Audioholic Media

After nearly two decades as a working musician, Will Hoge has built a fan base that is as loyal to him as they are dedicated to the soul of the music he creates. When the Nashville-based musician was involved in a nearly fatal traffic accident last summer, there was no shortage of support from fans, fellow musicians, and even Perez Hilton — which was weird but, you know, thoughtful. In the same grand twist of fate that kept the singer-songwriter alive and eventually allowed him to pick up his guitar again, rock ‘n’ roll was granted one more opportunity to stop being awful when Hoge released his newest album, The Wreckage.

In a time when music is sinking as an industry, artists like Will Hoge are helping us to remember it as an art form. He is one of the primary artists who inspired me to start Audioholic Media, and he encompasses the spirit of what we’re attempting to create here. While major labels continue to struggle with the idea that the music business is more than just terrestrial radio and t-shirt sales, raw talent is becoming more relevant. Will Hoge is an honest, incontrovertible musician and a consummate example of the kick in the ass that rock ‘n’ roll so desperately needs right now.

Audioholic Media: I know that November 10th is a significant date for you and your career as a musician, so it’s especially exciting to talk to you today of all days.

Will Hoge: It was years ago. 1996, November 10th. There’s a weird phase when you wanna become a musician, it starts off as this hobby thing. I don’t think anybody just picks up a guitar or plays the drums and says, “OK, I’m giving up everything else for this.” Not just right off the bat. It’s kinda like dating and falling in love. You progress in your relationship with rock ‘n’ roll, and it gets to this point where you eventually quit school — or I did. I played in a band and eventually it took me away from school. I stopped school, but I still had a day job. Then you get to a point where you have less of a day job and it becomes more of this really temporary situation and you’re playing music more and more and more. It kinda gets to be this cutoff where you have to really commit everything to it or stop. The 10th of November, 1996 was kinda my day. I just went through a whole bunch of stuff at that point in my life: first real lost love relationship, first time that I was playing in a band… [I couldn't] just quit my job that very second, but I don’t think I worked for much longer. I just decided that this is what I was gonna do. I’ve really worked tirelessly almost every day since. It’s really been long term, and it continues to grow and get better each year.

AM: I want to jump 13 years later and talk a little about The Wreckage. When you were premiering the album on MySpace, it was immediately clear that all of the tracks were independently strong. I know that you re-worked a good amount of the album after the accident happened. What were the previous songs like?

WH: There’s three that made it from the original sessions. “Hard To Love” is the first song that we recorded for the record before the accident and that stayed. The duet “Goodnight Goodbye” was recorded before the accident, and “Just Like Me” was recorded before the accident. We had recorded a different version of “Too Late Too Soon”; it was much more of, like a big, kind of rock, The Who kind of sound, and it didn’t really fit the song. We had some other songs that were just a little more straight-ahead, rockin’ things — all the songs that we were real proud of at the time, but with everything that happened in the time off after the accident, I started writing a bunch more, so a lot of these songs kinda came along. We recorded these and as we started really looking at the overall picture of what we had recorded, it wasn’t that the other songs necessarily weren’t good enough.

I still really believe in albums, and I know that it’s a dying art. There’s a lot of people that say albums don’t really matter anymore, people just wanna buy singles or they’ll buy the songs they wanna hear, and I respect that — I think there’s definitely some truth in it — but as an artist, I still like to hear records. I like to buy records and put them on from the start and listen through the whole thing. I may be the minority in that but that’s something I’m still gonna do. As an artist, it’s important for me to make albums. Really, with these songs, it wasn’t that the first ones weren’t good enough, they just didn’t fit this concept. The songs started kinda finding their way onto the record, and there were certain songs that just got booted off.

AM: In terms of the accident, I was reading that you broke both of your shoulders and that you had lost your voice…

WH: I crushed one of my lungs and hurt the other one pretty bad, so I was on a breathing tube for a pretty good while. Obviously when they were rescuing me off the street, they didn’t take the time to say, “OK, this guy might die, but we need to see if he’s a singer first and be very careful putting the breathing tube in.” There’s a certain kind of breathing tube, and I’ve found out since that you can use different things that don’t mess with your throat or your vocal cords. I’m just thankful that they kept me alive, but having this big tube down my throat for a long time did mess with my throat a bit. Then having a lung capacity that is very different than before the accident, it just changed my whole way of singing. I had crushed ribs and a broken sternum also, so my chest just literally didn’t expand the way that it had before and it was months before I was really able to do that. A year or so later I’m still getting some of that back, you know, muscle-wise and bone-wise, and really being able to do all the things I did before. It just changed the way that I had to approach singing. Physically I’d done it the same way for so many years that it had become real comfortable — some of that in a good way, but there were some real changes in having to kinda learn to re-sing, and it opened up some things that I probably would have never done before. It’s certainly expanded my abilities as a singer — maybe not necessarily vocal range, but vocal understanding or willingness to try new things. It’s ultimately been a good thing.

