Costa living

On touring with Broncho, the pitfalls of writing and the eternal chess game

Who: Costa Stasinopoulos, producer/writer/musician/sound engineer
Where: Arnie’s
To drink: Guinness

The Tulsa Voice: How was the recent tour with Broncho?

Costa Stasinopoulos: I like running sound and traveling a lot more than I thought I would. I thought I’d be a lot more uncomfortable. 

TTV: That’s surprising to me. 

CS: Well, we’re not sleeping on floors and that sort of thing. It’s kind of gotten to the point where I regret not having toured with a band throughout my twenties.

TTV: Can you make a living being a musician in Tulsa?

CS: Technically yes, technically no. I don’t know, is there one?

TTV: Are you?

CS: Am I? ... I make hundreds of dollars a year. [Laughs] The answer is, sure, but at what cost?

TTV: Explain. 

CS: Well, running a studio like The Church, for example. [Editor’s note: Stasinopoulos is the primary producer/engineer for The Church Studio. The studio is currently closed for renovations, potentially for the next year.] With all due respect to everyone that has been involved with that project, that’s way different than just chasing down your own passions. Sometimes it can become something like turning in your homework. 

TTV: It’s all still useful though, right?

CS: Any project that I work on, whether it is producing, engineering, editing, mixing, live shows, writing, film stuff, directing—I just try to view it as an opportunity to add to one thing, … the experience that I can put into the next thing. So any project that I’ve worked on, I wouldn’t give back. I wouldn’t give that experience back for anything. A lot of it is an emotional experience as well. That’s sort of how I take things in ... not necessarily learning a new trick on a record every time, you know? You don’t necessarily put a new trick in your bag every week as a producer ... but you do learn how to be a person in that setting—you get better and better at it. You learn about other artists, and I think that’s probably the merit of going to art school—you learn how to appreciate other people’s art. So in that case you’re getting a front row seat in a master class every time that you do it. 

TTV: Do you identify as a producer at this point in your career, or is that too limiting?

CS: Everything’s always been too limiting—without meaning to sound a certain way, I hope. In my mind, I was supposed to be a writer. 

TTV: What were you supposed to write?

CS: Well, let me back up. I was supposed to be a soccer player, then a writer, and I liked music—so those were my plans. I was writing a novel, since that’s never been done before, and from high school to college I had this kind of bank of ideas and I wanted to discover through writing. ... [But] I lost it all.

TTV: You physically lost it?

CS: Yeah, I never printed it out. It still blows my mind. I mourned it for three months. It was just gone. It was all on a laptop, and it crashed, as they do. I had it backed up on my parents’ computer at home, but when I looked there, it was gone. So I was like, “Fuck writing. Forever.”

TTV: Did you take it as a sign on some cosmic level?

CS: Yeah, that I fucked up and I need to never, ever do that again. [Laughs] I just decided the other thing I like is music and I was just too heartbroken to go back into writing again at that point. But that’s all I wanted, was to discover myself and other people and the world around me through writing. So I just said, “Well, somebody give me a guitar, I gotta figure this out.” So I started writing lyrics. ... But to get back to your original question, two years ago I would have said that I was a producer/engineer. I mean, that’s what I was doing, and my own personal music projects were on the backburner—that seems to always be the case. That’s part of the cost of living as an artist in Tulsa.

TTV: That you might have to get paid by using your talent to help someone else create their vision.

CS: Yeah, and slowly inch your way toward yourself. I don’t know what the hell I am right now, you know? There are six little projects I’ve got ready to fire off, and I just don’t know what the next one will be. ...

TTV: Does being in that situation weigh heavy on you? Or are you a person that believes that whatever is supposed to happen next will come on it’s own?

CS: Oh, wow, that would be nice. No. Look, I try to shed the image of having the burden of the art cross and dragging it through the streets of Tulsa. That’s someone else’s job now, if it ever was mine. But just a song itself presents a terrible cloud at all times, until it’s done, and then it’s dead to me because I no longer get to interact with it. It feels like quitting sometimes. So there are some projects that I don’t want to die; I want them to continue. I want this really long chess game with myself to continue, because I’m really enjoying it and hating myself and also loving little bits of me at the same time. It definitely weighs on me very heavily, and that’s just how it goes for me.

TTV: Is working with musicians’ egos just the worst?

CS: ... I’ll put it this way: If someone has an ego, it had better come out in their music, that’s what I’ll say. I’ll demand that. But I’m not gonna try to stifle it, either. If that’s what sparks their flame, if that’s the lighter fluid to their emotional spark, then that’s fine, I don’t care—in studio. Outside of the studio, in the real world, it’s the last thing I want to see, from myself or others. 

TTV: Is that more of a thing when money is involved?

CS: I think so. On a local level—on a Tulsa level, let’s say—we are all just trying to get something down that we can live with, get some stuff made. So the ego doesn’t have any social utility in that realm, so it’s avoided I think. 

TTV: What concerns do you have making and producing music?

CS: Well, I used to have this idea that if you wanted to create something moving and poignant and sad, that you had to be moving and poignant and sad. And that was a terrible way to live. ... There’s still a part of that that I respect in a way and that I think is necessary so that your work isn’t full of shit. But most of that is just trying to crutch a lack of life experience. Now, it’s more of a device like any other. That always concerns me—“Why am I writing this?” That’s something that concerns me. I only took lessons for ... tenor sax, when I was learning to play jazz. And I was playing in a lesson, you know, going through the changes, and I just fly off and let fingers do the talking, and I looked at my teacher and I was like, “Yeah?” And he said, “Do you know what you just did?” and I said, “No.” And he said, “Then it doesn’t fucking count.” His point was that that wasn’t jazz. That was horrendous and masturbatory. I learned that early. I didn’t always apply it to my life, I still tried to cheat—and I think everyone does to a degree—but that was a shock, and it was embarrassing. 

TTV: That’s an interesting thing to be confronted with early on.

CS: I loved it. It felt authentic. It was like, “Oh shit, that’s one of the secrets,” you know? We’ve spent three months in here taking lessons, and you finally gave me something. Because blowing through a tube isn’t making me an artist, but learning stuff like that is.

TTV: Do you remember the first instrument you picked up?

CS: My dad bought me a guitar. I was little; it actually survived a few days. I was on the top bunk, and I dropped it and it shattered into a million pieces. It stayed with me forever. I was five or six, and it was a little baby guitar, a toy guitar. But it was pretty, and I liked it. I liked the idea of it—that it could do something, but that I couldn’t make it do something yet. I liked that. And so it just broke, and it was weird because nothing was ever said about it. And it was a really stark, scary moment for me and I almost respected the instrument more at that point. It was like taking a fish out of water and watching it die. You realize, “I shouldn’t have done that.” 

TTV: Can you listen to music on the radio without dissecting it?

CS: Man, that’s like Neil De Grasse Tyson bitching about the movie “Gravity” because the debris was coming from the wrong direction. I’ll hear a song and it’s like living in “The Matrix” and I’ll see the session. So, there is an element of that for me where I have to clear the fog of what I know before I can get to what it is that they do or what they’re saying. The music that I enjoy the most immediately is the music that I enjoy the most immediately, you know?

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