Musician Pierce Fulton is playing in Brooklyn, NY tonight! Check out his So Much More Tour at 8pm at Verboten!
Pierce Fulton's Twitter and Website
Photo By Meredith Truax.
I love listening to positive stories about people making a living at their passion.
Pierce Fulton is just the guy I needed to hear from while waiting with baited breath for a weekend snowstorm here in New York. Plus, Pierce is really adorable.
(Hi Pierce! My kids and I would love to see one of your shows when you get to New Jersey! You know, like at The Stone Pony!)
What are the scariest things about touring? How do you get prepared for your performances?
The thought of forgetting something. Just recently I forgot my pants when I went to Vancouver for a show, I kid you not. Luckily I had my friend taking photos and he lent me an extra pair he brought.
I don't really prepare much besides remembering my computer and SD cards and maybe browse through promos or Beatport.
Besides dance music, what's your favorite genre of music? How has it influenced your music?
I'd say blues and classic rock mostly because it's what I grew up on. I am fortunate enough to have extremely cool parents who had badass musical tastes throughout my life. Like my first memory of music ever is singing my own lyrics to "Franklins Tower" by the Grateful Dead before I could talk.
I find myself always gravitating back toward blues riffs in my music. My favorite trick is relative minor pentatonic / blues scale on a major song.
Have you ever been put in a position that is out of your comfort zone?
What's interesting is I actively seek scenarios where I can be put out of my comfort zone when I'm writing music. I'll try to work with a vocalist or a writer that's out of my normal style range and see what I can make of it. I'll also go to a music shop and buy a random instrument and make a goal of learning the ins and outs of it. If an idea for a song spurs, great, if not it's just another fun tool under my belt.
What's funnier is the amount of energy I put into widening my musical comfort zone harshly narrows my social comfort zone. I'm a pretty shy and quiet dude, especially during periods when I'm really pushing myself creatively.
How did your So Much More Tour come to life?
My manager, agent and I have been talking about doing a branded, solo tour for a while now and the timing just worked out I guess! We wanted to hit a bunch of markets I haven't been to in a while so my agent worked his magic and here we are. It's funny, we thought about naming it after my latest single and calling it the No More tour but I didn't want people to think I was finished making music or something. After a ton of brainstorming I came up with So Much More tour and it worked perfectly because I have so much more on the way including my own remix of my song No More which is coming in early February.
What was it like the FIRST time you picked up a guitar? How do you incorporate guitars into your music?
I believe I was five or six years old because when I was a child I'd randomly hop on stage at like weddings or small concerts and grab some small percussive instrument and start messing around. My parents were just like, "Well, that's interesting" and got me a small acoustic guitar. I played the hell out of it and eventually got a real one and the rest is history. It's crazy, I was registering my Strat (a Fender guitar for the unfamiliar) on their website, not quite sure why to be honest, but I saw in my case the receipt from 1998 which blew my mind because I got the guitar when I was a pretty avid player.
The first time I put a guitar in my music was for my live version of Kuaga. I always disassociated my guitar playing and my electronic music but once I did a song that focused around the guitar it was like all the dots connected.
Pierce Fulton chilling in Vancouver.
What was it like going from Vermont to New York to California?
Extremely wild. I learned how to drive in Vermont which has two lane highways and you're usually the only one on them. Then I moved to Brooklyn where you don't drive at all and the subway is your transportation. Now I'm in Los Angeles after not driving for five years and my only experience is on dirt roads in the woods, so let's just say I try not to drive further than the grocery store if I can help it haha. But I love it, I got pretty tired of the cold in Brooklyn and I'd love to live in Vermont for my entire life but it's so hard to fly out of southern Vermont shows. Burlington, Vermont isn't bad (I went to college there) but there are basically no nonstop flights to places outside of New England.
Do you have any other interests besides music?
As sad as it sounds, not really. Music consumes me and I know how cheesy that sounds but it's true. Ideas are always ticking and brewing in my head and it actually affects my life in bad ways. I often find myself realizing I'm not fully focused on a conversation or a movie or event because I'm thinking of a melody or rhythm. I even had someone catch me playing rhythm patterns with my teeth one time; I'd kept it secret for a long time because it's quite weird and my dentist HATES me for it.
I will say living in Los Angeles has me cooking and going outside more often so those are two things I try to utilize to separate my time with music. Hiking and cooking fun meals with my roommates is a great new hobby. In Brooklyn I was a borderline hermit, only ordering take out and getting coffee from cafes. My friends worried a bit!
At one point you took up the trombone, as well as other instruments. What was it about the trombone that made you want to learn it? How has that impacted your music?
My great grandfather was actually a relatively successful vocalist and trombone player and I was semi-named after him. My name is Pierce Collins Fulton and he's John Collins Fulton aka Jack Fulton and we're the only two people who pursued music full time in our family. I took up trombone because I thought it must be some sort of destiny and played it in my high schools concert band. I had an amazing music teacher in high school that ran a few electronic music courses but also had his masters in conducting and concert trumpet I believe. He took time out of his day to teach me trombone because I was a junior when I started in a band full of people who'd played their respective instruments for years. It was an amazing experience using your mouth and lungs for music after only using my hands for my entire life (guitar, drums, piano etc).
Anything else you'd like to say?
Well I'm happy everyone's enjoyed my music so far and that I'm excited to keep pushing myself and see where things go!