My conversation with Jake Burns was one of the most fascinating interviews I've ever done. So fascinating, in fact, that I had to sit with it for a while, chop it up, and feed it to you in tiny little pieces. Here's the first morsel, hopefully that'll whet your appetite for more. Enjoy the read!

Hey Jake, thanks for doing this interview. Please tell us a bit about Stiff Little Finger and a new release soon?

The last album was released about ten years ago. For one reason or another, life kinda kept getting in the way. In that time, Bruce left the band and we had to get Ali back in, which slowed everything up because he hadn’t even heard any of the new songs by that point, so we had to go back to playing older songs to be able to bring him back in the band. Also, in that time, I went through a divorce, met someone else, and changed countries. Like I said, life kinda got in the way.

One of the big defining moments in the process was about four of five years ago when I wrote a bunch of songs and I wasn’t sure I was that happy with them. Then, my fiftieth birthday came and went. I don’t make a big deal out of birthdays but everyone around me made such a fuss of it being a “landmark birthday,” or whatever that it made an impression on me. After that, we went on tour. I came home at the end of the tour and sat down and listened to all of the songs I’d written up to that point. I think probably sitting at the back of my mind there was the fact that I had just turned fifty. When I listened to them, I said to myself, “You know, I could have written these when I was twenty.” It didn’t feel like the songs had moved on at all. It also felt a bit fraudulent; it felt like Stiff Little Fingers by numbers. I phoned everybody up and said, “Okay, we’re gonna scrap all of them.” They were like, “You’re kidding, we’ve done all this work and we’re gonna scrap it?” I said, “Trust me; it’ll be for the best.” So basically, I started from scratch all over again, like I said, five years ago. Now we’re in a position where we have a whole batch of songs, but then we we’re thinking, “What are we gonna do next?” Our contract with EMI was very much a rolling contract. Our relationship with the exec board was one of,“If you’re still happy, we’re still happy.” Because it had taken so long to do this, the entire landscape of the music industry changed. The internet had become so huge. Ten years ago, physical records weren’t as novel as they are now, you could still find record stores on high streets. Now there seem to be more small independent stores coming back, but the likes of Tower and Virgin record stores have just disappeared. So, we started thinking about record labels and what have you. We thought, “What exactly does a record label do?”

The main thing it does is get your records in the shops so that people can get them. There aren’t any shops anymore. Then, somebody mentioned pledge music and Kickstarter and said, “Look, you guys have been doing this long enough, you know what you’re doing.

Don’t you enjoy being independent more than working with a record company?

We were a bit conflicted about it because we’ve been a lucky band in that we’ve never really had trouble with record labels and we were always treated pretty well. We’re not desperate to be independent because we’ve had a bad experience. The more we thought about it, the more exciting it sounded. We really can do whatever the hell we want. There’s nobody breathing down your neck going, “You have to write that hit single.” Nobody cares about hit singles anymore. It felt very exciting at first, but the next question was, will anybody go for it? We know that we’ve got a very supportive audience, but we weren’t at all sure that people would donate money to us. We suggested the idea on our website and a couple of people were slightly confused as to how it worked. They went, “we’re paying for you to make a record and then we have to buy the record?” We said, “No, once you pay for the record, it’s yours. You don’t have to pay twice.” Once people caught on to the fact that what they were doing was basically pre-ordering a record, they said, “Oh yeah, sure, we can do that.” We reached a hundred percent of our goal within twelve hours, which was fantastic.

You’ve doubled your fundraising goal, how do you feel about that?

It’s great, but people had been getting confused, writing in saying, “So now that you’ve doubled your goal, does that mean we get a double album?” I can’t fathom writing another twelve songs in a week. What it does do is give us time and space to plan ahead and make this thing even better. We don’t have to go for the cheapest recording studio, we can go to better facilities, which in the end, will hopefully make it a better record. The packaging, the cover, and the distribution can all improve as well.

You’ve said that when people can cherry pick MP3s, the concept of the full album is all but lost and songs can’t really grow on you. What songs would you think it’d be a mistake to leave behind?

That’s tricky because, like you just said, everybody has favorite songs of their own. I’ve had people come up to me and tell me that songs I particularly think were not the greatest thing we ever did were their favorites. Sometimes I say, “Really? I’m sorry if this ruins it, but I think it sucks. Anyway, I’m glad you like it.” I wouldn’t want to point out the songs that I think are the high point of what we’ve got. The other thing is, of course, that we haven’t recorded them yet, we’re going to record in January. We’ve played a lot of them live and we’ll be playing more of the newer ones. The audience have actually heard a lot of the songs and they like them, but things change when you get into the studio. The best song of the lot when you play them live falls flat in the studio because it doesn’t really capture what you did live. Something that you played live and thought, “Well, that’s okay, I mean it’s a decent album track,” can suddenly come alive in the studio. You go, “Wow, this is a much better song than I thought it was.” Like I said, I don’t want to color anyone’s opinion, people should make their own minds up. Somebody might come up to me, pick what I think is the weakest track on the album, and say it’s the best thing we’ve ever written.

Be sure to check in for the February Punk Globe for part 2 of the Jake Burns interview.