That’s right! We got ourselves interviewed by The Columbus Dispatch! It should run in the Weekender this Thursday (10/1/2009), and will even have adorable pictures of us. In the highly likely scenario that Andy’s responses are heavily edited (no paper should ever include my words without many deletions) and due to the fact that it’s my website and I can say anything I want!, I’d like to put here my alternate response to the final question of the interview. Enjoy.

“Why should people come to a Trains Across the Sea show?”

You should come to a Trains Across the Sea show for the same reason you should be supporting all these local independent artists all over this beautiful city – because you used to. Before the kids, before the sixty hour weeks, before you let the wild-eyed idealism of youth fade quietly into the comfort of domestication, you cared about local art, you drank whenever it felt good, you rolled in the grass like an idiot, you learned a few chords on guitar and sang some song to impress a girl, you tried to sketch your friend, you saw your friend’s band in empty bars on Tuesdays, you ran wild and free throughout the city. And it’s not that you wanted to stop, or even distinctly chose to; it just the importance of self-happiness seemed to fade behind the deadlines and kids’ soccer practices and stiff social gatherings and now, suddenly, you’re on this other side, importing your art from the far corners of the globe that NPR tells you about, while the rest of us local artists are still playing those empty bars to our friends on Tuesdays, still making albums, still painting, still trying our damndest to peel off some corner of this city so we can keep providing it with a product as essential as any other local grocer or carpenter or plumber or librarian – a night of loud music to cut loose once in a while or a few words to a melody to change your mind about something, or knocking you upside the head with some twisted painting you didn’t expect – that art is important, damnit! And as long as we agree that art is important, then let us also agree that LOCAL art is important.

You should come to a Trains Across the Sea show, to any show, to every show, because “artists are workers and they need to eat too.” And if the only way to survive as an artist is to move to a coast, to flee this beautiful city, then we’ll keep losing the best of them and continue to think that “local” art is somehow “inferior.” But anybody who has taken a good long look under this city at all these people who are genuinely trying to build something greater than themselves through art can’t help but agree that we’ve got a hell of a party on our hands, and everyone’s invited.