Interview with bleubird

I met and photographed Jacques aka bluebird when he was in Maine last summer.  He was kind enough to do a skype interview with me from his home in Florida in the midst of preparing for a European tour with Astronautalis, shooting a super 8 music video and releasing an album.   We swear a little, laugh a lot, and talk about Facebook friendship, the trials and tribulations of an online presence, touring, building a community and cross promoting other artists, and he shares some behind the scenes stories of filming his new video.

I have transcribed the first 5 minutes, but I encourage to watch the whole video.  And to follow him on facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram.  Oh and to buy his albums.

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T: So, I’m collecting interviews from all over the place, mostly around town, but I also thought it would be kinda cool to get skype interviews of kind of random people that I’ve met along the way. I want to ask you a couple of questions, but the main...

J: Sure.

T:  Oh fuck, I’m totally backlit, hold on.

(J laughs at me)

T: This is going to be a hilarious recording.

T: I’m so OCD about lighting properly.  Anyway....

J:  That makes sense, that makes sense.

T:  Right. The main question I’ve been asking everybody is if you were to meet somebody and they had never been on Facebook, didn’t know what Facebook was, how would you explain to them the difference between a Facebook friend, and a friend in real life?

J: Okay.  If they didn’t understand what Facebook was?

T:  Yeah, like to your grandma who didn’t even know what a computer was.

J: I would tell them that they were one of my future friends.

J: Because -- because you can’t really say that its not a real friend, because like sometimes with my schedule now, I tend to communicate more with people via social networking than in real life. 

T: Right.

J: Especially because I have friends that are not, you know, I’m rarely around most of my friends. I have friends all over the place.  But are we talking about people that  I’ve never met in real life that I’m only friends with on Facebook?

T: No, well both.  Because some people like use Facebook only for people they’ve met in real life, they don’t even accept friendships of people they haven’t met in real life.

J: Ok.

T: Some people use it, like I think the way you use it, and this was going to lead me to question #2,  the way you use social media is really interesting because it’s a promotional tool, obviously.  I think musicians use social media the best, everybody else is kinda playing catch up.

J: I think it was designed for us. 

J: I mean MySpace originally was. 

T:  That reminds me, I’m supposed to get your identifying information, too.  You have to tell me who you are and where you’re from.

J: Not via my social networking multiplex. I often battle with the question, if I wasn’t making music, would I have a Facebook page or would I even use twitter?  And you know, as excessive as I tend to get with twitter, the bottom line is I only have it and I only use it because of what I’m trying to do.  Like I wouldn’t be on twitter as much if I wasn’t trying to promote and do things, but you can’t do too much of look at this link, listen to this song, watch this video, so I try to push myself to actually interact. I mean you know.

T: It’s a dance, right?

J:  It is a dance, and you know, I can’t say it’s not an enjoyable dance.  You know, we as a generation, not even a generation, as users, I think Facebook has become intertwined with our lives so we almost use it to supplement our real friendships.  And I think in some ways I mean you can argue that it kind of deteriorates the human on human bond.  But I think there is a very strong argument that it actually adds to it, it enriches our friendship.