I found Marc With A C a few years ago via Internet. He’s a cool dude, he writes indie pop jams. He’s down with the Lo-Fi. I chatted with him, here let me show you.. If you’re not the reading type, scroll down and find some mp3s for your computer.

jrc: Hey there!
Marc With A C: Hello!

jrc: How’s your Thursday?
Marc With A C: So far, it isn’t too bad. Of course, I sleep late, so it could be awful but I would have been unconscious.
And yours?

jrc: I go to sleep awfully late, but I’m usually up earlyish. So far, so good.
San Diego to Orlando?
Why?
Marc With A C: My family is spread across the country. It’s really that simple. Tried to move back to San Diego to “make it on my own” when I was about 19, but couldn’t cut the mustard. Beautfiul city, but despite the awful weather, Orlando has been a much neater town to live in.

jrc: Right on.. Good music scene locally?
Marc With A C: “Scene”? No. We have factions that play shows together. Some factions are more successful than others, as in most towns. I’ve just been incredibly lucky that average music fans have stayed interested in me, even when the “scene” couldn’t have cared less. If That makes sense. But Orlando is a really neat little town once you get used to it.
For example, The other day I went to work at a record shop, then attended a business meeting for an upcoming show, and ran into an old friend on the way back to my car. This all happened within the radius of one block, which is pretty awesome. Some towns you’d have to spend eight hours in the care for all of those things to coincide.

jrc: I’m from Detroit.. that doesn’t happen here. heh
Marc With A C: Hah. I’ve seen PBS specials.

jrc: So.. the Lo-Fi thing. It’s definitely a niche. Usually ‘you people’ are anti-digital anything. I noticed you had the myspace, and the last.fm..is making fans via the internet just the way it’s going to be now?
Marc With A C:
1. For me, “lo-fi” has meant using whatever is around to record your music. It hasn’t been a “Pro-Tools = Satan” mindset, just that you can sound exactly like yourself by pulling up the nearest thing with a microphone attached and pressing record. Nicer recording equipment is frankly a way to make yourself sound like all of the other people that own it too.
2. I’ve never understood how I’ve acquired fans, nor why some of them get so incredibly obsessive. I just thank the stars they exist and that they like what I’m doing. MySpace and last.fm are just ways of keeping yourself accessible. I’m a normal cat, and people should be able to hear and email me if they’d like to do so. I’m not special or anything.
3. That being said, I don’t know what to do with the oncoming “record stores are over” mentality, and I’m terrified of it.

jrc: Yeah. Finding you, hearing you, and emailing you aside, what about the fact that they can also grab your discography from a slew of places.. all for zero dollars? Is it more of a “Wow, these people are listening!” or “Stop stealing my shit!”?
Marc With A C: Hmmm. If someone downloads my album, and they like it? Hopefully they’ll buy it when they get around to it. That’s seemed to work so far as everything of mine goes out of print within a matter of months. And thanks to file sharing, we have strong fanbases in Greece, Italy and Amsterdam. Most groups from Orlando are lucky to be getting heard down the block. We’re focused on letting anyone who wants to hear the music hear it, not on getting rich. If money were the issue… I’m making the wrong kind of music on the wrong kind of equipment.
Mostly, I don’t focus on any one segment of being a musician. I do each part of it when I have time, be it writing songs, making albums, playing shows or what have you. I’m comfortable with how it’s gone so far!

jrc: I know you’re a pretty avid record collector.. which I imagine to mean vinyl? Even though you’re not a vinyl nazi, does it bother you that your new record won’t be on wax?
Marc With A C: Yes, yes and yes. I hate it. Making vinyl is very expensive, and that means that I’d have to charge quite a bit for a forty minute record. Even though I gladly pay through the nose for vinyl titles I want to own, I don’t want to make the people that enjoy my songs have to pay twenty five dollars or so, allowing me to break even. I always think in a side one/side two way when sequencing albums, so it’s always been an issue for me. The upcoming record, “Linda Lovelace For President” is possibly the first album I’ve made that was put together with the constraints of the digital age in mind.

jrc: And it was kind of collaboration, if I understand correctly? That was a first too?
Marc With A C: It was, in a way. My drummer/best friend Chris Zabriskie and I had been working on a side-project called Lo-Fi Is Sci-Fi. We’d both contributed song ideas for the second record, but those sessions never happened. I had a notion that his tracks in particular would fit very well on a Marc With a C album, next to new things I’d been writing. After a tedious amount of “how will this work?”, we settled on the form you hear them in now. They may sound like Marc With a C songs, but it’s more than Chris and I have been working together for so long that we’re bound to write from one mindset, even as separate entities.
There’s no right way to talk about that, actually, so to make it simpler: Chris wrote some songs. I liked them and wanted to sing them. Chris eventually said “okay”. The songs fit very well and I hope we can do it again in the future.

