Thursday, July 28, 2011
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Martin Sexton Interview
The riveting sound stops you in your tracks and before you realize it, his vocals have taken hold of you. His name is Martin Sexton, a musician that emerges from the musical wilderness, transcending America the beautiful into a musical compilation of life, love, loss and hope. On Sugarcoating, his latest album, Martin bears his soul with the courage and conviction of a man seeking the truth, and confronting mistakes made along the way.
During a midday conversation Martin talks about life and what has led him in his current musical direction. "I feel like I’ve woken up a little in the last couple years. I didn’t know things a couple years ago that I know now and I don’t like what I see so I’m singing about it.” Focusing on the title track Sugarcoating, he says the song is about the present day and the future. “It’s more about that, then what happened nine years ago. It’s about the impact that that day had on us all, that reaches into today and years to come with the gates that that opened up for all out war without end. It just gave America the green light; you know it gave those powerful corporate government types the green light they were working on.”
Admitting he’s not partial to any one song over another he adds “We’ve been playing most of them off the record live, me and the band here, out on the road, and they all seem to flow with the same intensity as one another.” He adds that “Most of the songs on Sugarcoating were written out on my boat actually. I was out on my boat with my friends writing most of these songs. You know, while trolling the waters of the Adirondack Mountains.” He then says that’s his vice “Adirondack Mountains…that’s where I’d always rather be. It’s where I live in the summer time. My heart lives there.”
Confessing that he “might have gotten spoiled with the bigger venues” and now might prefer the bigger venues, he goes on to explain “I love the energy of a couple thousand people surrounding me, singing in harmony.” Describing a recent show in Boston, he continues saying “You know about 2,500 people just singing in 3 part harmony, it was like heaven. Like the light of the universe shine down on us and unified us all as people.” In fact, these live performances give way to many serendipitous moments. “A lot of times in my live shows it’ll happen where I stumble upon something I need. Like maybe even as simple as I’m playing and I’m not using a set list and I’m not sure what to play next and right at the right moment a fan yells out a title of a song and it fits perfectly into the set, and I play it and it just carries the energy of the show over to the next level. ” Moments like these, when audience members call out their song requests are viewed as “a nice help at times, and I always see sort-of synchronicities as sign posts in my life. I kind of believe that a synchronicity is a sign pointing me in the right direction or affirming to me that you’re moving in the correct direction.”
Throughout the course of his travels, Martin has “never played Red Rocks out in Colorado and I’d like to play there. The beautiful thing about the tour I’m on now is we’re playing some rooms that I’ve always wanted to play in and that I have played in before and now returning to just some dreamy rooms. I love the 9:30 Club in DC, the House of Blues in Boston, the Fillmore in San Francisco and I really enjoy the Nokia theater in New York.”
Switching the conversation from professional to personal, Martin opens up about his likes, dislikes, fears and accomplishments. He begins with subtlety in life, a pet peeve he falls victim to on the road. “Yeah, I’ve got some pet peeves…I wish I had some exciting ones but they’re all pretty mundane. I like cream in my coffee not Cremora. That’s a pet peeve of mine. I like cream in my coffee, not a powder. It’s a luxury pet peeve.” From pet peeves to guilty pleasures Martin goes on to say “You know, my pleasures now, since I’ve been sober this long are not guilty anymore. You know, they’re pretty innocent. Like a late night piece of pie on the tour bus. Like last night I woke up at 2:30 a.m. on the bus as were trucking up here to Traverse City Michigan and I had me a slice of apple pie and a glass of milk. That’s about the extent of my guilty pleasures.”
Nervousness, everyone falls prey to it at one point or another, but Martin confronts his head on. He recalls the last time he was nervous about doing something, but followed through on it anyway. “You know I think it was singing at Fenway Park, opening a game, doing the National Anthem. That’s a tough gig cause when you sing into the mike, you don’t hear what your singing until like 12 seconds later, because the speaker is a half mile away, you know… out in left field. So it gets technically confusing. When you are singing one line, but you are hearing the one you sang 10 seconds ago and it tends to jumble it up. There’s no teleprompter, so if you miss a word everyone, all 50,000 people plus whoever might be watching on T.V. knows that you just screwed up words. Everyone knows when you sing the wrong words to that song. So there are just all these little pitfalls that can happen
when you sing that song with all those technical hurdles and the lyrics being right. The singing part, singing in tune isn’t tough, but I’d say that’s the last time I was nervous. I’ve also done it at hockey games where you’re on ice so you could slip and fall on your ass in front of 50,000 people too. That wouldn’t be pretty. (Laughs) It certainly would be funny, but yeah, I’d say the last time I was taken over by nerves was singing at Fenway Park, singing the National Anthem, just because no teleprompter, no way to really hear what you’re doing. It came out fine. I managed to sing all the words correctly. It all went off without a hitch.”
