Colie Brice - Feeling Some Kind of Way

  “I feel like good art needs to be uncomfortable.”

On a road to Eastport, Maine sits a music studio with the most artistic vibe. I am here to talk with Colie Brice, and although we have met a few times over the years, this is the opportunity I have to dig into Colie’s musical philosophy and the road that led him from California to contentment in a small town in Downeast Maine. 

Where are you currently in your musical career? 

“It’s something I’m asking myself these days. I recently went from being an electronic band kind of person to getting deeper into smaller ensembles. I love doing a duo with my son. He and I’ve been doing a lot of solo, acoustic stuff. I always kind of avoided the intimacy of just voice and acoustic guitar. I think, for me, rock and roll was escapism and was a loud bombastic way to metabolize the pain of my upbringing and create a gang around me. And it was like a lot of peacock feathers.”

What changed? 

I went to a Grateful Dead concert and took acid and it really expanded my perception. It was the first time in my life where I actually could look at myself from a detached objective perspective outside of my own ego perception of myself. And that was amazing. And there was freedom in that. In tribute to what I experienced, I did an instrumental improvisation called 17 G Tribute – It was around the time Jerry Garcia died, so I made it a tribute to him. (Colie won’t share this, but 17 G Tribute was off his New Age Blues album which was accepted in 15 categories in the NARAS 1997 GRAMMY nomination entry list.)“So I’m just trying to excavate my soul and find some, some deeper, more rich veins to explore musically. I do have a creative principle that I go by in my life that I call the Luna Muse Principle, which means crazy inspiration.”

Can you describe what it’s like to create music? 

I hope I’m getting closer to my personal authenticity as a human being and to artists. I am trying to excavate my soul and find some deeper, more rich veins to explore musically. I do have a creative principle that I go by in my life that I call the Luna Muse Principle, which means crazy inspiration. So throughout the course of my life, I’ve made all these songs, and I’ve recorded with other bands and I’ve been involved in tons of projects but my own personal endeavors with my soul and music, I’ve kind of been reckless. I have been very self-indulgent and meandering, but also very eclectic and experimental, maybe a little eccentric but I will just get inspiration for either. When I sit in the studio to create something, it could be a song or it could just be a soundscape. It could be a vintage blues jam or could be some avant-garde expressionism. I don’t really know what’s going to come out, which is kind of exasperating to anyone who actually has had an interest in my music.

Have you always been involved in both creating music and the technical side? 

I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager, I took two cassette decks and recorded a drumbeat on one cassette deck. And then I played it back in front of another cassette deck while I overdubbed the piano part. I’ve been doing that since the mid-eighties. I  have kept up with the technology. Like now I use Apple pro logic and, you know, my tools have gotten more sophisticated, but it’s been a lifelong earnest pursuit exploring the world of the recording arts, and it’s been an amazing journey for me. 

Would you say you have had a successful career? 

I haven’t had maybe the material success in music that I’d hoped to have had as a kid and lately, I have played with a handful of people who have had much greater commercial success than me and I still have some friends who are actively doing very well professionally, and I don’t know, maybe if I was younger, I’d still crave that type of success. But now, you know, you talk to a middle-aged person, who’s got to live on a tour bus or something or eat at Cracker-barrel every night, and the idea it loses some of its lower to me.  Not the playing part. I’d love to be playing music live somewhere every night, somewhere cool. But, I don’t know that I have the desire to really live that life anymore.So I guess in hindsight in all the years I’ve been doing this, there are certain things that I still like on a personal subjective level and there’s other stuff I’m like, Oh my God, I wish I could just erase that from the planet earth. The thing that keeps me bold is that I never know what someone else’s going to like, something that I might be dismissive of that could be a guy in Venezuela who uses as background music first podcast or all these rich experiences I’ve had like the commercial success in a band called Phantoms Opera when I was in my twenties.And some of the people that were fans of that band were pretty hardcore and the band had mainstream press. And so that’s left me with a handful of people that have stayed curious about what I’m doing, artistically.  Many bitterly disappointed that I’m not doing the type of music that they like me to do, but it’s interesting. Thanks to Phantoms Opera, I do have a small, but an international audience. I could hear from a person from Japan or Paris today about a track. I guess that’s why I keep trying to be true to myself because every once in a while something means something to someone where you just would not have anticipated it. And as long as there’s another person finding some value in it, then to me it served its purpose.