. And I’m also exploring the idea that literature might be losing many of its rising stars to more lucrative artistic endeavors. If you have any suggestions as far as who I should be talking to, I’m interested in hearing them.

DL: I didn’t even know you were a writer until you came to that reading of mine in Brooklyn. You mentioned something about how you used to dread reading poetry in settings like that. Can you tell me a little more about your past as a writer?

AW: I’ve always written, but growing up I’d never said I was a poet or writer. But in college I took a liking to it after I took a freshman creative writing workshop. The first story I wrote for that class won this university-wide writing award, and that really encouraged me to take crazy chances with my writing. I started dabbling in some poems for that class as well, and ended up winning another one of those awards. So after that I started writing a lot; I got really into it, felt like I had some talent. A lot of my classmates were writing these very… adjective-ridden unfocused… things.

—Basically the normal fare in a class with freshmen who have maybe never written a poem before.

Exactly. So… I was saying… so I had this somewhat naive aesthetic in my poetry and I really had a lot of fun with it.

Definitely. I can see that a lot in your lyrics, in the songs you write for Tally Hall. You have this voice that’s a little naive but also very colloquial and jokey.

Yeah, and I’d say even more so in my poems. I used to spend hours with one page obsessing over every syllable and every word. Eventually it became a thing where I was actually as interested in the visual presentation… on the page… as interested in the presentation as much as the words themselves. But with song writing it’s a little different because I’m working with the melody, and for me the music is more important than the lyrics.

Yeah, I’m sure. I’d imagine with most musicians it’s like that.

Depends, but yeah, for me. [Laughs]

So what made you decide to pursue music over writing?

Well, once things sort of took off, I realized I could be in a band and make money doing it, and I pursued that. And once I started working with Tally Hall, I just lost the drive and time that I used to devote to poetry and fiction. Outside of writing songs, there’s always other things to do for the band. It’s about not just writing songs but building our business.

Yeah that’s something about Tally Hall that I’ve always admired, I’ve always thought was cool… Your guys’ viral presence and the idea that you guys are a band in the fullest sense, and have this experience outside the music.

We’ve always approached Tally Hall as sort of a multimedia enterprise. We started as just friends making music, but Joe [another member of Tally Hall] was a film major [at University of Michigan] and we were always making these little videos. It just seemed natural to merge the two. We did some sketch videos and we got a lot of other people who are supportive of the band involved. Friends, fans. If anyone ever has an interesting idea, we get them involved. We don’t limit ourselves to music.

Seems like you’ve been pretty successful because of that. Isn’t that part of the reason you guys got signed?

Yeah it’s definitely a part of it. We were actually the first band to sign with a major label as a video band… So they definitely saw the potential of the new marketing with viral videos. When we started youtube wasn’t really around, but now it’s kind of a necessary thing, video marketing.

The media… the music itself doesn’t seem to matter quite as much anymore. You have to have something else to offer.

Seems to be the same in the publishing industry these days…

So in terms of craft, Tally Hall is very much a band with more than one songwriter. How is the way you go about writing a song different from writing a poem or story?

I generally like to write on my own and then bring it to the group… When you’re so close to something, when you’re generating something, it’s hard to step back from it and see what’s wrong with it. So I like to write alone and then bring it to the band in the studio, and so does everyone else.

So you kind of like to use the band in the way the writer uses the writing workshop?

Yeah, I’d say that. It’s not very different from a writing workshop. We sit down in a together and bounce ideas off each other. We’d say: What do you think of this? And someone would say: I think that bridge is working, but I don’t think you need that chord and so on.

In terms of your process… you write by yourself, but do you write under specific conditions? Like, do you have a certain writing desk, or special notebooks…

I write all the time. Generally, I… I have two ways of generating. Sometimes I come up with an idea on the run, like on the subway, and I’ll punch it into my phone and take it home to work on. And the other way I write is just sitting down in front of my keyboard and I have this library of generated musical ideas that I’ll pull from, ideas that I’ve recorded in the past that aren’t complete songs. And I’ll work them into something with newer ideas.

I find that I can’t write while I’m on the road. On tour.

Yeah that’s tough. I found the same thing, on my book tour, that I didn’t write anything. But then once I got back home, I had all this material in my head and just wrote and wrote.

Yeah, it’s kind of frustrating. There are times on the road where I’m doing nothing and I should be writing, but it’s hard to gather up the energy.