Having gone back through his rolodex of memories, Martin shifts gears, from nervousness to happiness, and talks about the best compliment he was ever given. “I guess I’d have to go back at that day I was a subway singer, way back in Porter Square T Station, round about 91. I used to make my living doing that. There was a…there’s a very long escalator that would lead you down to the platform. So you could hear a singer down there before you could see him. So I was down there singing a Ray Charles song at 7:30 a.m. and this bold old African American woman came around the corner. She had just stepped off of the long escalator and got her first look at me after listening to me probably for the last minute or so and her eyes opened wide and she did a double take and she stood there and listened to me, and as the train approached she opened up her old purse and pulled out a crumpled up 1 dollar bill and laid it down in my case, and she looked up at me and she said “You black…there’s some black in you somewhere.” I guess I’d say that’s probably the nicest compliment that I can think of.”
Overcome with fond memories, Martin shares that his favorite past times are “Spending time with my family, my wife and kids. Going antiquing, going to antique auctions and finding really good barbeque out on the road.” When asked to describe himself, he turns to his wife who he claims can do a better job of that. She says that he is warm, generous, loving and a prankster. “I can definitely agree with the prankster part. I’m always pranking people.” As they both laugh out loud Martin admits he loves to play April Fools jokes. “Every day is April 1st in my world, and ah, I would also describe myself as a 12 year old boy inside.” He goes on to share “My children are the best gifts ever given to me.”
Without skipping a heartbeat he confesses his greatest achievements in life are “Making a great living at something I love to do. Raising a family of several kids. It’s something I feel joy doing and also at the same time being beholden to no one. There’s no big corporation breathing down my neck telling me how to do it, or pushing me onto Bank of America commercials or that kind of thing. So I think that is my ultimate achievement is having what I built and calling it my own in a truly independent fashion.”
Back on the topic of his music he divulges his writing process. “Now -a-days the songwriting is more work for me. In earlier years I relied more on inspiration, but that only goes so far. That’s great for your first record, but after that you’ve got to engage your craft into a process. So I’d say inspiration was a certain percentage of my song writing, you know like maybe 20% and then the rest, the 80% is hashing it out and just writing. It’s hard…it’s a hard process for me. I don’t really enjoy it so much, but I do it. I love beginning a song, and I love finishing a song, but it’s just the time in-between. It’s very easy for me to start a song. I could make a song up right now that would sound maybe catchy or interesting, but then to actually build that into a real song that was 3 minutes and 40 seconds long would be the hard part.”
However, it’s not just the music, but also the silence between the notes that are important. “I’d say that is a really sacred time, when the universe is in alignment, you know? When you are up there singing and you can stop singing and there’s silence. That to me is as important if not more important than the music itself. That’s the pallet, you know, that’s the white space on the artists pallet. The silence is golden…it’s just as important as the sound. There’s artists like BB King who can just play one note and just floor you with all this silence that’s around the note. I think that is a sign of his mastery, that he can take the moment to play that one note and just blow that silence out of the water.” Just as some are the masters of their trade, others are just starting out, looking for advice or inspirational words from musicians who have been at it for years. “Whenever I get asked by up-and-comers for advice I always just say “play, play, play and write, write, write…and stay true to your heart when doing it. Gig wherever you can. Play your ass off. Write as much as you can and be true to your heart.”
As the int
erview wraps up, Martin talks about how he is “pretty much the same guy from when I started. I’m hopefully a little wiser from the experience. I’m definitely the same guy I was basically as a 12 year old kid.” Then finishes up stating: “I’d like to be remembered as the guy who brought people together, you know, whether they were old or young, red or blue, black or white, gay or straight, female or male. I’d like to be remembered as the guy who brought people together with music cause that’s what my aim is to do. I’m not preaching to the choir at my shows. It’s not just 20 year old kids, its every spectrum of American people, and so you’ll be alongside people that you probably wouldn’t be beside of in everyday life. You’ll have republicans, democrats, gay or straight, black or white…I’m trying to bring down those divisions and serve as a reminder that we are all way more alike than we are different. Everybody singing in harmony, it doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor, young or old, they’re just singing along side all these people.”
