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and he was booed off the stage. Did it stop him? No. If some people don’t like it, then they don’t
like it. What are you gonna do?

GS: What would you be doing if you weren’t making music?

RA: I don’t know. Assault? (laughs) I like computers. I’m a bona fide computer expert. I’ve always
done that as a hobby, and I enjoy it. The mind is set up for that the same way that it’s set up for
music. You follow the same kind of paths of things. I’d probably be a full-time computer guy,
spending my time in the basement and having the same kind of skin I have now because I have a
nightclub tan. Everything would be the same, but I’d probably weigh a lot more. Twinkies and Jolt,

man.

We were supposed to fly to France last August and the UK in November, and that got canceled.
Hopefully we’ll be able to go this
year. The dates from November
have been pushed to November of
this year. As far as France is

concerned, it’s hard to make any
plans.

GS: I bet you’re itching to get back
on the road.

RA: I love playing out. I would love
to play more in the United States,
but it’s a big band. It’s nine pieces.
It’s hard to get routing on that
unless people already know your
stuff and you have the advance
ticket sales that can cover that. We’re trying. We’re pushing. We’re following everything we can.

These days it’s a lot different. You’ve got Spotify, Deezer, Apple, and eight million blogs. It’s a bit
overwhelming. We had half a million streams on the last album, which shocked the hell out of me.
My sax player told me we had more than half a million streams, which is not quite enough to pay
for pressing 1,000 CDs, but it’s a brave new world where you can get tons of people hearing your
music, but not actually get any money for it. We do it for love.

When the internet was first starting, I used to think it’s be great if you could just put your music
out and people all over the world could hear it and be able to listen to it right away. Now we’ve got
10,000 new songs a day. You gotta be careful what you wish for. It’s a lot of pros and cons. It must
make your job a nightmare. You must be inundated
.
GS: It’s a bit difficult when you get a lot of music and you want to pay some attention to it,

but you just don’t have time.

RA: A journalist friend of mine gave me the CDs she received for one month. It had been a couple
years previously. Forget it, man. You have my respect. I did it that one time, and I was absolutely
fried. It got to the point where I would go, “Shit! Next!” Some of it was good and you could tell

right away it was good. But some of it was shit right from the jump. Then I felt bad because I could