AM: Was there ever a point when you thought, “Holy shit, what if I can’t hold a guitar again, or if I can’t sing like I did before?

WH: It’s strange to say this, but there was never a point when I thought that I wouldn’t do it again, but there was a point when I realized that I could do it again. When I got back home and was out of the hospital, I was still in a wheelchair, I still couldn’t walk, but I was to the point where I could hold a guitar. I couldn’t stand, but I could get my arms around a guitar, so I’d sit in this wheelchair and play. My voice was still real weak. It was the first time that I’d had some time by myself. My wife was able to at least leave me alone for 20 minutes to go to the grocery store, and my son was at school, and I was able to sit in the room and play and sing a song for the first time. It was real weak and all that, but it was a real cool moment for me, because that was the first moment when I kinda heard my voice again and it sounded at least somewhat like me again, I thought. I did realize then, “OK, I will be able to do this again at some point.” So I don’t know that I ever thought that I wouldn’t, but I do know that was a moment when I realized that I would.

AM: Because you’d been notably independent for so long, has it been difficult to share control since you’ve chosen to sign with Rykodisc?

WH: It’s been really good, actually. It’s odd for me to say that about a record label, because I’ve done my fair share of rants against the record labels, but Ryko’s been really cool. They’ve pushed me to just try to be the best version of myself. I’ve been getting a lot of suggestions, some of which have been really good, some of which I’m against and didn’t try at all and they were OK with that, some of them we tried and [they] didn’t work. It became much more of a partnership than a heavy-handed record label. It’s been really good, actually. I’m really excited about hopefully getting to work with them longer.

AM: What is it about them that made them the right fit for you and what you’re doing?

WH: They’ve been real. Record deals a lot of times are very over-the-top, and there’s somebody that’s selling you on what you want most and they’re telling you all of the things that they’re gonna do. There are a lot of fancy dinners and limousines, and it’s everything that you want. It’s a kid at Christmas scenario, but then that dries up. At Ryko, they didn’t really have that. Those aren’t the things that I’m interested in. I want an opportunity to try to write great songs and make great records and [create] true work and be a musician. I’m not interested in being a star, but I’d like to be a great musician. Ryko seemed to want very specific things, and they seemed to just want to give me opportunities to that would help me be a better musician. It struck me as a musical partnership, and that was the big bonus for me.

AM: Rykodisc seems to be supportive of the fact that you’ve really utilized new media to build your career, especially in terms of initially releasing The Wreckage via the Internet and allowing fans to tape and record your live shows. As an Internet-based music magazine, it’s interesting to hear you talk about your thoughts on the importance of giving people free access to so much of your music.

WH: I think the only people that fear taping and downloading are the people that aren’t very good at this. The reason Britney Spears doesn’t want you to tape her show — everybody knows what Britney Spears looks like, everybody’s seen her videos, they’re not concerned that she’s gonna fall during her performance, what they’re concerned about is that you’re gonna realize that she doesn’t sing at her concerts. There’s so much of that that goes on. We don’t discourage it, but we actually play. There’s some wrong notes in our set, don’t get me wrong, and you’re gonna hear ‘em, but they’re played with the most integrity that you can play a wrong note with. The bottom line is, on the business end, a lot of the label people will say it kills record sales to people who trade music or download music, and I just flat don’t think it’s true.

