Kip Moore On His New Album, Songwriting, Streaming and Touring Europe – Interview

CMA-award nominee Kip Moore, is currently in Europe for the Country to Country music festival, in London, Dublin, Stockholm and Oslo. His 2012 album ‘Up All Night’ was the bestselling album by a newcomer in 2012 and 2013 and has just been released in the UK with some extra bonus tracks, recorded live in Nashville. I was fortunate enough to get Kip on the phone recently, and had the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his career, his views on songwriting, social media, touring Europe, the upcoming album and the streaming debate, among other things.

Me: What kind of things are you up to in the UK at the moment?

Kip: I’ve been doing press all day. I got here last night, and this is what I’ve been doing all day!

Me: That sounds like not too much fun then!

Kip: Well this is what I’m here to do, I came to focus on getting my career off the ground over here.

Me: Yeah exactly, so how much influence do you have over where you play and tour?

Kip: I’ve already called my agent, and we’re trying to set up a headline tour in the fall! We saw in Norway and Sweden how the fans respond to us over there, where we sold all of our CDs, and there is clearly a passion for us to come back, for me and my band. We just got to the UK, and we hear there’s a buzz going on, and I’m already trying to get back over here!

Me: That’s great to hear! I’ve been a fan of yours for a while, and noticed you only just released ‘Up All Night’ last week here in the UK.

Kip: Yeah that’s right, we stuck some bonus tracks on there for you guys as well!

Me: Yeah, I noticed that. I’m a huge fan of ‘Lipstick’ in particular. Is that going to be on the new record?

Kip: Yeah I’ve got a good feeling that it is.

Me: With that song in particular, your musical style really reminds me a bit of artists like Bruce Springsteen. Does that help you stand out a bit in a crowded Nashville music scene?

Kip: Yeah, I think it does 100%. I think that we have spread ourselves from our live show, with the fans that go to them spreading the word. You know, I wrote all of my own music, and my whole journey through Nashville, I was the guy who found it hard to get in the door, when everyone else was writing with the big songwriters that write for everyone. I was writing with me and just another no-named guy who didn’t even have a publishing deal. Therefore, our sound doesn’t sound like what was going on in the town I guess, and we developed our own thing, and actually that has been beneficial to us. I’m kinda glad now that I couldn’t get into any doors, getting kicked in the teeth and playing live shows and playing my own style of music, without being influenced by the hit songwriters who were writing for everyone else.

Me: You can definitely tell! Were you surprised when you got the CMA nominations and places on big tours with Tim McGraw and Dierks Bentley?

Kip: You know, I’m one of those kind of guys who’s always had a strong belief in myself, and knew what kind of music we were making and what we were building, so I wouldn’t say surprised. Grateful is more the word. If you don’t believe in yourself and envision yourself doing big things then there’s no sense in even setting out to do it. I envisioned all the things that were happening, but it took so long to get them that I’m just very grateful for it all.

Me: Yeah I can see that. So as a writer are there any topics that you try to avoid, because everyone else is doing them or it’s labelled as ‘bro-country’?

Kip: Yeh, but I’m not gonna say any names, or really focus on it, I prefer to just focus on myself. But there are people who I won’t get in a room with. It’s just one of those things, where I know how I am and I won’t take kindly to someone trying to tell me that they know better than me and steer me in a direction I don’t want to go. There are some types of music that I don’t feel like writing, I just want to stick to my guns and write the kind of music I want to write.

Me: I can understand that. So have people like Brett James, who produced your album, been an influence on you, being a massive hit songwriter?

Kip: Brett’s been a great influence on me because he speaks when I ask him stuff. He believes in me as a writer, and given me the growth, by signing me to a writing deal when I was young along time ago, and let me grow in my own right without pushing views down my throat. Whenever, I asked stuff because I value his opinion, he would be there to talk things through. He let me record the songs I want to record, even the bad ones that I thought were good, and let me discover they weren’t for myself. We have a special bond, we co-produced these two albums, including the one about to come out, which I’m very excited about.

Me: Have you got any news on the new record?

Kip: Yeah, it’s looking like a late May or early June release. I can’t wait, it’s a whole different record, I’ll never make the same record twice. You can tell by songs like ‘Lipstick’ that its going to be a different kind of record.

