For the rest of December, the Sour Sedans — a music-as-a-muse funk band that welds downplayed Red Hot Chili Pepper vibes to modern rock sounds with an almost quirky, wear-it-on-your-shelve delivery that can come off as a alt. rock take on the Talking Heads — offer both of their records free online at Band Camp (soursedans.bandcamp.com). Vocalist and guitarist Ryan Cazares talks about Melting Pot 6 and the way to get rich by offering things for free.
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Why did y’all decide to give away the entire catalog? Don’t you know if you give away free music all the record companies crash and burn?**
I recently read a book called The 6-Figure Musician. While I don’t think the book quite lived up to its title, it had a few great suggestions. One suggestion was to try and give your music away for free. This accomplishes a few things: it allows more people to hear your music, which could lead to more people at your shows. Why keep people from hearing your music, especially when the profit margin is so small for a song or an album? Is there even a profit margin?
When will you be looking to get back in the studio?
We just began writing new songs and hopefully we can head back to the studio before the end of 2017. We hope to record an LP this time around.
What do you prefer and why: studio work or gigging live?
I enjoy both playing in the studio and playing live, but it’s difficult to capture our energy on record. I think our live show is very high energy, and people who have seen us live get hooked on us faster than if they only hear our records. Playing live also gives us a chance to improvise and interact with the crowd.
Y’all seem to really enjoy music as your record The Fix had a lot of songs about music itself.
All of the songs on the record The Fix are about music. In fact, they are about the difficulties musicians face in the business. We titled it The Fix because it sometimes feels like a black market out there that we have to navigate to get our music to our fans ... to give them their fix. It’s not easy to juggle that while we all have full-time jobs, but we just love playing music so much.
You have another Melting Pot show coming up on Feb. 4 at the Blue Moon. What is that gig all about?
I started the Melting Pot Show in 2013. I had the idea after Sour Sedans played a couple of Kevin Sekhani’s Hoot Nights at Blue Moon Saloon, where each band plays tributes of a selected artist for the night — Prince, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, etc. But I thought to myself, How can we expose Lafayette to the amazing variety of talent that we have here without having to resort to cover songs? The Melting Pot Show concept was then born. I book four completely different bands at each show. I assign each band one song from each of the other bands to interpret/cover and the rest of the 45-minute set is up to each band. The results have been awesome. Every band who has taken part has had such a good time: a hip-hop audience gets to experience a rock band they may not have ever gotten a chance to see or a Cajun band’s audience may get to witness a great set from a synth-pop band. We’ve had a huge variety of bands take part, and they’ve all raved about it: bands like Sweet Cecilia, Michael Juan Nunez & The American Electric, Smoov Ras & The Reflection and La Recolte. I hope to someday make it into a festival.
Nick Pittman is a freelance entertainment and feature writer. Send him your music and entertainment news to [email protected].