Even when I was growing up listening to records, long before the Internet — we didn’t have computers when I was a kid [laughs] — you’d have friends who would burn you a cassette of an album. There’s been the technology to not buy an album for years and years and years. I had friends that would burn a live bootleg of a show on a cassette and you’d trade it and spread it around and fall in love with a new band, then you’d go buy their record. It’s no different now, you can just reach more people than you could before. There’s gonna be some people that aren’t gonna buy your record, but there’s gonna be a lot more on the other side of that. They’re gonna download your record for free off of some file sharing site, and if they don’t like your record, they’re not gonna buy it, but they were never gonna buy it in the first place. If you didn’t have downloading, they were never even gonna hear your record. The bottom line is that all you’re doing is giving people an opportunity to hear something. If they love it, I firmly believe — and we’ve seen it with our fan base — they’re gonna go and support the artists that they believe in and want to see. I think that people may download your record but they’re gonna come and buy a ticket to a show, probably more than once; if you’re worried about it strictly financially, you’ve gotten more money from them in that than you would’ve gotten from them buying the record. They’re gonna then buy a t-shirt or two, they’re gonna buy your other albums and probably still buy the album [they downloaded] because when they realize that you’re an artist and you actually do your work, they wanna support that. They’re gonna give you the money to buy the record directly from you anyway. It’s not something that I’m afraid of. The music industry and artists as a whole are trying to fight that tide — it’s just silly. You’re just wasting your time. I think you’re better off going and making more records and trying to write better songs than trying to stop that. It’s like arguing gravity at this point.

I understand it to a point. You’re out here and this is the only thing that you have, so you wanna be a little precious with it, but at the end of the day — when you’re arguing about a dollar or two dollars versus [how] you could be celebrating the fact that you could make $50 — it just depends on which side of the argument you wanna be on, and I’m on the other.

AM: The more I speak to people involved in the music industry, the more I realize that most everybody really does know everyone else, but it stems less from the sleazy, networking side of the business and more from how willing they’ve been to take part in the community as a whole. That connection generally thrives most before an artist is signed. I’m sure that being part of the Nashville circuit has helped, but so many other musicians seem to know you or know of you. Is that sense of community important to you and to your career?

WH: Nashville’s a small town, geographically and population-wise, just in general. It’s not a huge town in the first place, but within that small community, there’s an even smaller collection of people that are musicians, so you know a lot of the same people. Music kinda comes and goes in waves in every community, and I’m sure Portland’s the same way. In Nashville you go through this thing where everybody’s getting signed in Nashville, then it kinda dries up for a minute, then it comes back. I was in between this wave of bands that had gotten signed and either gone onto bigger things or had gotten dropped. I was in between that and the success of, like, the guys in Kings Of Leon or something like that. When I was first starting, it seemed like it was a lot more cutthroat. It was guys that would want their band to succeed but they would kind of discourage people from liking your band. It was much more about, “What can I get?” And then somewhere in there, I really saw that change when it became this community where everyone kind of works with everybody again . “I want you to succeed because I wanna succeed.” It just became a really cool thing to see. It’s great for everybody if that’s the case. How important is it? It’s hard for me to say. I’ve had some opportunities to play with other people. It’s one of the things I still like to do, unfortunately we haven’t gotten to do much of it in the last couple years, but I like to go out with other bands on tour. It’s a nice thing to go out and be the opening band for a while. I hope that those relationships at some point pay off. It’s nice to go out and support some friends and not have the focus necessarily be on you 100% every show.

AM: The idea of sharing the spotlight and being part of the community seems like a lost idea to guys who want to be in a band just to tell chicks they’re in a band.

WH: Yeah, exactly. You either wanna be in a band or you wanna play in a band. I wanna be in a band because I wanna play music, I wanna make records, I wanna be a musician. There’s a lot of reality television, with American Idol… There’s still this false hope. There’s a lot of people that are out here, like you said, because they wanna nail a chick so they wanna be able to be famous or whatever. Of the people that I grew up admiring as artists, I don’t think any of them had that as their goal. I think that it’s always been more about the music. Obviously I wanna make a living, I wanna support my family and things like that, but I’m not willing to sell my soul to do that, to be on MTV or anything like that. There are a lot more music fans that don’t watch MTV than there are music fans that watch MTV. I mean, there’s a lot of people that watch MTV, but they’re just consumers at this point, they’re not music fans. They may like whatever MTV’s playing, and maybe at some point again MTV will actually play music and turn those people onto what is great music, but at this point, it’s just marketing. And whoever that star is, their music is more a souvenir of their stardom than [a result of someone] buying it because it’s a great record. I want to be on the other side of that. I want people buying it because they think it’s a great record and they connected to something that was said in the lyrics or something that they saw at a show, because those are the people that are gonna come back time and time and time again and buy record after record after record. That’s what I’m interested in trying to do.

AM: Having been part of the band Spoonful, are there any primary differences between being the lead singer of a band and a solo artist who travels with a band?

WH: Oh yeah. Spoonful was my last attempt at “a band.” A band is fake, don’t let anyone fool you. There’s always one guy who does the majority of the work, two guys who do the majority of the work, and there’s a bunch of dudes just kinda hanging around not doing shit.

