The Paesanos Podcast

Sean Lukasik:
So Franz, thanks so much for joining the Paesanos Podcast. I really enjoy having you on

franz:
My pleasure, Sean. Thanks for having me.

Sean Lukasik:
So I wanted to talk with you as an artist, a musician, a writer, and sort of everything that you've got going on in the world of creativity. First and foremost, with the role of the internet that that's sort of played throughout your career. Obviously, the internet today is different than it was 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And so I guess let's just start there and sort of ask how the process has changed for you when it comes to creating, writing, songwriting, and even sort of putting stuff out into the world now versus when you first kind of started your career.

franz:
Sure, so I've been in the music business for 25 years, which means I've basically seen the entire history of music on the internet from the very beginnings. I mean, I remember when I was in, it must have been late college or my early post-collegiate years and I was making my own music for the original GarageBand.com. opened up and this was the first, I don't know if you remember this, this was the first place where you could sort of upload songs and get them critiqued by strangers. And what a revelation that was in terms of, oh, people who aren't my friends are going to hear these songs that I wrote and recorded and have an opinion on them. Obviously, Napster, 99, 2000. much more weighted on the side of being a music fan than being an active participant in the music industry. So

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
that was pretty exciting, especially, you know, there was the dot com boom. I was living in New York, so I had a job at a dot com, had, you know, reasonably fast internet by the standards of 1999 at

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
work and a CD burner. So that was pretty exciting too. You know, MySpace. as someone who was in bands in the early 2000s, in a lot of ways remains the best sort of community building experience for bands for a couple years there. That was the first time where you could really feel like you could contact the people who were fans of your band directly or be in

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
contact with them to the extent that you wanted to. But in

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
terms of booking shows and sort of on the DIY level, being part of a network of bands and promoters and people who are putting on shows and fans.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
The ability to access, I mean the biggest plus that's sort of maintained through that is independent distribution, the ability

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
to sell your music, distribute your music, stream your music, get your music on the streaming platforms for a nominal fee through various websites. You know, I want to give a shout out to CD Baby. who are probably

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
stuck with a name that they wish they hadn't

Sean Lukasik:
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

franz:
started with in the aughts. For my money, Remain, the most artist-friendly company for that sort of thing in terms of then physical distribution, now digital distribution. Bandcamp, obviously, has been great for people. On the one hand, on the other hand, right? the internet giveth and the internet taketh away.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, well and it's interesting to hear you talk about like Napster and I remember lime wire And you know those it took work to really like burn a CD and put that playlist together similar to how it was, you know making a mixtape or whatever before that but But the free access to music I know was a big problem for the industry And they've done everything to make sure that that's not possible anymore.

franz:
Well, they haven't

Sean Lukasik:
But

franz:
done that much. I mean, the damage is done, right? So like

Sean Lukasik:
Sure,

franz:
the revenues

Sean Lukasik:
sure.

franz:
of the music industry between 2000 and by the time Napster was shut down, literally halved. And

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
they made up some of that in the advent of iTunes a few years later, and then streaming, but it's never completely recovered. And the... you know, the I mean, Spotify is one of those companies, I think, like, we understand on some level that Amazon is bad for the world and that Uber is bad for the world, but

Sean Lukasik:
Mm.

franz:
people have sort of made their... It's just too convenient. And so people are just willing

Sean Lukasik:
Right.

franz:
to live with that knowledge. And Spotify is one of those companies. Spotify was built on torrenting technology. The original Spotify library was built on... on the pirated music collections of the founders of Spotify. And they've maintained that sort of attitude. They're not fundamentally interested in music as such. They're interested in monopolizing the audio listening lives of their users. And what they've managed to do, and it's really stark from a music fan's point of view, obviously it's incredible. You have... as close to a universal library. Obviously, it's not a universal library, but it's closer than the world has ever come. And that is great for the music fan. It's great for the up and coming musician who has access to all this, they can put all this stuff in their ears in a way that someone my age never could have. On the other hand, they've eliminated the last vestiges of people paying directly for music. So the iTunes music store and to some extent Bandcamp was a little bit of clawing that back for a few years in terms of paying a nominal fee, a dollar a song, for recorded music. But then streaming music has completely, more or less, eliminated that. And so on the ground for a musician, what do you do? When I started touring in the aughts and then through the early teens, the big revenue source on tour was selling CDs. And CDs were a pretty good profit margin. You could make them for a dollar and sell them for $10. And nobody's buying CDs, nobody's buying, very few people are buying MP3s.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm hmm.

franz:
And then so from the point of view of the touring musician, what are you selling? The critical mass of people who have turntables is not large. And from a logistical point of view, LPs are large, they're bulky, especially if you're doing international touring, you simply can't bring enough to stock your entire tour. And so just in terms of like someone went to your show, they liked what they heard, what do you have to offer them?