During a midday conversation Martin talks about life and what has led him in his current musical direction. "I feel like I’ve woken up a little in the last couple years. I didn’t know things a couple years ago that I know now and I don’t like what I see so I’m singing about it.” Focusing on the title track Sugarcoating, he says the song is about the present day and the future. “It’s more about that, then what happened nine years ago. It’s about the impact that that day had on us all, that reaches into today and years to come with the gates that that opened up for all out war without end. It just gave America the green light; you know it gave those powerful corporate government types the green light they were working on.”
Admitting he’s not partial to any one song over another he adds “We’ve been playing most of them off the record live, me and the band here, out on the road, and they all seem to flow with the same intensity as one another.” He adds that “Most of the songs on Sugarcoating were written out on my boat actually. I was out on my boat with my friends writing most of these songs. You know, while trolling the waters of the Adirondack Mountains.” He then says that’s his vice “Adirondack Mountains…that’s where I’d always rather be. It’s where I live in the summer time. My heart lives there.”
Confessing that he “might have gotten spoiled with the bigger venues” and now might prefer the bigger venues, he goes on to explain “I love the energy of a couple thousand people surrounding me, singing in harmony.” Describing a recent show in Boston, he continues saying “You know about 2,500 people just singing in 3 part harmony, it was like heaven. Like the light of the universe shine down on us and unified us all as people.” In fact, these live performances give way to many serendipitous moments. “A lot of times in my live shows it’ll happen where I stumble upon something I need. Like maybe even as simple as I’m playing and I’m not using a set list and I’m not sure what to play next and right at the right moment a fan yells out a title of a song and it fits perfectly into the set, and I play it and it just carries the energy of the show over to the next level. ” Moments like these, when audience members call out their song requests are viewed as “a nice help at times, and I always see sort-of synchronicities as sign posts in my life. I kind of believe that a synchronicity is a sign pointing me in the right direction or affirming to me that you’re moving in the correct direction.”
Throughout the course of his travels, Martin has “never played Red Rocks out in Colorado and I’d like to play there. The beautiful thing about the tour I’m on now is we’re playing some rooms that I’ve always wanted to play in and that I have played in before and now returning to just some dreamy rooms. I love the 9:30 Club in DC, the House of Blues in Boston, the Fillmore in San Francisco and I really enjoy the Nokia theater in New York.”
Switching the conversation from professional to personal, Martin opens up about his likes, dislikes, fears and accomplishments. He begins with subtlety in life, a pet peeve he falls victim to on the road. “Yeah, I’ve got some pet peeves…I wish I had some exciting ones but they’re all pretty mundane. I like cream in my coffee not Cremora. That’s a pet peeve of mine. I like cream in my coffee, not a powder. It’s a luxury pet peeve.” From pet peeves to guilty pleasures Martin goes on to say “You know, my pleasures now, since I’ve been sober this long are not guilty anymore. You know, they’re pretty innocent. Like a late night piece of pie on the tour bus. Like last night I woke up at 2:30 a.m. on the bus as were trucking up here to Traverse City Michigan and I had me a slice of apple pie and a glass of milk. That’s about the extent of my guilty pleasures.”
Nervousness, everyone falls prey to it at one point or another, but Martin confronts his head on. He recalls the last time he was nervous about doing something, but followed through on it anyway. “You know I think it was singing at Fenway Park, opening a game, doing the National Anthem. That’s a tough gig cause when you sing into the mike, you don’t hear what your singing until like 12 seconds later, because the speaker is a half mile away, you know… out in left field. So it gets technically confusing. When you are singing one line, but you are hearing the one you sang 10 seconds ago and it tends to jumble it up. There’s no teleprompter, so if you miss a word everyone, all 50,000 people plus whoever might be watching on T.V. knows that you just screwed up words. Everyone knows when you sing the wrong words to that song. So there are just all these little pitfalls that can happen
when you sing that song with all those technical hurdles and the lyrics being right. The singing part, singing in tune isn’t tough, but I’d say that’s the last time I was nervous. I’ve also done it at hockey games where you’re on ice so you could slip and fall on your ass in front of 50,000 people too. That wouldn’t be pretty. (Laughs) It certainly would be funny, but yeah, I’d say the last time I was taken over by nerves was singing at Fenway Park, singing the National Anthem, just because no teleprompter, no way to really hear what you’re doing. It came out fine. I managed to sing all the words correctly. It all went off without a hitch.”Having gone back through his rolodex of memories, Martin shifts gears, from nervousness to happiness, and talks about the best compliment he was ever given. “I guess I’d have to go back at that day I was a subway singer, way back in Porter Square T Station, round about 91. I used to make my living doing that. There was a…there’s a very long escalator that would lead you down to the platform. So you could hear a singer down there before you could see him. So I was down there singing a Ray Charles song at 7:30 a.m. and this bold old African American woman came around the corner. She had just stepped off of the long escalator and got her first look at me after listening to me probably for the last minute or so and her eyes opened wide and she did a double take and she stood there and listened to me, and as the train approached she opened up her old purse and pulled out a crumpled up 1 dollar bill and laid it down in my case, and she looked up at me and she said “You black…there’s some black in you somewhere.” I guess I’d say that’s probably the nicest compliment that I can think of.”