Me: I really like the sound of the bonus tracks on your UK released-album.

Kip: That’s all live recorded, in one take with my band, no session musicians and no bells and whistles. They’re just really dry and gritty, with no fixing of vocals or backing. That’s just what we sound like as a band.

Me: I think that’s again what reminds me of Springsteen, which is a massive compliment! So with your new album coming out, where do you stand on the streaming debate, with the balance between exposure and getting paid for your work?

Kip: Man, it’s tough, people just think that streaming should just be the way that it is. At the end of the day people will pay five bucks for a Starbucks coffee, and we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making a record and people expect it to be free. We spend years and years and years working on our craft and building something, and it shouldn’t be free, when you put that much time and energy into it. It’s just that warped mentality that our society has now, and I don’t think there’s any going back. My younger sister sees nothing wrong with it because it’s what she knows, with free music. It can’t survive that way, that’s what people don’t realize, that the thing they love is getting crippled at the same time, and new acts used to have the labels to send them out on the road and you got to hear the new bands and stuff, and it’s getting more difficult. There’s session players that have played in studios for years, and now they’re out of a job, and publishing houses closing down left and right, and world-famous songwriters who can’t find work and it’s a trickling effect and people don’t understand the ramifications of it, because they’re not inside the business.

Me: I agree with that. So have you got any temptation to follow people like Jason Aldean and pull your album from streaming sites?

Kip: I’ll tell you what, it’s a lot harder for a new artist to do that, because there’s not as much demand for your product, so I don’t know how I’ll handle that. It’s a fine line. Taylor can do it because she has such a mass demand for her product. You see guys like U2 that are claiming ‘hey we’ll give you a free album’, but they don’t tell you behind the scenes how many millions of dollars they’re getting paid to do that! And that’s jacked up, because you wouldn’t have done that early in your career, but now that you’ve made millions of dollars, you give away a free product and are screwing the rest of us! It’s a touchy topic.

Me: How much of your decision is it? Is it management or label or what?

Kip: You know, I call a lot of my own shots when it comes to those kind of things. It’s one of those things where I consult with a lot of people, because I value their opinions on how we should go about doing this. I go out of my way with my shows to keep ticket prices down, and fight for the fans and keep scalping down, and reduce production to make a cheaper ticket, but when it comes to my record, I killed myself over the last year and a half, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making it, so how in the hell should that be free? I’m flying home on my days off and spending 48 hours in a row in the studio recording something and then right back on the bus to a live show. SO how the hell should that be free? It is just a backwards philosophy right now.

Me: I couldn’t agree more, so how important is social media in your experience as a newer professional artist?

Kip: There are good and bad points to social media. As far as just from a career standpoint, social media has been good to me. I feel like I’ve got the best fan pages from any artist period. I’ve had three or four fan pages that have been unbelievable and have helped portray who I am as an artist and what I stand for, and their fan pages are big, and helped me convey my message outside of magazines and things like that. In that regard, social media has been great. I’m kind of anti-social media for a lot of other things, just as far as the world we live in like it gets to the stage where it just pisses me off to be honest. I think it has got narcissistic and vain and out of hand. But as far as with my career, in promoting me it has been a helpful tool, especially since I was underground for a long time.

Me: That’s really interesting, because you see loads of interviews with artists saying ‘we love Facebook’ and ‘we love twitter’.

Kip: I’m that guy who tells you the damn truth every time, I don’t sugar coat shit, I don’t dance around questions and I don’t give politically correct answers. I get in trouble for that sometimes, but I can’t go about things like that, and I get bored as hell talking like a robot and saying the same thing every time.

Me: You must spend so much time out on the road, it must be quite hard being away from home. What kind of things do you get up to to relieve stress?

Kip: I take surfing trips. Whenever I get a break of five days I’ll go to Costa Rica, Hawaii, Dominican Republic, East Coast, West Coast, I’ll try and find a spot to surf for few days.

Me: That’s really cool, if you have any time on your UK trip, you should check out Cornwall, which is very good for surfing.

Kip: I’m already planning a trip to Portugal, and so trying to go there in May.

Me: Thanks for talking to me, I know you must be busy so won’t take too much of your time!

Kip: Thanks buddy.