So your band, you guys formed in college, and got picked up by a major label [Atlantic] just a few years after graduating. And Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum was a really cool record, and very fun and intellectually interesting.

How has that affected your artistic career, to produce something that’s that successful? Are you afraid that getting signed by a major label so early on, having that kind of success, will in any way affect your lifelong output as an artist? In 50 years from now, will you still be writing music?

Well, I don’t… I don’t really see our first record as being successful in the business sense. It’s a meaningful record, it’s successful artistically. We set out to make something meaningful yet fun, and it was. But in terms of me as an artist… it’s been a few years since I wrote that, and that was a particular point in my life. I was glad I could channel those ideas and that sentiment.

What I’m writing now, what I’m interested in, is not the same as the last record. And we have a decent amount of fans, a lot of people heard the record, but in terms of where we want to be as a band, the last record was just a drop in the bucket.

So what’s the new record going to sound like? The last record had this infectious pop sound, with outrageous power cords and insanely catchy hooks. Reviewers were constantly comparing the record to Weezer and Ben Folds and the like.

I think we have the same sound… it’s the same band… but our new record is definitely more sophisticated, darker ordeal. There are elements of humor, but… it’s hard to say. The sound is different than our first album but… well we’ve showed it to some people and they’ve liked it, so I’m excited about it.

Great. So when’s it coming out?

Good question. We’re working on a game plan. We focused on art, on recording it, for six months, and now these next six months are all business, to make sure those past six months were not spent in vain.

Interesting. That’s a very practical approach, one that a lot of artists don’t seem to be willing to adopt. But it seems more and more like it’s necessary to do.

I imagine not everyone is an entrepreneur in the band. Do some of you do one thing more or less than the other thing?

Well I think you have to be, you have to be an entrepreneur. We all have different strengths in the business aspect, so we delegate tasks.

At the end of the day, you’re the only one that is going to do everything it takes to make sure you’re successful, so you just have to do it.

Plus it’s more fun than a desk job.

Yeah. To go play shows and call that business, my business, that’s pretty great. It’s tough out there. We’ll still once in a while flyer the streets or play to an empty room, but that’s what it takes, and that’s what you gotta do.

Is there anything you learned from being a poet that helped you in your songwriting?

Well I think having written poetry, I pay a lot more attention to detail. It’s really focused in poetry because there’s not that much there, so what is there needs to be important… I question every chord in my music, maybe because of that.

I find that people often attempt to draw parallels between my career in poetry and my career in film. Which I cringe at. What I usually tell them is the only thing that participating in two art forms has really done is highlighted that I’m not interested in the medium, but more in specific themes. Has being involved in two different art forms illuminated anything for you?

Yeah. Well. Whether it be poetry or fiction or music or whatever, once you know who you are and what you’re about, it comes through in your work.

There’s this concept in art, especially in writing, that the closer you can get to the purity of your personal voice or vision, the better the piece of art is. Other artists will disagree with that. Where are you on that spectrum?

Just depends, you know. If you’re writing for Brittany Spears, obviously you’re writing to a specific voice. But ultimately if you know who you are and what you’re about, the work shines. I think the great artists have a grasp on a vision.

I remember at one point you and your brother [Steven Horowitz]… weren’t you guys in some sort of mashup project together that was really successful?

Yeah, a few years ago when everyone was remixing that Jay-Z Black Album, we did it with some modern classical music.

Right, that was very awesome. So my question is if you could mashup any Tally Hall song with a hip hop song, what would it be?

…Well I think a lot of our music is multi-metered and maybe not appropriate for that, so it’s a tough question. Let me get back to you.

[Andrew got back to me: Welcome to Tally Hall with Eminem's Slim Shady. Both
introductory songs. Think it'd work!]

So can we post one of your poems?

[Laughs] Sure.

—-

THE BUTTERFLY IN A BLENDER

by Andrew Horowitz

The butterfly is trapped in a blender And the boy in the kitchen sits in wonderment picking his nose Cold air outside runs past windows and makes a sound Lost leaves want to whistle into the house A rotting spider on a windowsill could view the scene and continue to die an unnecessary death Someone else will put it in the trash they all think Now the boy disregards the spider and wonders instead where to put his snot The wall is lined with yellow flowers that have been painted from the ground This is where he puts it, just after god leaves to find one-hundred miles away something of interest