JB-  Tell me about your love of music and when that started.

Joel Kroeker-  Actually, that goes back to when I was a very little kid.  I loved pop music - the poppiest of pop music, as most little kids do.  I would just stay up late at night and listen to it and then what I did was I would record songs on the radio, I would use two cassette recorders, and tap beats along with them.  I had no idea what I was doing.  That's how I started recording music as a little kid.  I have, I don't know, hundreds of cassettes of myself doing this for some reason.  It's not very good or anything, but that's what I did.

JB-  Those tapes they kind of come back to haunt you later in life…

Joel-  Well I don't share them with anybody but they're fun for me to listen to!

JB-  I recently came across tapes of me singing as a kid and doing fake interviews and stuff and I thought, "What was I doing?"

Joel- That's true.  The mind of a child is hilarious and fascinating.

JB-  And look, I'm doing reporting and radio and you're doing music.  It all worked out!

Joel-  It's all fate.  It's all pre-destined.  You can't really get away.

JB-  How did you get your break in the music industry then?  Did you play them those tapes? (laughing)

Joel-  I didn't.  Basically it's just the same old story as everybody else.  I just worked really hard at trying to make inroads with certain important people.  But basically what I did was I lived in Edmonton when I started really focusing seriously on the singer-songwriter stuff and I was doing my masters in ethnomusicology.  And I was doing a study on Canadian singer-songwriters for obvious reasons and I started interviewing all the people that I now work with.  On the side, once I got the relationship with them I would say, "Well, hey, how about if I just send you my CD?"  So I would send it to them and that would be how I originally met them - the introduction.  I guess that was very helpful for me because then I could actually talk to these people, they would give me their time because they wanted to be part of the project I was doing and I wanted them to hear my stuff.

JB- You mentioned [pronouncing slowly] ethnomusicology.  You have a masters degree in that.  What is that?  And what about it caught your eye?

Joel- Basically what it is is the study of music and culture and how music is important in certain cultures.  It's the combination of musicology and anthropology.  So you can study absolutely anything basically because musicology is the study of Western music and the history of Western music.  And with ethnomusicology, the reason I was so interested in it was because it was totally wide open to anything in the entire world basically.  And there's a million different things you can study and a lot of them don't even seem obviously music-related.  Music happens in totally random ways.  In ethnomusicology you might talk about someone humming on the street and why they are humming that and why that certain person is humming that certain thing at a certain time.  It's really not as formal (as musicology).  I find it more interesting, more sort of human.

JB- Why is it that you stay away from Top 40 music?

Joel-  I find it nauseous.  I feel absolutely sick.  There's nothing worse.  It's a kind of torture, moral torture.

JB-  Let's be honest, a lot of these pop stars can't necessarily sing.  It's just how they look.

Joel-  Yeah, I can't figure that out.  I don't know what that's all about.  I think we're all sort of rooting for somebody really authentic to get up there and do it.

JB-  Who is the last, in terms of pop stars, to be the most authentic that's made it big?

Joel-  It's always scary using the word "authentic", because again this is just my opinion.  People like Elvis Costello - he's got all kinds of things going on in terms of what he's doing artistically.  And he's managed to get pretty successful, so he's a good template.  Then Leonard Cohen is like the anti-superhero, really.  Against all odds he became quite well-known.  I think he should be even more well-known than he is, but he's somebody who basically devoted his life to sitting in a room by himself and he still manages to make it big.  So that's the kind of guy that I think is pretty impressive.

JB-  About Top 40, are you talking the sound of the music?  The lyrics?  What is it you don't like?

Joel-  I've tried to figure that out.  I'm not sure exactly.  I've talked to a lot of people and I've never heard anyone say they enjoy listening to Top 40 radio.  I've never heard anyone actually say that but it's very, very popular.  It's the most popular kind of radio.  So I've tried to figure out why it's so popular if no one likes it and why is it that I hate it so much?  And I think one of the reasons I hate it so much is because it represents exactly what I'm trying to fight against as an artist.  Now this is just my opinion, I'm not saying that I'm completely right on this, but I'm just trying to figure out why I feel this way.  As an artist I'm trying to do things that are necessary.  I think people should love every sound.  I have a very hard time believing that the music I hear on Top 40 radio is loved by anybody, and for sure not that people who make it.  It doesn't seem like loved sound.  These are sounds that are made to please somebody else in order to make lots of money.  That should be wiped from the earth.