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Erik: How are your responsibilities changing as your band prepares to release a new album?
Conrad: When a band releases a new record, internal jobs change, and they change all
the time but when you're recording -- when you're writing, you're focused on writing.
And the way a band writes or the way a single songwriter writes, you have to change your
mentality and your approach. And that goes for the way you interact with other people.
You have to know when to jump in, when to hold off, when to acknowledge the good, acknowledge
the not that good. When you record, it's different, your responsibility is—well, first of all,
if you're on budget if you're in a studio, you gotta be fast because this is affecting
a lot of people beyond yourself. You need to be prepared. Your job at that point becomes
prepare—it's like a presentation. You go to the office, we're preparing for this. We
brainstormed, now we have to prepare for the presentation because on the day we present,
i.e. on the day we record, we want this to go as seamlessly as possible. Now that we're
getting ready to release a record, jobs change again, we have to learn how to perform this
record, we have to go in and our job now is very much strict musician, how do we do this?
How do we perform? How do we play this music? And there's an element of—there's also an
element of marketing I guess. We have to decide the artwork. Who inspires us? We brought in
someone, a friend, an artist, he's fantastic. We love what he did. We have to work with
people, a label -- a record label. They gave us money to record, now they're gonna release
this record. We have to actually go into meetings and decide—make decisions. At that point
it becomes very much a project manager's role. You have to juggle several hats when you do
this. It's all worth it, of course, but, yeah, the job changes, stage to stage. And then,
when it comes to the point that we're on tour, at that point, we'll hopefully have stopped
thinking about getting the word out and we'll just back to focusing on actually playing,
on actually performing.