Exposed Vocals: How did you hear about Exposed Vocals? What made you decide to sign up?
Marlon Hurt: I found Exposed Vocals through Twitter, actually. As a one-stop shop for everything music industry related, it’s a pretty amazing site.
Exposed Vocals: So tell us your story. Where did you grow up? What made you decide to become an artist?
MH: I grew up outside Atlanta, Georgia, in a little town called Stone Mountain (which is famous in its own right for some pretty awful reasons, if anyone is inclined to google it). Blues is still big in the South, as you might imagine. My dad is a blues guitarist—he still gigs actually—so there was always blues or blues-rock playing in the house. My mother says that I would kick along to George Thorogood in the womb, and that if they wanted to calm me down as a toddler they would put that record on and that I would stop and listen like I’d heard it before. Also, dad would call me downstairs to his music studio to play me old vinyls of Johnny Winter, Taj Mahal, Albert King, you name it. Always late on a school night too! It sometimes bored me to death, especially as a teenager, when nothing your parents do is cool, but the music sure stuck. As I got older I felt myself pulled back toward the roots music from my early days. My developing brain had been configured for a 1-4-5, I guess. And of course, since dad played guitar that meant I had to play guitar too. So here I am.
Exposed Vocals: How did you come up with that name? What was your inspiration behind it?
MH: Our first singer came up with The Hurt Project. We had just had a contentious split with a band called The Brooklyn Blues Project. The split happened suddenly, literally on the day we were headed to the studio to record an album of blues standards. (The gent we had the disagreement with was the rhythm guitarist as well as the de facto band leader, which meant I had to cover ALL the guitar parts on the fly for that studio session. That was a full day’s work, as you might imagine. But the beer tasted extra sweet afterward!) The singer had already put together a tour of Montana to promote the to-be-recorded album, and all those venues needed a name to put on their posters (and we needed a name to put on the album). After tossing a few terrible ideas back and forth, our singer just riffed on the old name, substituting my last name, Hurt, for Brooklyn Blues. It seemed appropriate, so we left it. The blues is about being emotionally hurt, after all, and I try not emphasize that it’s my name and not just a noun that’s appropriate to the genre. THP is only “my” band in the sense that it’s what we call the group of people I love to play music with, despite the fact that my name is on the door. But it seems to work, so why jigger with it?
Exposed Vocals: What do you think about online music sharing? Do you ever give your music away for free? Why?
MH: I love it. We do give our music away for free. If someone is listening to our music then we’ve gotten where we hoped to be. I don’t want to turn away any potential listens because someone doesn’t feel comfortable dropping money on us. A potential new fan is worth way more than that one potential dollar. And I’ve also found that if someone likes what they hear then there’s a good chance they’ll throw money in the tip jar anyway.
Exposed Vocals: Since everyone was a start-up once, can you give any smaller or local bands or artists looking to get gigs and airplay some tips?
MH: Well, we still are that smaller band. NYC is a weird place for blues, especially original, alternative/indie blues like we do. There aren’t very many smaller-to-medium venues here that focus on blues until you get to the big boys like B.B. King’s. What little success we’ve had has been the result of investing in some solid studio recordings that really capture our ideal sound and then putting those songs to work by sending them out to anyone and everyone. I figure the worst a booker or manager can tell us is ‘no.’ Otherwise, we try to be as easy to work with as possible, both with bookers beforehand and with venue staff on the night of the gig, and I think that accounts for why we tend to be offered follow-up gigs, even though our draw is typically less than the true indie rock bands playing around town. So I guess I would say, be kind to each other and don’t be shy about putting your music in front of anyone who might listen.
Exposed Vocals: Do you ever make mistakes during performances? How do you handle that?
MH: God, yes. All the time. We play live blues, which is built around improvising, and no one wants to play (or hear!) the same thing twice, so there’s a constant drive to discover new sounds and new licks. Most of the time I can find what I’m after, but there are plenty of moments where an idea just spins away from me. I try to laugh it off, and bring the audience in on the gaffe. I figure that anybody who’s listening will have noticed that I flubbed something anyway, so there’s no point in playing coy. Plus, mistakes are a byproduct of trying to respond to the music moment-to-moment, which is what folks are there to see, so I can’t imagine they fault me too much. And if it does bug someone they should tell me: I’ll buy them a beer afterward to make it up to them.
Exposed Vocals: Do you tour? Anything interesting happen on tour that you think our readers would enjoy hearing about?
MH: We did the one tour I mentioned earlier, right after we formed the band in 2012. We played a 10-day whirlwind in Montana to promote the album of standards. Montana actually has a kickin’ blues scene. We played these intimate, little basement clubs on up to huge outdoor festivals. Our singer at the time—the one who named us The Hurt Project—put the whole thing together, and it ended up paying for itself, which is a pretty big accomplishment in my book. The most cringe-worthy incident, for me, happened on the last day. I think most musicians can relate when I say I don’t have a lot of money, so I try to balance my budget against changing my strings as much as possible. Most of the time it’s not an issue, since we gig at most once a week here in NYC. Well, we did ten shows in ten days in Montana, and some of these shows were as long as four sets. That’s exponentially more fret time than usual. The final show of the tour was also the highest-paid. We were playing outside at a swanky marina, where people could sit in their boats on the lake and watch us play. Just gorgeous surroundings. Well, I hadn’t changed my strings all week. I just hadn’t thought of it, since I change them once every two weeks at home. You can probably see where this is going. Sure enough, just as we’re getting everyone into it I bust not one, but two strings. It took me ten minutes to get my act together, and by then we’d totally lost the crowd. I was quite sheepish after that.
