You are a musician in a band of three - We're About Nine- that has been doing really well along the east coast. You're not a very old band, about 3 years old, so is this surprising?
It's all very surprisingly. Everyone has it in their head that there is a certain amount of time and effort required for this. And we have put in time and effort, but I can name a handful of people we know who have been spending the same amount of effort for a couple of decades and haven't got where we are after a couple of years.

I think it helps to be young now. This is a business that works in cycles. For the most part what happens is that the line of famous and important people gets into their mid-thirties or so, and there is a new stretch of people in their twenties. They don't push out the people in the thirties; they just become the new wave in the pool. It is generally an age-related thing, and secondarily a freshness and newness-related thing. But we're part of the new pool.

So what happened?
So what happened is a funny thing. As with anything in entertainment, I think it's being what people want to see and hear and being there at the uniquely right moment. There's no way to predict that. No way to predict it, but ways to go about exploiting it. We started sending emails and making acquaintances and doing a lot of opening acts. That's what happened between last year and now, and we profited dramatically both finance-wise and career-wise. We took opening acts for The Nields and The Kennedys and Groove Lily and a bunch of different acts in a similar vein to what we do. We were able to ride on the coattails of those people to get to their audience. We got some opening acts where it didn't go so well and then some where we sold $300 worth of CDs.

Does playing with The Nields make your fan base more national? Does it spread knowledge about you?
It has and does and it is a funny thing. The coolest thing of all was to get someplace and have Annie Gallup, who was sharing our bill, say that she had never heard of us before but she was just at a festival in Texas and a bunch of people were sitting around talking about us. Texas. Its probably one of the biggest festivals to happen every year. But it's not magic, its one or two people who know us talking about it, and a conversation starts.

You play contemporary folk music - lots of acoustics, lots of harmony, some ballads and some political stuff. This is a really broad outline, though. What do you think defines contemporary folk music?
I like Katie's answer to that question: she says the audience defines folk music more than the artists. There is very little about what we do that fits into the traditional mode of what people call folk music in America. The folk industry in the 90s and in whatever we call this decade now is getting a reputation for taking in anyone who is good and being turned away. So if you are doing pop music and the pop music is too smart or too writing-oriented and not enough production and glam oriented, you are going to be rejected by the pop music industry and not get a record deal, or played on the radio. We aren't that, and no one that we know is that. We know people who are doing loud rock music, country music that is not mainstream country anymore, bluegrass, jazz. As long as it's got a little bit of something that throws it a little off center, the audience accepts it. Generally the folk audience, they like to feel like they're in on something no one else gets. That's why contemporary folk music scene is defined by the people who watch it who think that they are watching, who have told themselves they are watching, folk music.

How do you think knowing that you have an audience affects you? How has it changed your self perception or the way you behave towards other people.
It doesn't change the way I behave towards people, I don't like to think. Even when we were playing coffee shops and small places there would be the occasional person who wasn't used to going out and seeing music up-close from people who had a CD out who would be willing to sign it. So we've always been seeing a little bit of this. But now there are people asking us question about our influences, and what a song means, and telling us their version of what a song means to them.

What has changed about my perception of what I am doing is that I take myself more seriously. But not in a bad way, it just made me define a stage presence for this sort of thing. I wasn't used to being part of a performance where people pay to see me up close. And pay money and come somewhere to see me up close. And like me enough to spend more money to take what I am doing home with them. That makes me have more self-respect. It's not creating an ego in any of us, I don't think, but it makes us realize that we have to work and that we have to continue to move on that level. Because at this point we feel like there are people who will be disappointed if we slack off. There is a little more pressure and on the other hand it's a lot more satisfying.

So do you have riders for your shows? Is there bottled water in your contract at this point?
We do have a standard contract, but we haven't put any riders on that contract just yet. Pretty much everywhere we go has bottled water. I guess we could, but I would feel ridiculous asking for something as a rider. It's something people's managers do for them and we don't have a manager.

Who does the production?
We do it ourselves, with help from Andy and Denise. They are fabulous engineers, and both are full of great production ideas. I do most of the arranging and most of the playing of instruments, so a lot of the production ideas come from me. However, I don't hesitate to make that a collaborative effort. I run almost every idea by my bandmates before it ogies on tape. Andy, being a technical wizard, is always there for help with the more technical side of production.

Does doing production lead to obsessive behavior?
Yes. I think it's a productive kind of obsession, though. It's really something I love and want to learn more about. I spend lots of time doing production in my head and on paper, months before a song gets to the studio. It's the reason I do less writing than either of my bandmates and more arranging. My brain works differently, for the most part. For right now, what I'm best at is shaping things, adding subtle touches that make a song different than it would be if it was performed solo by whoever wrote it.

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