The band Sylvan Esso takes the Marketplace Quiz
The band Sylvan Esso takes the Marketplace Quiz
No matter who you are, you’ve probably had a rough day at the office that changed your perspective, or maybe you made an impulse purchase you really, really wish you could take back. This week, the band Sylvan Esso took our money-inspired personality questionnaire.
Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn make up the electronic indie-pop duo Sylvan Esso. Their latest single, “Radio,” is out now.
A: OK Nick, in your next life what would your career be?
N: I’m enjoying this career pretty intensely, so it’d be tough not to just double up on this one.
A: Yeah, can’t do that.
N: OK, so I can’t do that.
A: No.
N: Do you go personal interest or do you go humanitarian aid that you wish you would have provided in this life?
A: No, no, no, no have fun.
N: I would really love to be good at designing fonts.
A: That is a great option!
N: I’m really a big fan of of the subtlety of typography, and I think that spending a long time getting really good at understanding how the written word works would be of a really fulfilling thing to do.
N: Alright, Amelia. So everybody knows that money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you blank, what would you your blank be?
A: Time with puppies.
N: Seriously? You’re going to pick time with puppies?
A: No, but that’s true.
N: Close to happiness.
A: It does.
N: It can buy you things that bring you close to happiness.
A: Yeah, exactly, it can buy you records, and you know, time with your with your family.
N: Airplane tickets, is that what you’re saying?
A: Yeah, darn tootin.’
N: So you would go with things that are kind of happiness enablers?
A: Well, yeah, I mean that’s the whole drag about money.
N: I think we’ve gotten to the bottom of something here.
A: What is the hardest part about your job that no one knows?
N: I’m just not a very fame-interested person. So a person on the street knowing who I am is kind of an anxiety-inducing experience for me.
A: I’ve observed that in you, yeah.
N: More than that, thing nobody gets about being in a band is that it almost is never a profitable thing to do. I think that there’s this misconception that if, you know, somebody on a website or a radio station or whatever, is talking about you that you are a rich and famous person who, you know, makes a lot of money and just sets around, and that’s just not the case almost ever.
A: I still I still check out the press of toothpaste, and you never get to the point where you don’t have to go to the DMV.
N: All right, I’ve got one more for ya. What advice do you wish that someone had given you before you started your career in music?
A: in general, I would have loved it if someone had just been kindly and delicately touching me on the elbow and being like “You employ these people, don’t worry about it.”
Just because people are telling you to do things doesn’t mean you have to do them, like this is your business. It took me about two years to learn, and then when once I have that I was like, done, fine. But there was two years that we’re very guilt ridden because I was trying to appease people that worked for me.
N: But I feel that you still do, I mean like you, I don’t know you’re very nice…
A: Excuse me?
N: I think you’re very nice.
A: It’s not a question of being nice or not. Because, like, I wouldn’t fulfill what they wanted me to do and I bad about it. How about you?
N: I wish I would have been given a better understanding of just the ins and outs of the business that surrounds music. When I started, and for a very long time, I was just really passive towards the idea of business and music being connected. There’s too many things to understand for somebody whose primary interest is making things.
A: Yeah, you know it’s a weird idea? Monetizing your art.
N: Yeah, they’re not good bedfellows.
A: It’s so strange that the largest chunk of money that we stand to earn as musicians is when your song is synced to sell product.
N: Isn’t that weird?
A: Like when your song is put in a commercial, very strange.
N: It’s a tough relationship
A: And it’s usually, like, here’s a song I wrote about my breakup in eighth grade and now it’s selling fabric softener. I’m so happy, it bought half way house.
N: I wrote about my relationship with my mom and how do you like this laptop? It’s really a great laptop. Like, what is that?
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