jrc: And “Lo-Fi is Sci-Fi” is available with some demos of the songs that ultimately appear on the new Marc With A C record?
Marc With A C: Yes. Chris made the first Lo-Fi is Sci-Fi record available for digital download, and when that happened he also dug up his demo versions of songs that eventually made the new record.
Those became bonus tracks, and the second album wasn’t ever finished.

jrc: When you say “Chris wrote some songs.” Does that mean music, or does that include lyrics?
Marc With A C: Chris writes songs in a similar manner to me: he writes music and lyrics from top to bottom. If it’s missing anything, it isn’t a song yet. He wrote three songs for the new album, but when he wrote them at his house, he certainly wasn’t thinking “Man, I should totally give these to Marc for his album”. It just worked out that I had a very strong attachment to those three songs, and they fit a certain mindset that the new record was going to hit for me.
The new Marc With a C record, I mean

jrc: As a music fan, what about the new stuff coming out now? Anything you absolutely love, or absolutely hate? heh
Marc With A C: Oh man, how long do you have?

jrc: All I have is time.
Marc With A C: I think that the new stuff by Steve Poltz, The Breeders, Robert Pollard, The Capstan Shafts and a girl named Jellybean are among the best records we’ll hear this decade. And even if Chris weren’t in a band with me, his solo records would utterly floor me. But as for things I absolutely hate?
There’s not a lot of things that the average music consumer is enjoying lately that I understand or want to hear, let’s put it that way. I’m not a snob, I simply don’t get it.
If you want me to name names… Vampire Weekend is a good example.
They’re fine at what they’re doing, but I don’t fucking get them at all.

jrc: I saw them this year.. I thought they were great, and I do love the album.
Marc With A C: Yeah! Tons of people are losing their mind over them. They’re aren’t untalented, I just don’t understand why what they are doing is resonating with so many people.

jrc: Does not getting it mean you’re not enjoying it? Do you think the record is bad?
Marc With A C: My day job is working at a record shop. I’ve heard their new album more times than I’ve heard my own. I didn’t like it. I don’t think it’s bad, but I do find it incredibly mediocre.
Marc With A C: Mediocrity annoys me much more than a “bad” album. At least you can laugh at a terrible album.

jrc: “I don’t think their music’s bad, I just think they’re doing it wrong”
jrc: Does that lyric take aim at anyone specific?
Marc With A C: You’d have to ask Chris. He wrote that song, “Born Vintage”. I’m not sure who he was talking about, but I think of a specific person I know in everyday life when I sing it, not a musical act.

jrc: Ah. You mentioned Pollard up there.. this is going to be a long storyish thing that turns into a question.
Marc With A C: Ok, go for it!

jrc: I visited the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame for the first time this year, fully expecting to hate it. I didn’t though. It had this really cool winding thing that went from roots blues rock, through the motown stuff, to the 60s garage stuff.. then the 70s movement stuff.. the 80s punk/new wave.. and it ended with a cool little grunge Sub-Pop / CZ records display. I couldn’t help but feel a little hopeless as to what they’re going to put next in that hallway. As a musician, what do you think comes next as significant to music history? Also, because you mentioned Bob Pollard, they have a room in the Hall Of Fame for Ohio based music. Devo, Afghan Whigs, Dean Martin. There wasn’t a single record behind the glass from GBV, but there was a boot from some stage goth band called Mushroom Head. How is it that Pollard’s stuff could be ignored in that forum?
Marc With A C: Hmmm, I’ll answer this in two parts.
1. What’s coming next? I’m not sure. We’ve seen the death of regionality via Clear Channel and micromanaging people’s music collections through digital distribution. The sad part about digital music is that there’s nothing to display and commemorate it with. I mean, are you gonna proudly display the laptop that Thom Yorke recorded “The Eraser” on the same way you’d make a shrine to Keith Moon’s “Pictures Of Lily”-era drum kit? I kinda doubt it. But as long as we as a collective mindset appreciate the music made during the time period, I think we’ll be fine. For all I know, that next room will commemorate what record stores used to look like as a “what the fuck did we do to music, people?” type of thing.
2. Robert Pollard is the most important type of songwriter/recording artist we’ve got going today. The kind that makes records that he wants to listen to, instead of subscribing to any outside theories or scenes. He still seems a bit bewildered as to what the shoegazey-indie rock set ever saw in him, when he just thought he was making classic garage and progressive-minded pop. And that’s great. People making records because they want to, even if no one’s listening? That’s way more important than Greg Dulli’s ego, if you ask me.