AM: They just show up for the shows.

WH: Yeah, and take all the benefits. The only real difference to me was that I decided that this is what I was gonna do, and I was gonna do it. The thing about bands is that you get somebody that leaves and you’ve gotta change band names or you’ve gotta change something. I always knew that this is what I wanted to do, and I was gonna be the constant through it, so it was more important for me to just find guys to play with me, then it can always be Will Hoge ’cause I’m not gonna quit. I’m not gonna go and get a day job. So I kinda get both worlds, but I still love the consistency of having a group of guys that I can fall back on and rely on musically.

AM: When you have people leave your band, the change in the sound is a noticeable one. I know that some people have been sad to see guys like Dean [Tomasek] and Jefferson [Crow] leave because they were huge assets, but you do get this new sound with each transition and that’s a cool progression.

WH: That’s my favorite thing about it. People will say that it’s not the same, and it’s not the same. It’s never gonna be the same, and I don’t want it to be the same. When someone leaves or they’re fired or they quit, I’ve never tried to find a replacement band member, I’ve always tried to find another band member. No one’s ever gonna play the same exact same as someone else does and I don’t want them to. I want every person that comes in to bring something new to the party, and with each incarnation, there’s certain things that you go, “OK, this guy does this better than we did before. And there’s other things he doesn’t do as well, and we need to try to work around that.” It’s always a challenge. It’s never the same, and I don’t think it should be.

AM: Being on the road as much as you are, I know that you rotate your set list every night, but “Woman Be Strong” has kind of come to be expected at every Will Hoge show. Do you ever get sick of playing that song?

WH: I don’t think we’ve played in a few weeks. I’m real fortunate in that there’s no songs that I’ve written or recorded or that we would play that are cringe-worthy at this point. That’s one of my favorite things. To do a show and have someone come up at the end of the night and say, “My favorite song is ‘Woman Be Strong’ and you didn’t even play it, but this is my favorite show that I’ve been to.” That, to me, is something that’s real important. If you’re coming to just hear one song and we don’t play it and it ruins your night, we didn’t really do a very good job. I love for somebody to leave and say, “I just had the best time that I’ve had seeing music, and they didn’t even play my favorite song,” because then they’re gonna come back again, and go, “Maybe they’re gonna play it next time,” and they’ll be that much more excited. There’s nothing that I feel like we have to play.

AM: Considering that so much of your success has been based around the work you’ve done as an independent artist and a lot of touring and word-of-mouth promotion, you’ve done remarkably well for yourself. Are you taking everything as it comes or are you do you strive to accomplish specific achievements based on some sort of time line?

WH: I think you have to sort of take it as it comes. You have to, obviously, have some goals. I mean, I want things to be bigger. There are people that are doing this forever and there are people that are doing it temporarily. And I think that it starts to become a lot more temporary when you start to put time lines on things. Like, if I’m not playing to 1,000 people a night by October of next year, then I’m gonna quit. There are people that do that, and I would understand it to a certain point, but I’m not doing that. I suppose at this point, if I had to tour with just a Volkswagen and an acoustic guitar, it’s what I do, so I’d find a way to make that work. I think you have to be smart and work towards something, but to put to put a time frame on it is suicidal.

AM: What do you have planned for 2010?

WH: We’re working on some songs, trying to get some stuff together for another record. We’re doing the Rock Boat thing in January the seventh through the 11th, come home and do a show in Nashville on the 13th, then we go to Europe and do that for a few weeks. I’m hoping we’ll do some more touring next year, but there’s nothing scheduled as of yet.

AM: You’ve talked about your father once sneaking you in to see Bo Diddley play and how that really informed your idea of live music, and your live show has had the same experience on me and, consequently, on Audioholic Media.

WH: That’s cool. That’s real cool. Music can be such a spiritual experience and it’s funny because there’s a point where people see it and realize it. Unfortunately there’s so much bad music that a lot of people don’t experience it. It doesn’t have to be at my show, but I see it at my show because that’s when people will say that to me. We had some girls in Chicago that were big hip-hop fans and a friend of theirs had said, “Look, I’ll buy your tickets, you just have to come.” And they bought every album and said [they've] never listened to rock music, or country music, or whatever the hell it is that I do. It’s a wonderful experience. It’s changed my life forever, and if you can ever have that effect on somebody, it’s great.

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For more information on Will Hoge, visit willhoge.com.

photography by Justin Patterson