Overcome with fond memories, Martin shares that his favorite past times are “Spending time with my family, my wife and kids. Going antiquing, going to antique auctions and finding really good barbeque out on the road.” When asked to describe himself, he turns to his wife who he claims can do a better job of that. She says that he is warm, generous, loving and a prankster. “I can definitely agree with the prankster part. I’m always pranking people.” As they both laugh out loud Martin admits he loves to play April Fools jokes. “Every day is April 1st in my world, and ah, I would also describe myself as a 12 year old boy inside.” He goes on to share “My children are the best gifts ever given to me.”
Without skipping a heartbeat he confesses his greatest achievements in life are “Making a great living at something I love to do. Raising a family of several kids. It’s something I feel joy doing and also at the same time being beholden to no one. There’s no big corporation breathing down my neck telling me how to do it, or pushing me onto Bank of America commercials or that kind of thing. So I think that is my ultimate achievement is having what I built and calling it my own in a truly independent fashion.”
Back on the topic of his music he divulges his writing process. “Now -a-days the songwriting is more work for me. In earlier years I relied more on inspiration, but that only goes so far. That’s great for your first record, but after that you’ve got to engage your craft into a process. So I’d say inspiration was a certain percentage of my song writing, you know like maybe 20% and then the rest, the 80% is hashing it out and just writing. It’s hard…it’s a hard process for me. I don’t really enjoy it so much, but I do it. I love beginning a song, and I love finishing a song, but it’s just the time in-between. It’s very easy for me to start a song. I could make a song up right now that would sound maybe catchy or interesting, but then to actually build that into a real song that was 3 minutes and 40 seconds long would be the hard part.”
However, it’s not just the music, but also the silence between the notes that are important. “I’d say that is a really sacred time, when the universe is in alignment, you know? When you are up there singing and you can stop singing and there’s silence. That to me is as important if not more important than the music itself. That’s the pallet, you know, that’s the white space on the artists pallet. The silence is golden…it’s just as important as the sound. There’s artists like BB King who can just play one note and just floor you with all this silence that’s around the note. I think that is a sign of his mastery, that he can take the moment to play that one note and just blow that silence out of the water.” Just as some are the masters of their trade, others are just starting out, looking for advice or inspirational words from musicians who have been at it for years. “Whenever I get asked by up-and-comers for advice I always just say “play, play, play and write, write, write…and stay true to your heart when doing it. Gig wherever you can. Play your ass off. Write as much as you can and be true to your heart.”
As the int
erview wraps up, Martin talks about how he is “pretty much the same guy from when I started. I’m hopefully a little wiser from the experience. I’m definitely the same guy I was basically as a 12 year old kid.” Then finishes up stating: “I’d like to be remembered as the guy who brought people together, you know, whether they were old or young, red or blue, black or white, gay or straight, female or male. I’d like to be remembered as the guy who brought people together with music cause that’s what my aim is to do. I’m not preaching to the choir at my shows. It’s not just 20 year old kids, its every spectrum of American people, and so you’ll be alongside people that you probably wouldn’t be beside of in everyday life. You’ll have republicans, democrats, gay or straight, black or white…I’m trying to bring down those divisions and serve as a reminder that we are all way more alike than we are different. Everybody singing in harmony, it doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor, young or old, they’re just singing along side all these people.” Article & Photographs by: Holly Mazzone
Friday, July 16, 2010
Vigilantmonkey.com Magazine Articles
H1N1: A Spreading Vaccine: http://www.vigilantmonkey.com/mindbodysoul/tabid/137/ItemID/89/View/Details/Default.aspx
The Digital Switch…We’re (Still) Working On It: http://vigilantmonkey.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/the-digital-switch%e2%80%a6we%e2%80%99re-still-working-on-it/
The Digital Switch…We’re (Still) Working On It: http://vigilantmonkey.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/the-digital-switch%e2%80%a6we%e2%80%99re-still-working-on-it/
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