Exposed Vocals: Where do you usually gather songwriting inspiration? What is your usual songwriting process?
MH: Most of my ideas come to me while I’m jimmying with the 1-4-5 blues progression. I’ll find some kind of twist or tweak and then try to build on that. If I’m lucky, the whole thing falls together pretty quickly, but sometimes it can take years for a particular idea to find its way home. I really do enjoy working in a genre that has “rules” the way that blues does, or structural expectations anyway, the kind that can be bent or even broken. The rules give someone like me a framework to bounce around inside. But it’s the vocal lines that always give me pause. I come from a writing background, so the words are something I’m very comfortable with, but trying to activate the music part of my brain while operating the language part of my brain often puts the whole lump on the fritz. I usually end up writing the melody and then just trusting that I can find the right words to fit it. And then I hand the whole thing over to our incredible singer, Jasmin Lloyd, who takes my workmanlike construction and breathes real life into it.
Exposed Vocals: Do you have a band website? What online platforms do you use to share your music?
MH: We do: www.TheHurtProject.com. We use everything we can get ahold of. Bandcamp, Reverb Nation, YouTube. More recently, we’ve been asked to join Veromuse and Showpitch, both promising social music sites that are in beta.
Exposed Vocals: What are some really embarrassing songs that we might find on your mp3 player?
MH: I’m a sucker for emo. I don’t know why. Even if I’m brave enough to put my iTunes on shuffle with company around, I’m too embarrassed to let my emo collection pop up. But I will shamelessly sing along to Postal Service, Anna Nalick, Feist, and that kind of thing if I know no one is listening.
Exposed Vocals: If you were given half a million dollars and a year off, what would you do? How would you spend it?
MH: I would hire a small army of music teachers and try to learn all the other instruments I never seem to have time to practice: piano, harmonica, trumpet, you name it. Oh man, it would be glorious.
Exposed Vocals: Any planned studio upgrades? What are you working with now?
MH: We’re about to jump back into Shady Bear Recording Studio to lay down a few more originals, which will be great. Though I do all the demos at home for the stuff I write, just so people can get a sense for what I’m thinking. I use a combo of Garageband and Audacity, and feed the various live sounds through a Tapco firewire interface, and listen back through a pair of Bose monitors. Very simple. I know Garageband is far from the industry leader, but I’ve been working with it since 2005 or so, and I just know the program really well at this point. Plus, both it and Audacity are free! Free goes a long way in my book.
Exposed Vocals: How do you find ways to promote your music? What works best for you?
MH: This is a tough one. I’m really not sure. I just try to put it out there on whatever platform is available. I go back and forth between thinking we’re competing with all the other sounds on the internet to thinking that this is one huge collaborative effort on all our parts, we indie musicians and industry folk everywhere, to point our listeners toward those other artists we respect and admire. But no, I’m not sure what actually draws people in to click on our track and take a listen versus skipping it in favor of something else. I’m not even sure why I do it when I’m in fan mode. But I have a sneaking suspicion no one else knows either. So we’re all flying blind here, but we’re all flying blind together!
Exposed Vocals: If you could perform anywhere and with any artists (Dead or Alive) where and who would it be with? Why?
MH: Ronnie Earl, hands down. Luckily, he’s still alive. But that guy plays guitar exactly the way I hear blues guitar in my head. I would be happy just to join him in a studio somewhere with his (or my) band and jam—no pressure, nice and relaxed. I’m getting goose-bumpy just imagining it.
Exposed Vocals: So, what’s next? Any new upcoming projects that you want to talk about?
MH: We should have two or three new studio tracks from Shady Bear in the coming months, which is exciting. I love recording our originals, especially because this gang makes them sound so very sweet. Beyond that, gigging like maniacs, when- and wherever we can. Check our web site for all the upcoming dates.
Exposed Vocals: If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing?
MH: I’m actually pursuing my master’s degree in forensic linguistics at Hofstra at this very moment, and will probably go on for a doctorate. Linguistics shares a lot with music, but is also very different from music, so the two areas make a great yin and yang for my intellectual and artistic lives. But I gotta say, if that phone call comes in I would be the first guy out the door with my guitar. Linguistics isn’t going anywhere.
Exposed Vocals: Do you remember buying your first album? Who was it? What was going through your head?
MH: I think every guy my age can relate when I say: “Thriller.” (I say “guy” because all the girls I knew at the time had a Madonna album. There seemed to be a very distinct gender thing going on there.) “Thriller” was THE cassette to own. Anybody who was anybody in the BMX bike gang had that tape.
Exposed Vocals: How do you juggle the rest of your responsibilities while trying to stay ahead in your music life?
MH: I drink a lot less beer than I used to, ha ha! I have a wife and a young son, on top of school and the band, and my trick is just to pay attention (or try) to what’s in front of me at a given moment. Of course, my son has the advantage there since he is not shy about jumping on me when he wants face-time.
Exposed Vocals: What should fans look forward to in 2015?
MH: More solid studio tracks and a ton of live performances! We’ll see what happens from there. The year is still young!
