I do like to have a clean slate, especially when you’re in indie film.
I handed out flyers in malls, candies in gasoline stations; helped set up tarpaulins in bars. I played bit roles in several indie movies. Looking back, I can say it has definitely been a long journey.
From dancing around to Michael Jackson and Madonna as a kid to having my mind blown by the first sounds of punk and indie rock, to getting to play my own songs and have people listen, music is what got me through.
The movie I worked on that had the most problems and interference came from the smallest indie movie I’ve ever done. I couldn’t believe what the director had to go through; he was destroyed.
Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they’re still musicians, and they’re still making art.
I was one of those kids who had never seen an indie film before I got to college. If it wasn’t a big, huge tentpole movie, or if it wasn’t on the radio, I hadn’t experienced it.
When I got my record deal at Atlantic, at the time, ‘indie’ wasn’t a style of music: it was a kind of label. And I think, eventually, the bands that ended up on those labels began to be branded as ‘indie bands,’ and then it became a genre.
Just because something’s kinda indie and whatever and only a few people know it, it doesn’t give it more authenticity over Rihanna’s ‘Work’ work work.
I’m still that indie kid at heart. I’m still that guy who wrestled in front of 15 people and never knew he’d make it to WWE. I’m still that person.
I love PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, Pixies, Portishead, and Massive Attack: a lot of what I would describe as alternative and indie music.
With Jubilee I had a natural interest to write about something on the opposite end of human experience – a real celebration of release and joy, which is in some ways an unexpected theme for the indie rock genre in general.
After I do a big movie I get offered big movies. But I always do the weirdest indie.
It’s just interesting that people don’t really know about the roles that I play that are darker. I kind of do a huge blend of really big light things but also really dark indie things, and it just sort of happens to work out that way.
I’ve produced before, and sometimes it’s by default. In the indie level, you can’t just come to set and be like, ‘Oh, I’m an actor.’ You have to be willing to help out, make the project happen.
The indie movie world is like a bad Tinder date, and there are always strings attached.
When I first put out music, people didn’t know what I looked like. They called it a new type of something; they couldn’t put a genre on it – it was where indie and urban kind of meet in the middle. I thought that was quite exciting.
Actually, the most entitled people I’ve met are indie rockers and indie actors, because they really believe their press.
I’d only do a deal with a label if it allowed me to still be indie and have that indie mentality. I have to have creative control.
I just adored ‘Shaun Of The Dead.’ That’s a true mashup. That’s a real Romero-era zombie movie and a real Gen X indie comedy. That was before zombie movies were cool, before ‘Zombieland’ and ‘I Am Legend,’ and now it has become a whole sub-genre.
A lot of people of color in the music industry are still more interested in embracing things that are considered white canon, and looking radical. Like when people point to punk in the indie world: If you point to the history of punk as what you see as your legacy, that’s more prized and praised.
If you’re on an indie label, you’re not getting enough money. And if you’re on a major, you’re not getting enough support.
If you’re trying to solve a problem that is fundamentally important to human society, that’s really important to our mission at Indie Bio.
Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively – as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.
I criticized the whole American songwriting industry and the pop side of it and I was bitter about it. And I stepped back and thought ‘Why are you bitter? You can’t just stand there like every other indie musician and criticize this so-called ‘generic’ music when you’re not doing anything to challenge that.’
Before the whole Disney realm had undergone this huge revamping, as a kid, I always saw myself doing these dramatic indie parts. And then I fell in love with doing comedy and doing kid shows and really working for kids.
I was always told that I was too strange or that I was too cheesy by different groups of people, like the record companies said I was way too weird and the indie people wouldn’t even let me in their band.
Stars are a part of our emotional psyche, but audiences should also support a good indie film which may not have a big star.
To jump from the indie ranks to play with the big dogs, there’s a gate you have to pass through.
I think indie films are really important, because they show the studios and the audiences when they see them, great stories. Really interesting, small stories.
I actually think that Republican administrations are better for music. The Reagan era was such a great era for punk and indie rock.
Something happened in the nineties. There was a shift. I don’t want to blame it on grunge or the rise of indie – but that was basically it. It was seen as dirty and kind of ignorant to have these ambitions, to want to be a big band.
When I was young, we didn’t have indie games. We had ‘garage developers’ or similar terms, who were just small teams making games out of passion.
So many of the indie movies that get made are not about topics that touch millions and millions of people.
I’ve had the opportunity to work on some really great indie features. One of them being ‘Little Savages,’ which is a super fun family film.
It’s amazing to me how quickly the industry will try to put you into a box. It’s like, I did ‘Beale Street.’ And they decided now, all of a sudden, ‘Oh, okay. KiKi Layne does those little quiet indie dramas.’ I’m like, ‘No! That’s just where I got started.’
All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label.
I took an acting class with Louise Lasser, Woody Allen’s first wife and co-star in many movies. I’ve done some other indie films, if you look on the YouTube. I love acting – it’s great.
To a degree, rock fans like to live vicariously and they like that, music fans in general, but when indie music sort of came into prominence in the early ’90s, a lot of it was TV-driven, too, where if you saw the first Nirvana video, you’re looking at three guys that look like people you go to school with.
Look: You’re not gonna become a millionaire doing this, but that was never the point. And I think a lot of people in the indie film business kind of took their eye off of that.
We’re quite different from each other. Camila is the pop girl, Lauren likes the indie sound, Normani and I love R&B, and Ally is the pop-country, kind of church girl.
Sometimes I wish I was just a girl in an indie band. I could dance around on stage and it wouldn’t be so much about me.
I’m a big fan of character actors like Johnny Depp and Gary Oldman. My goal is to continue playing character roles in indie films and move into playing character leads.
We don’t want it to be obscure music. We’re not trying to be indie. We want to be popular.
Nobody’s made an impact like Raina Telgemeier or Kate Beaton. I think that indie creators, people making webcomics and graphic novels, are the ones to watch.
You don’t want to end up being an indie wrestler who wants to be the big fish in a small pond.
On a big film, there’s almost no way you can meet everyone. On an indie, there are 30 people and no trailers to duck into.
There’s a bunch of cities I’m not crazy about, but I love Chicago. I love the musical history – the mid-’90s indie rock scene, Chicago house music. It’s a great town.
I have the most eclectic music taste out there. I can be listening to an indie pop song just as easily as I could be listening to a Carly Simon song from the ’70s to a country song.
The only reason I was offered ‘Punisher’ was because I had made an indie film that was rated R for violence and was filled with fight scenes.
Like all artists, I’m a complete cinephile; I see everything. I see past movies, present movies, indie movies, experimental movies.
The fact that I’m still able to wrestle on the indies and yet still do my stuff in NXT, and the fact that I wrestled in front of 15,000 people at the Barclays Center at TakeOver, and then, the following weekend, I was still doing indie shows, is wild.
I want to play guitar, piano, drums, write songs for other people. I can do punk – I can do indie – but as long as it has my voice, it’ll always be my sound.
Major labels don’t want to take chances on cooler, indie kind of things. People only know, unfortunately, what they’re being spoon-fed.
Indie movies got co-opted by the studio system. The studios insisted that only stars could make movies successful.
I’m not shy about trying to find what truth there is in any genre, whether that be an action piece, a sci-fi piece, a small indie film, or a play. I’m open to it all.
I had an indie pop phase, I had just about every phase you could think of.
I had a band called the Sound Of Love, and that was R&B songs about girls in my high school. I played in some other indie bands who were trying to make it big; those sucked. Then I started Makeout Videotape, and that was that.
