Mike Q&A Summary 7/16/2020

[LPLStaff]

Mike didn't do a Q&A on July 15th as it was just an art stream and an interview with the "Dropped Frames" talk show.

- "Taka said a few years ago he worked with you and Steve Aoki. What happened to that? Did it become Last One to Know?" - "I believe that it did. I don't know when he said that and I don't know what he was focused on, but I wrote Last One To Know and I just liked the song and then I played it for a few people and Taka did do a version of it. Steve and his manager just loved it and they wanted to do something with it and they had suggested Lights and I think she's great. I think she's super cool. And I think the thing about it was just that on that one I had always imagined it being a female vocalist. I actually wanted it to be a female vocalist for the whole song. That was my thing. I didn't want it to be my song at all, but they did, so that's how it ended up working out."

 

- "Back in the day what did you think about people who downloaded music illegally?" -> "I've talked about this like a billion times I think. It didn't really bother me. I always said the trade off is, like, if you never buy the stuff that your favorite groups are making, if you only downloaded it for free, then effectively that group could basically like, go away. If you think about it, that's the whole problem with downloading for free and why people would say, "Oh you're stealing from the band", or whatever. If you were a band coming up and nobody paid you for any of your stuff, then you quit. So that's sucky. If you love the band, it's a shitty thing to happen. And that's true for anybody, any group. If you look at the number of followers or downloads or you put up stuff in your store and nobody buys it, it's like "Oh, nobody cares, so I guess move on." It is what it is."

 

- "How do you guys decide where to go when you're planning a tour?" -> "There's an art to planning a tour. Obviously part of it is what makes financial sense, where are the fans, where have we been, where have we not been. Sometimes it gets kicked off by like, an offer from a festival or another band to tour with. Like if a couple of big festivals in Europe are happening over the summer and they make an offer to the band, it's like, "Ok we've got one show at the beginning of July and one show at the beginning of August, so we fill in the middle, you know." So there's a few festivals or whatever. For us, it was easier than most because we had relations with a lot of the festivals and could go headline and stuff like that. But on my own, on solo tours, I wasn't going to be headlining festivals. So I could find different festivals. There were ones that I got offers and then I would do like, do some of them and not want to do others. It was a lot more... you had to finesse it."

 

- "Hola from Hawaii! I met Joe when he was doing a mural for POW! WOW! Hawaii. Is it true you were considering doing a mural for it?" -> "I was! I was supposed to go and then some stuff came up and I couldn't. Part of the problem is that.... POW! WOW! is a really great art show, they do them in Hawaii and other places and I've wanted for years to come to the one in Hawaii. And it's always like, right next to my birthday and stuff comes up right around my birthday. I just haven't been able to make it out, but I really want to. If you haven't seen that, just wherever you live, look it up. POW! WOW! Hawaii is like, a really great art show. They paint murals and stuff like that all over the islands."

 

- "If you could collaborate with any artist right now, who would it be?" -> "I don't know. I love the guys from Brockhampton, they're great. I think Denzel Curry is really talented. I don't know."

 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/681482794