say if you’re not laughing every five minutes in rehearsals we’re doing something wrong. It’s not like everything just has to be haha jokes, but you need to be enjoying the process for the most part so that you don’t notice the time or you don’t beat yourself up over how much time you spend on something. If I look at Creatures, I don’t even want to clock the hours on how long it took to paint and record everything. I might get depressed at that point, but it’s not about that. At the end, it was just what happened. That’s how I spent three years. And now what it does is it allows doors to open to have these new experiences, like a board game event, which wasn’t possible for me prior to that. And then the loop closes when people show up and I see them just laughing and having their Staring Contests and hearing them cheer and clap for each other in the game. That’s enough for me. It made it all worthwhile, man. Bringing people together and giving a space for them to enjoy each other’s company and have some sort of thing to do to connect. Jonny: You’re a good force for the world. You’re using your talents and rolling with the punches, and trying to keep things fun, while dealing with life. Kid Koala: Art, for most artists I know, is like a therapy thing more than anything else. If I look at Space Cadet as a book, at the time I was going through a massive existential crisis, but not in a way that you would read into it explicitly in the book. We just lost a few members of our family, my grandma. And my daughter was actually on her way. That was like this duality. I was in between generations thinking about that. I was like how do you get that out? Well, it’s probably not a scratch turntable record I’m going to make. There was the book and then the score was right after Maple arrived. Her crib was right next to my piano and I didn’t want to wake her up. I remember just playing, sometimes I’d hold her in one hand, picking out notes or writing chord cycles with the other hand. They were all lullabies for her really. And that ended up being the score for the Space Cadet graphic novel, which people to this day have said, I used to play that for my child to help them go to sleep. And I’m like, that makes sense because I wrote a lot of that with a sleeping child right next to me. Even when it came to do the turntable parts I had headphones on because I didn’t want to wake her. I put little rubber stoppers on my faders so it wouldn’t make that snap-click metal-on-metal sound. That’s an example of how life actually ended up affecting what I was making. And then embracing that fully when it came time to develop the show. I was like well, I made the whole record on headphones, let’s put the whole audience in headphones. Let’s make it comfortable. And we had inflatable space pods for everybody, and they’re just chilling, listening kind of in their own crib. And it was an experiment, but it worked. So I’m not afraid of where it’ll go, even if it doesn’t, even if it’s confusing at first. I always feel like a couple years down the line it starts to reveal why it had to be that way. The rest of the time, I’m just trying to read the roadmap and be like, yes, this is what it had to be. I wasn’t going to wake the baby. I wasn’t going to stop doing music or stop drawing. I just let it become a part of it. Jonny: Like we were talking about with the game earlier, we love that how to make a Song, you kind of have to meet these requirements, which could be a heart break. You can’t get access to the genre if you don’t feel the pain. Tell us a little bit about how you thought about the game with all that. Kid Koala: Really, it’s kind of semi-autobiographical in terms of just my experience in the music industry. I wouldn’t say these are allencompassing industry truths or anything, but I actually feel that there’s certain stars that need to align and time and energy, especially when you’re dealing with bands. For everybody to even just get in a room and rehearse is an effort. I think with regards to what you’re talking about, there’s a deck called Life Experience cards and those you receive usually when you land on these kind of whammy spaces where some sort of hiccup happens along the way. Most of these have actually happened. Like there’s a Noise Ordinance space so you lose your Drummer, but then you gain Life Experience. I remember playing at a few festivals with these strict decibel ratings. It got to the point where, oh, well this is enough for a piano concert, but we have a whole band up here, so I don’t know what we’re going to play. Or we just turn the PA off and do acoustic. So all of those things that might happen along the way, like your touring van gets 19
22 Publizr Home