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
It's a real conundrum.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
You're in the dry goods business in terms of trying to find a thing that's broadly of interest to anyone who might come to a show. We haven't been able to replace that.

Sean Lukasik:
What about making the music specifically? I mean, I know, I saw you with the Hold Steady at the last Massive Nights series in Brooklyn

franz:
Hmm

Sean Lukasik:
there. And as part of that, you know, guys do sort of soundcheck and talk and share things. And you talked a lot about the process, the songwriting process and sort of uploading files to Dropbox and listening to those and throwing feedback, you know, in a Google Doc or whatever. Obviously, that process is so much different than getting to getting a group together physically and bringing your ideas into the room. What is that like? I mean, where you're literally songwriting across a virtual connection.

franz:
Yeah, I mean that's has really was really accelerated by the pandemic. I know that a lot

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
of musicians I know took that opportunity to really upgrade their home studio situation, home recording situation.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
People bought nicer microphones. People learned how to use the software that they had maybe half learned. You know, it was really only a month or two into the pandemic before I started fielding. emails from people being like, hey, I'm making this record. Can I send you some files?

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
Like, yeah, absolutely, sitting around.

Sean Lukasik:
Right.

franz:
A lot of people made pandemic home records. The Hold Steady had already sort of started working that way because at the time I was living in California, Steve, one of our guitar players lives in Memphis. And so when we started writing music again in 2017, it just made sense. for us to be, at least in the early stages of sending instrumental tracks to Craig the singer, to be building them up a little bit at home and sharing them that way.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
Although at that point, it was usually very much, you know, one of us would make a very rough demo, Craig might sing over it, and then we would get together in a room. In the pandemic era and beyond, it's been much more of filling out relatively complete demos before we get in a room. And it's a, you know, we have the benefit of doing that because we're musicians with 20 years of experience working with each other.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
We have that chemistry and understanding of what everyone needs and wants. I think, you know, it might be harder to. to be starting from scratch with people, I'm not sure. But you can't beat that convenience. There are upsides and downsides. I have, feel like that it gives you an opportunity to do a sort of proof of concept demo. I remember in the early years of that band, sometimes I would bring in music and it would be a little hard to. You know, sometimes you bring in music and it's obvious to everyone in the room how it's going to go and what they're going to play. And sometimes it's not. And it's not always

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
easy to explain how you're hearing it in person in the moment.

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

franz:
So working from home gives you the opportunity to sort of fill out the sound and not be prescriptive about it, but to say, here's how I imagine that it might look and sound.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
And then people can sort of wrap their heads around it in advance of getting in a room together. And obviously, you know, then it goes through the filter of the specific musicians. And when it comes out the other side, even if it doesn't go in sounding like a whole steady song, it comes out sounding like a whole steady song.

Sean Lukasik:
Of course, yeah, yeah

franz:
So that's a benefit. The downside is that I think that prescriptiveness, where if you send around a very full sounding demo, it can be harder. for people to put their own stamp on it or to come at it with really open ears in terms of what their part might be.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
And you try to balance that in all kinds of ways. I think sometimes I've erred on the side of sending too complete an arrangement, which I've tried to pull back from. Tad, one of our other guitar players, is pretty good about sending very sketchy demos in many cases.

