MOIST: "O.K. COMPUTER"
Story by Sarah Chauncey
Photos by Edward Pond

MOIST, Clockwise from left: Kevin Young, David Usher, Jeff Pearce, Paul Wilcox, Mark Makowy

In the July issue of Chart, the members of Moist mention how e-mail has changed their lives, both personally and professionally. Below, they go into a bit more detail about All Things Internet, discussing the band's new website www.moist.ca and their responses to fan e-mails.

You [Jeff] read all the fan e-mail that comes in. How do you handle it?

Jeff Pearce [bassist]: When the e-mails come in, right now there's not that many, so it's easy enough for me to [answer them]. When more and more come in, then I'll be passing my computer around to everyone else as well. The ones that I answer are the ones that are very brief, one-line questions. If they're as simple as "When's your record coming out?" or "Where the hell are you guys? What have you been doing?" That kind of thing. Or sometimes they're more, kind of, interesting... Sometimes they're very musical; sometimes they involve our equipment; sometimes they involve our playing styles, or whatever.

Is there going to be an equipment part of the website?

Jeff: Not on our website.

Kevin Young [keyboardist]: There's one on another website.

Jeff: There's so many sites, around 60. Our actual site is going to stay very simple.

I'm glad you did away with the submarine thing.

Jeff and Kevin: That was never ours.

Kevin: I couldn't even get into it, and it was our site!

Jeff: The site that we have, there's going to be nothing fancy: No Java, no applets, nothing. Because people don't need that stuff. Ours is going to be basically just news, exactly the news, directly. Because there's so much "news" that gets out there that's rumours, like other people who run websites and the news they get is what they heard from someone who heard from someone. And we actually say, "This isn't true at all," so this will be just the true stuff, where we are, that kind of thing.

Kevin: The true stuff as we fabricate it. Moist-approved facts. [Laughs all around]

So what are some Moist-approved facts?

Kevin: There are five people in the band.

Mark: We're playing EdgeFest.

Jeff: It's amazing to me sometimes how intelligent the questions are. And when people actually do take the time... for one thing, people really appreciate hearing back. But they're nice, because the big problem is when people think that because you write back, you're going to be establishing this kind of back-and-forth thing. So I don't bother with that. There are times when people are writing very personal things to the e-mail account, and I try to answer them, I try to say... if someone's writing with personal problems, it gets ugly after a while. It's like this thing coming back, to the point where they feel like they're friends.

Because they identify with the music.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kevin: And we can't do that, because we're musicians. We're just not qualified to be...

Therapists.

Jeff: Yeah, and it's not fair. It's not fair to them, because we're not going to be around for them.

They're basing something on an image they have of you, based on a lyric, and not based on a genuine friendship. I think that's one of the downsides of the Internet with bands. I mean, it's great to have that accessibility to bands, but there's also that false sense of intimacy that fans can get.

Jeff: That's why now, these days, with e-mails that I write back, I try to be very impersonal, very much, like, "Here's your question and here's the answer." The other thing, too, is that I'm trying to answer 20 e-mails in a short span. I don't have that much time, so I try to do it. If I'm answering 20 e-mails, it takes me about 10 minutes, if I'm doing it, just, "Here's the question, here's the answer." If it's any more than that, then it just gets to be too much. And when people send in a question, and I respond back, and then they send something saying, "Oh, thanks for replying to my e-mail," I don't bother responding. Because it's, like, if you get 20, then the next day, you get 20 new ones, plus the 20 responses from the previous day. And it builds up.