jrc: Did you hear the Gutter Twins record?
Marc With A C: I did.
jrc: Did you dig it?
Marc With A C: It could have been a bit less string-heavy, but otherwise it was fine, I suppose. I never really thought about it much after Sub Pop sent it to me.
Although many of my peers with respectable taste love the hell out of it, so maybe I haven’t spent enough time with the record

jrc: Sub Pop vs K?
Marc With A C: Depends on what aspects of the label you’re talking about, for sure.
K has a great ethos, but I’m not exactly wild about everything they put out, nor am I impressed with anything Calvin [Johnson] has done in the last fifteen years… and I’m not sure why he’s a guest artist on nearly every record to this day. He’s not adding anything terribly interesting to, say, the Adrian Orange record.
Sub Pop has a higher rate of finding bands that came out of nowhere and smack you in the face with great records. However… they’
re also putting out Flight Of The Conchords, which is just a cuter Tenacious D that’s easier to market. You have to take the good with the bad on any label

jrc: Ok. As a music guy, a record geek.. drop some names of the indie pop underground for the kids to download.
jrc: you know, the bands that YOU would put on a mixtape for some girl
Marc With A C: Hah, okay…
Marc With A C: I’d highly recommend hearing (and buying albums by) Fishboy, Jellybean, Bucket Of Nails, Twa Toots, Nerdy Girl, Desmond Reed, The Capstan Shafts, old stuff by Tsunami, Helium, All Girl Summer Fun Band, Bunnygrunt, etc.
But I wouldn’t put them on a mix tape for some girl… I’m married now
jrc: Heh, Nerdy Girl! I’ve talked to Cecil a bunch.
Marc With A C: I got to interview her for retrolowfi.com last year, it was a dream come true, for sure.
jrc: as a neat story, someone put Cecil Seaskull on a mix for me.. and I instantly decided that she was going to famous, and she had to come play Detroit. I contacted her to tell her how big she was going to be and she kindly pointed out that she hadn’t been doing music for quite sometime, and that the song I was referring to was done ‘a long time ago’
heh, I guess I missed the boat
Marc With A C: I never got to see her play live either, but she’s been a huge inspiration for me.

jrc: Yeah. Discard her touring mentality though. You have to tour for your new record.
Marc With A C: I’d like to. I just don’t enjoy traveling very much.
Also, Chris and I have kids, so making all of the pieces fit is just going to be such a nightmare. But we’re absolutely determined to do some touring in the near future.
jrc: Detroit is just up I-75. You can bring The Fam
Marc With A C: The first Marc With a C tour in six years? Hell, we’ll see if I don’t have a nervous breakdown halfway through!

jrc: Ha. Good luck with that, and getting your delegates counted.
Marc With A C: Yeah. My vote doesn’t count, as I live in Florida, you know?
jrc: Yeah, you guys are responsible for this mess.
Marc With A C: The main part of Florida that had the “hanging chads” issue were retirees. They really expected these folks to figure out computers the next time around?
jrc: My parents stay in Florida 7 months out of the year.. they are the exact problem you’re referring to.
Marc With A C: Ah, so we are both responsible for this mess.

jrc: Fair enough.
Your record comes out in July
You’re okay with people stealing it until then, but you’d like them to buy it if they have 15 dollars when it comes out?
Does that sound right, kind of?
Marc With A C: You have to sort of expect as a musician that people will download it whether you sanction it or not, especially when we made it available on iTunes and Amazon on April 1st. It leaked after that.
I helped spread it for a very good reason

jrc: it was sent to me april 3rd.
digitally, unauthorized..
Marc With A C: If I was going to lose money on the people that were only going to download it, I was at least gonna get my BitTorrent ratio up in lieu of actual money, you know?
Marc With A C: But, when the album comes out this summer…
It has a second disc that won’t have leaked. A DVD of a full live show we filmed last year.

jrc: I’m looking forward to it.
How much Marc With A C vinyl is out there?
where do I get some?
Marc With A C: Unless it’s pirated, no vinyl exists to my knowledge.
jrc: You haven’t released anything on vinyl?
Marc With A C: If it does exist, someone should send it to me.

here are 2 tracks from the new Marc With A C record Linda Lovelace For President
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