Sean Lukasik:
Hahaha!

franz:
which gives us a lot of room to play with.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
Although that's not always the case, he can send very full band arrangements too. He's actually a really good drummer. So particularly in

Sean Lukasik:
Oh,

franz:
that

Sean Lukasik:
interesting.

franz:
sense, the drum parts can be pretty well filled out. So I don't know, that's

Sean Lukasik:
Would

franz:
just,

Sean Lukasik:
you

franz:
that's

Sean Lukasik:
consider?

franz:
one of those sort of, you know, the needle waves back and forth. But for a band where not everybody lives in the same, area or people have families. When the band started, we were rehearsing twice a week for two or three hours a time and we could

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
really write in the practice room and we just don't have that kind of flexibility in our lives now. So the Dropbox writing works for that.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah. And kind of nice that you don't even really need it to be. I mean, considering that you've got the 20 years of experience there working together and, um, and, you know, the, the very fast upload speeds and things now that, uh, that weren't around at the, you know, the advent of the band.

franz:
Yeah, I mean, I would say sometimes I like, I would like to have a couple, a little more rehearsal time before we go into the studio. These last

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
three records, you know, we get these demos and then we're really only in the rehearsal space for a day or two playing these songs for the very first time before we're in the studio, which on the one hand maybe captures the discovery process of the song. On the other hand, we definitely have had that experience of making the record. and never having played the song really as a band.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm hmm. Sure.

franz:
And then we

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
very quickly discover, we settle into something else in a live version where we're like, oh, I wish I, that's how I should have played it, you know. But that's, you know, that is what it is.

Sean Lukasik:
So you guys you guys put out an album Open Door Policy in 2020, which had been worked on pre pandemic, but then you're in the process of releasing an album during that time and, um, and eventually touring it to some degree, uh, with, with nobody in the room, no fans in the room with

franz:
Yeah.

Sean Lukasik:
you, I can talk all day about what that meant to me as a fan and what that experience was like watching virtually, uh, seeing you guys on stage and, um, different, uh, cities and places around the world. Um, But what was that experience like? Live streaming a show with nobody in the audience and seeing maybe faces on televisions or getting a little bit of feedback here and there, but essentially just relying on that virtual connection.

franz:
Yeah, I mean, it was very surreal and very emotional, as you can imagine. I remember having a very emotional reaction just to seeing crew people on the stage, like setting up the stage, just being like, wow, it's people who are good at what they do doing the thing that they do.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
What a great thing. You know, it was a little bit like the experience of being on late night television, where you're- In those cases, there's maybe 100 people in the room, but you can't really see them. They're 20 yards away. They're behind really bright lights and a lot of cameras. So you're sort of shutting that out and acting as if. You sort of make a mental image of a few thousand people and play to that mental image. So playing to an empty room at the Brooklyn Bowl, for example, was a little bit like that. We had these TV screens around the sides and the back of the room that was showing people's Zoom faces. And that was really great to see that helped, although I did find after a couple songs that it was extremely distracting. And I was missing my

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
mark, so I had to really block that out. But then, you know, and we've talked about this before, at the end, you know, the guitar feedback was still going and had looped and we were all sort of sitting over by the bowling alleys looking at the screens and the director was flipping through and people were holding up messages. That was a really emotional moment.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah. Well, it was, it was on both sides of the screen. I could. say, you know, being able to have some access to the music in that way was something a lot of us really needed at that time. Would you consider New River a pandemic album? Or was it the pandemic that just kind of made it possible to finally put out into the world?

franz:
Yeah, that's what it was. I mean, I was, again, you know, April of 2020, sitting around

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
trying to figure out what to do with my nights after the kids went to bed. And I had a couple of fully formed songs that I'd written over the previous couple of years. I hadn't put out a record since 2015. I had a lot of music, instrumentals, some of them, were stuff that for whatever reason hadn't made the cut as a whole steady song, but that I still thought were good. I have a huge slush pile of words, some of which becomes lyrics, some of which becomes

Sean Lukasik:
Thanks for watching!

franz:
fiction or writing prose of various kinds. And so I stayed up for a week or two just marrying the two together and pretty quickly had 10 or 11 songs that were ready to go. And then of course I had to wait another year to record

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah,

franz:
them, to get people in the room to record them.

Sean Lukasik:
sure. And I know you've talked about this before, but you're a guy who likes to release vinyl as well. And that wasn't too easy to do at the time either. I understand.

franz:
I mean, honestly, I don't give a shit how it comes out.

