Melissa Ferrick – Xperience History

Melissa Ferrick – Xperience History – by Rob Smittix.

Originally published April of 2023.

(Interview with Melissa Ferrick.)

RRX: Hello. How has your morning been?

MF: So far so good.

RRX: I’m excited just to talk with you. I don’t really like to do “interviews,” I think they’re boring so my style is just to chat. Everybody else does that, they just plug away all of the questions and I’m just like, what did you have for breakfast? Are you a breakfast person?

MF: Yeah I’m working on my second cup of coffee right now, I had a little bit of granola and yogurt this morning. Lining up my day, so yeah it’s going to be a good day, I look forward to it.

RRX: Me too but I’m on the first cup of coffee. The coffee cup I grabbed from the cabinet I’ve never seen before, I don’t know where it came from but it says “you’re awesome, keep that sh*t up!” So I’m going to roll with it.

MF: Good, good, excellent!

RRX: So April 28th, we’ve got you at Caffe Lena. That’s exciting. I’ve never seen you live before.

MF: Oh wow, okay great, are you coming?

RRX: Oh, heck yeah!

MF: Great, I’m looking forward to coming back there, I like it there.

RRX: I guess I’m late to the game but at least I’m going to be at the game now. Now I see you’re a music professor as well?

MF: Yeah I teach at Northeastern University now, I was at Berklee College of Music, I went to school there for a little while. I started teaching about a decade ago, well I started in 2010 but I didn’t really get a permanent job at Berklee until 2013. So I started there and then I moved over to Northeastern in 2019. It’s really cool, I like it a lot, I get to teach some classes on creative practice, which is really cool. It’s not as myopic as just songwriting, it’s really about how a person approaches work creatively. Where they get their ideas, how they think about where their ideas come from and how they express them. I teach an intro to music business course and I teach a course on music entrepreneurship, which is really fun and has a lot to do with my history. It really taps into what I have done in my career. It’s really nice, it’s not just song-writing, which is what I was teaching at Berklee. I’m really happy with my position now, it’s increased my commitment to learning and that’s something that really didn’t get ignited until I went back to school in 2017. I’ve just been kind of killing it in that area.

RRX: So what else have you been up to?

MF: I’ve been doing a bunch of co-writing now and I’ve just started managing a couple of artists, so I’m moving into the behind the scenes world, which is really lovely for me. I’m still playing shows and I’ll be putting music out throughout the year. More singles here and there just like how everybody else is doing things these days, then I’ll be compiling it together and putting out a full piece of work on vinyl, for the hardcore fans. It feels very relaxed unlike in the 90’s and 2000’s. My first record came out in 1993 and the last record I put out in 2015, which still feels like 5 years ago because of Covid.

RRX: Sure.

MF: This feels nice, it feels way more relaxed.

RRX: You do what you love though and that’s really a blessing, I do what I love but I know the majority of people kind of just do what they have to do. Your dream has probably come true, you probably still have other dreams.

MF: Yeah but it’s still a struggle. There are plenty of days that I don’t want to go to work. Even as a performer it just depends. Like when we were talking earlier about how’s today going? I’m having a great day. It’s a day at a time. The older I get the more I understand that I’m so fortunate to have this teaching job. A lot of my friends who are DIY, indie musicians, especially when Covid hit, were incredibly financially devastated. The entire live industry shut down. For me because of the job I have I kept getting a check. Just as importantly for me is having structure in my life. It really serves my personality really well. When Covid hit, I had to get up and I talked on ZOOM. It gave my brain other things to think about rather than if the air that I breathe was going to kill me. You know?

RRX: I can totally relate to that. It hurt the soul not being able to play live.

MF: It’s highly possible it could happen again, it’s just the way things roll. I can only speak for myself but I got through it and there’s a light at the other side. Getting through Covid really was a practice of getting right down to living in the present. For me it really was. I didn’t write through Covid, I wasn’t one of these musicians that surged on songs. I have a friend Dave Herlihy that I teach with, he was in a band called O Positive back in the day and he wrote like 30 songs. I was like dude, how did you? But that’s how he dealt, you know?

RRX: Right.

MF: Some people really flourished creatively and others really hit a wall.

RRX: Totally, and if you’re writing what you were going through, it’s therapeutic but nobody wanted to hear a Covid song. We wanted to escape it as much as possible.

(Both Laugh)

RRX: So I’m excited to see you live, what are we to expect from the show, anything different? Any certain strategy you are going to take with it?

MF: That’s a good question. I haven’t really thought about it yet. It’s still a little ways away. Caffe Lena is really the first show beginning my summer touring. As a teacher, school gets out on the 19th of April, so right after that I kick in to playing shows. Which I wasn’t able to do last year or the year before that so it’s really going to be the first full summer of me touring. I haven’t been down to Nashville in a long time, I haven’t been out to Chicago in a long time. I’m excited. The run-up to getting back out on the road, with Caffe Lena being the first show of this run, is giving me the opportunity to try out some new things and revive old songs. This year 2023, is a big marker for me because my first record came out in 1993. In August it will be the 30th Anniversary of my first record. I am doing work this year to pay homage to that. Not really a big push or anything like that but just for my fans and for me to just kind of look back.

RRX: It’s definitely a milestone and I can’t believe 1993 was 30 years ago.

MF: (Laughs) I know!

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