Sean Lukasik:
Okay.

franz:
And I'm not like a vinyl fetishist or anything. I want the music to get out there in whatever form that most people are going to hear it. And honestly, after that experience, I don't think I'm going to prioritize vinyl going forward. Because

Sean Lukasik:
Interesting.

franz:
I mean, that was a particularly bad couple of years in terms of how it came out. the turnaround on vinyl for a variety

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
of structural reasons which we don't need to get into. But yeah, I mean, I wrote the songs in April 2020. I couldn't get people in a room to record them until a year later, spring of 21. And then it took another year and a half to get the vinyl made. And so by that point,

Sean Lukasik:
Mm.

franz:
you're just like, well, this is old news. It's really frustrating.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, yeah.

franz:
So yeah, I'm not particularly, but from the label point of view, vinyl is where they are making their money back. And so there's, from their point of view, you have to wait till you have something you can sell, which makes total sense to me. But I will say that the most exciting feeling that I've had in terms of releasing music in the last several years is those. those couple of years where the whole study was recording and then putting the songs up on Bandcamp a few months later. Just because the turnaround was so quick. I feel like we're not taking enough advantage of what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, the convenience of distribution. And I understand why not, you know, but in terms of like the immediacy of like, hey, we wrote and recorded this song and we want people to hear it. You know, you have the opportunity, not that this happens all the time, but you, in theory, you could write a song in the afternoon, you know, in the morning, record it in the afternoon and have people hearing it that night.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
And I wish that happened more often because that's pretty exciting.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, and you could really bring people along. with the process as well. You're talking about, you know, recording it one way and then ultimately playing it live and wishing I wish I did this. There's there's the possibility of bringing people along in that process even if you release it one way and it changes a little bit a month later. You know, I don't know what all that looks like necessarily, but love that idea that bad band camp structure you talked about of you know, writing things and releasing them as soon as they're ready, um, is, is pretty unique.

franz:
I will say that from the band point of view, there is a way in which it was exciting for us to do that, but people don't take it as seriously. You get sort of caught between a Catch-22 of which we released an album's worth of material, but no one is going to treat it as an album until you release it all at once.

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

franz:
So during those two years, the question we kept getting in those soundcheck parties and elsewhere was, when are you going to compile this stuff? When are you going to put it all together? We were like, OK, I guess people want us to compile it and put it all together. And then when we did that, the reaction was like, well, this is not a real album. We heard all these songs before. It's like, well, fuck, you know? What do you want from us?

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I appreciate you doing that. And truly, I mean, it's it is a totally different lens into the process and into you know, how stuff gets released and the immediacy of it is pretty

franz:
Yeah.

Sean Lukasik:
neat.

franz:
I mean, and also, you know, I will say that if you're not paying it very close, that's like a Hold Steady superfan reaction. So there's a whole

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

franz:
chunk of people who didn't even know because media outlets are not going to cover you releasing songs on Bandcamp. So

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

franz:
from that point of view, there were X thousands of other people who were like, wow, Hold Steady record. We've never

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
heard this stuff before. This is super

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
cool. And so that's the argument for compiling this stuff or for saving it up and doing a proper album release. But, you know, an album release in this day and age is going to be songs that you wrote a year plus earlier. Or in the case

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
of Price of Progress, you know, the album is coming out in 2023, songs we started writing in 2020. And that feels like

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
too long.

Sean Lukasik:
I want to switch topics a little bit because I know that you've been working for well over a year now, unfortunately, with the Ukrainian music scene. And as the war has forged on there, I want to ask about what that looks like today. What is the music scene like in Ukraine? What are the artists up to? What are you up to as it relates to the efforts there?

franz:
I mean, I can't really speak to the entirety of the Ukrainian music scene.

Sean Lukasik:
Sure, sure.

franz:
Normal life continues apace in a lot of the countries, especially the western half of the country. People are playing shows, people are recording. A lot of people are in the army or in the territorial defense militias, so that's

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah,

franz:
disruptive. to being in a band, obviously.

Sean Lukasik:
yeah,

franz:
A lot of people have emigrated, particularly to Germany and to Poland. I can't speak in granular detail.

Sean Lukasik:
yeah. Well and maybe I should back up a little bit too for people who don't necessarily know. I understand and please correct me if I'm wrong. When the war initially broke out you were on tour.

franz:
No.

Sean Lukasik:
Okay. When the war broke out, you leapt into action trying to help with connections and funding. Is that?

franz:
Well, I mean, only in the sense that a lot of people did. My family has stronger connections to Ukraine maybe than the average American. My wife is Ukrainian American, and she has relatives living there. And she's an academic whose research is based in Ukraine, and we've spent extended periods of time living there. And so there was a period of trying Can we take people in here? What's the visa situation? Should we go to the Polish border and try to facilitate there? What's the best things we can do?

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
Spin asked me to write an article about the Ukrainian music scene. So I sort of, I did leap into action. in terms of that raising awareness. And Craig and I played that fundraiser that Eugene Hoot's put together, who's a guy I've known for a

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
long time. As the full-scale invasion has become more normalized, unfortunately, it's less dramatic in many ways. Um... I don't know, we're still in touch with a lot of people there. Again, Maria has been really involved in terms of raising awareness and talking about Ukrainian music and talking about particularly this ongoing argument about Russian cultural hegemony and Russian

Sean Lukasik:
Mm.

franz:
cultural colonialism and imperialism.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
which remains a fraud issue.

Sean Lukasik:
Is that I mean that feels really front and center even today, Elizabeth Gilbert just postponed indefinitely the release of her book, which kind of does exactly what you just described in terms of Russian culture, you know, talking about 1970s Soviet infrastructure and I mean, what are your thoughts on that sort of creative venture and the way it's playing out

franz:
Sure.

Sean Lukasik:
today?

franz:
I mean, I can't speak to Elizabeth Gilbert specifically because

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
I only saw the headline go by and I haven't read the specifics. But I will say that I think the conversation gets really simplified in the headlines to, oh, they're canceling Tchaikovsky and Pushkin. It's like, no, it's not that.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
But it is about the ways in which the nature of colonialism and imperialism is that cultures get subsumed into the hegemonic culture. So for example, Adam Curtis put out this documentary on the BBC a few months ago, which is a really extraordinary thing. It's based on footage that they found in a BBC closet in, I think in Moscow of just tons and tons of documentary footage from across the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1999. So the fall of communism and the... and the reconstruction in the 90s. And the headline, and it's a seven hour documentary, seven hour long sections. And at the top of every hour it says Russia. It says this is Russia. But the footage is

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
from not just Russia, but Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Chechnya,

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

franz:
Tajikistan, but to frame it as Russia. is, you know, even from a basically well-meaning, you know, artist of the left, like Curtis, is really misleading and feeds into this, the Russian chauvinist position that all of these countries and cultures and nations are to some extent Russia. And I watched all seven hours and I really admired it and I was glad I did, but it was really shocking that someone in 2023 would say all of this footage is Russia and all of these experiences of the fall of communism are subsumed into the and subservient to the experience of Russia. And so that's what the... the conversation and the resetting of the meter is about in this past year is saying, you know what, maybe, obviously, yes, okay, so there are, you know, Russian intelligentsia, Russian cultural refugees, the experience of being, you know, maybe you're a liberal writer who doesn't feel safe in Russia anymore and you've emigrated. But is that, is that And that's a really difficult position to be in. But is that a more difficult position to be in than the Ukrainian writer, the Ukrainian musician whose culture has not been celebrated on the international stage for centuries

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

franz:
and whose nation is trying to be wiped out? You know, I... Let me put it this way. My family and I were traveling a few years ago, and we went to, I forget what country we were in, but we were at an Iraqi restaurant. It was run by Iraqi refugees. And they were very nice to us. But it felt like a very, and we went there. We wanted to, but it felt extremely awkward and embarrassing to be an American eating. at an Iraqi restaurant, even an American

Sean Lukasik:
Thank

franz:
who

Sean Lukasik:
you.

franz:
protested against the Iraq War, who was by no means a supporter of the American government in many of its international escapades in the last 20 years. You still have to answer for it. And so I'm not entirely sympathetic to the position. of Russian cultural figures, dissident figures, refugee figures, whose argument is we are as much of a victim as this situation, as the Ukrainian, as our Ukrainian equivalent figures are, because that's just simply not the case. And it's

Sean Lukasik:
Well,

franz:
not fair,

Sean Lukasik:
and I,

franz:
but

Sean Lukasik:
yeah.

franz:
it may not be fair, but it's not the case. And so to the extent that, you know, that an opera company, you know, thinks twice about staging Eugene Onegin for the Amtith time and thinks about maybe there's repertoire from Ukrainian composers that we might program instead. I don't think that's an unfair position to take.

Sean Lukasik:
Totally and I appreciate that, you know, there's it all of this is complex and you do a lot of deep thinking around all the work that you do all the creativity that you put out into the world and I appreciate being able to ask you know about a lot of these things. And you write about so much whether it's in fiction, nonfiction work that you've put out in the world in the articles you've written obviously, in the music and all the different bands that you're part of. And how do you sort of, how do you prioritize that? How do you decide what's the next thing you're working on? Is it just sort of what's in front of you or, you know, what's that day to day like for you as you're considering what's the next most important thing for you to work

franz:
Yeah,

Sean Lukasik:
on?

franz:
it's really tricky. I mean, there's a way in which for most of my young adult life, I really was working on a lot. I had a lot of plates in the air. And then when I became a parent, one of the adjustments was realizing that I could only have one major project, aside from raising the kids,

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
that I could be working

Sean Lukasik:
The

franz:
out

Sean Lukasik:
other

franz:
at the

Sean Lukasik:
major

franz:
time.

Sean Lukasik:
project. Yeah.

franz:
So there's a way in which I'm still working through the backlog from 10 years ago in terms of stuff that I had started. It's my daughter's 10th birthday today as we're recording this and

Sean Lukasik:
Oh,

franz:
what

Sean Lukasik:
that's

franz:
I'm

Sean Lukasik:
great.

franz:
working on is cutting down the manuscript of a book that I started working on in 2015.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
So a book that I started, you know, she was two but maybe I still hadn't quite come to that realization yet.

Sean Lukasik:
Heh heh heh.

franz:
So that's why I'm saying that maybe there's a way in which I'm still working through that backlog. And I think once I get this manuscript off my desk, that'll be the first time maybe in that decade where when I finish that project, I'll have a clean slate in terms of what's the next project going to be. I mean, I already know what it's going to be, probably. But... I think I want to balance the music stuff and the writing stuff. I want to balance the hold steady stuff and whatever I'm working on independently of the hold steady. Things present, it all sorts itself out. Things present themselves in terms of freelance

Sean Lukasik:
Okay.

franz:
work. A band or an artist will email me and say, hey, I want you to play on my record and here's so many tracks and they're going to pay me. So that... that jumps to the front of the line.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
Whole study stuff is booked a year in advance. Or at least I know sort of roughly what's coming up. I have my teaching jobs. I know when my classes are going to be. I know that I have a day or two a week where I can work on other things. It's a scheduling conflict. But in terms of the main projects, I'm just trying to alternate.

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

franz:
New River came out, my solo record last year. So that takes care of that for a couple of years. I have to finish. The thing before that was my novel, Someone Should Pay for Your Pain.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

franz:
So in terms of alternating between writing and music, I know that the next thing up should probably be the next book, which is convenient because

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

franz:
that's

Sean Lukasik:
Hahaha.

franz:
the thing on my desk. So once I get that off my desk, then I'll probably think about is the next musical project. Do I want it to be another solo record of songs with lyrics, or do I want it to be another sort of instrumental art music project. I know that the next writing project should be another novel in terms of the rotation and also will be another novel in terms of that's what I have the idea for and the pages for. You know, it sort of works like that.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, and I mean, as long as we're looking to the future too, and thinking about the world that your kids are growing up in. What does have you put any thought into like how that continues to evolve the process of writing and releasing books and music and articles? the existentialism of artificial intelligence and its role in all of this stuff. I mean, do you, do you think about that? Do you, do you think about ways that you can maybe use it in the work that you're doing or, um, is it just kind of out there and, and you're doing, you've got your process and they'll eventually have theirs.

franz:
AI I don't know or care about.

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

franz:
I

Sean Lukasik:
Fair.

franz:
really don't. It has nothing to do with what I do.

Sean Lukasik:
That's fair.

franz:
I don't know, these things will sort themselves out. It doesn't seem like that sort of thing is gonna be useful.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
People are, people

Sean Lukasik:
I mean,

franz:
are,

Sean Lukasik:
yeah, like, I think it just puts the human work even more at a premium to be honest,

franz:
Yeah,

Sean Lukasik:
you know,

franz:
it seems like a tech panic. You know, before that, it was crypto. Before that, it was whatever, you know, the metaverse. These things come and go and they don't make a splash. And the same sort of people get excited about them and the same sort of people freak out about them. And I don't understand them or nor am I interested in them. And so I can go on and do my own. thing. I teach at the college level, so at the beginning of the year, we got a flurry of emails from various people being like, you know, chat GPT in the classroom. Here's how you should watch out for students writing their essays with it, or here's how you incorporate it, or here's how you use it as a teaching exercise. And it's just like, I don't know, teaching is hard. I have my lesson plan and it's hard enough. without thinking about that. And the students are gonna be more knowledgeable and savvy about it than I am. If they are using, I happen to think that most of them are earnest about learning. And so are gonna legitimately try to be writing their essays. And

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
if there's one that isn't, that's a problem for that student and not me.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, I mean, I had a conversation in an earlier episode. And the guest brought up the reef lectures and Stuart Russell, I don't know if you're familiar with

franz:
No.

Sean Lukasik:
those and BBC, BBC puts them on every year. It's a series of lectures and Stuart Russell talked about artificial intelligence. This is a guy who spent most of his life studying it and he's not a panic stricken techie and so that gives me a little bit of hope and I just wondered if you thought about it in terms of writing or songwriting or just sort of in general.

franz:
I don't

Sean Lukasik:
But

franz:
think about it at all.

Sean Lukasik:
yeah, great. Love that. Good. Well, you know, there's every year you put your annual audio yearbook out there, any sort of sneak preview or anyone that we should be paying attention to that might end up on the list this year.

franz:
Oh my God, I already have 150 songs on it and it's only halfway through

Sean Lukasik:
Great.

franz:
the year. So it's gonna be a real

Sean Lukasik:
Awesome.

franz:
problem to cut down. I've been on a real Sondheim kick for a couple of years. Stephen Sondheim, the musical theater composer. I feel like people probably assumed I was much more of a musical theater head than I... that I have been for most of my life. I think mostly because

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
of the way I sing, which is theatrical, but it wasn't about musical theater. It was just about I just sing that way. Because

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
I grew up singing along to Mark Eitzel and Scott Walker and people like that. But I think now I'm legitimately, I've got the bug. I'm in a

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
deep Sondheim dive. There's a podcast called Putting It Together that goes through his songs one by one. It's like an hour conversation on each. I'm like hundreds of hours into it at this point,

Sean Lukasik:
Good to know.

franz:
which I understand is not for everybody, but that's where I am.

Sean Lukasik:
Love it.

franz:
I don't know, Terry Adams solo records, I've listened to a bunch of, the keyboard is from NRBQ. What else did I like? I liked the White Reaper record. There's

Sean Lukasik:
Okay.

franz:
a, you know, from the rock side. I checked out Sheer Mag for the first time. That was a lot of fun. There's a group up here called Batfangs. It's a Don Giovanni band. It's these two women. Betsy from X-Hex. They do real like sort of classic rock throwback stuff. They're a lot of fun. Those are off the top of my head. That's some stuff

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah,

franz:
I've been listening

Sean Lukasik:
no, I appreciate

franz:
to.

Sean Lukasik:
it. I'm excited. Yeah, to dig into some of that stuff. And I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation. And, you know, we'll, we'll let people know to just kind of follow you around. You said at Franz Nikolai everywhere on social media. And of course, franznikolai.com your website, anything else that you want to share or add? While we're here.

franz:
at Franz Nikolai, not everywhere. I downloaded TikTok once for about 20

Sean Lukasik:
No

franz:
minutes

Sean Lukasik:
TikTok.

franz:
and I was like, this is clearly not for me and deleted it. I think at 45, I'm not in the market for new social media outlets.

Sean Lukasik:
A few more hours of Sondheim podcasts

franz:
So

Sean Lukasik:
and I

franz:
only

Sean Lukasik:
think

franz:
the

Sean Lukasik:
you'll

franz:
old

Sean Lukasik:
be

franz:
guard

Sean Lukasik:
back. That's

franz:
social

Sean Lukasik:
fair.

franz:
media. And as those disappear, so will my social media presence in the

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
decades going forward.

Sean Lukasik:
At Franz Nikolai on MySpace.

franz:
Yeah, there you go.

Sean Lukasik:
We got it. Perfect.

franz:
Friendster.

Sean Lukasik:
That's right.

franz:
I was never on Friendster actually. I was a late adopter of most of these things.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

franz:
Anyway, yeah, that's, yeah, FranzNicolay.com.

Sean Lukasik:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Franz.

franz:
Okay, thanks, Sean.