How much money would you be willing to spend to get a mouse into your kitchen?
Until Friday, August 23, $75 not only will net you a private preview of Mouse Powell's newest album, These Are the Good Times, but the Tempe-based rapper will come into your home and prepare you a bona fide home-cooked meal.
Powell currently is on the verge of releasing the follow-up to his standout debut, Where It's Cloudy, and like many independent artists around him, he's turning to project-funding-platform Kickstarter to help put the finishing touches on the record.
Needless to say, he's getting creative with his proposed incentives, which include everything from standard musician merch to skateboards and house parties. With a week left until the the funding period closes, Mouse is pushing hard to reach his goal of $3,000.
Up on the Sun: So what's the good word on this Kickstarter? Mouse Powell: We're getting ready to put the finishing touches on the new album and it's going to be a free project. So we're doing a Kickstarter to try and fund the mastering, so it can sound the best it possibly can. The rest of the money is going to go to making new music videos.
Right now we're right around $1,500 and we're trying to get to $3,000. The feedback has been incredible so far, and now we're at the halfway point.
We're also doing a radio campaign with [KWSS morning show] TMI all week.
Is this your first run with Kickstarter? Yeah, definitely. Random put me onto it. I've seen him be ridiculously successful through Kickstarter; he's funded a whole bunch of projects that way. It's a really cool way to be able to independently handle stuff without having to be on a label or anything.
How has the process been, being a newcomer to the whole Kickstarter thing? If you've never used it before, the way it works is, people make donations and they receive different incentives for the different levels of donations. '
We've got a lot of cool incentives -- pretty much all of the merchandise things that I've had in the past like T-shirts, sacrilegious candles that have my face where saints normally go, and I'll even cook dinner for you. We're also offering the skateboard that I rode in the video for "Holding Home." So there are different levels.
But people seem really eager to help out because it makes them a part of the process. So you really get more of a hands on feel. All of the feedback has been awesome. The average donation has been around $25 as opposed to someone just buying a CD for $5. That's been crucial, because it's helping us put everything together.
So you know your way around the kitchen? Ah, man, I don't want to brag but I'm a little bit of a beast in the kitchen.
Right on, man! Do you have a signature dish? I can cook it all. I've been working in restaurants since I was old enough to work. Right now I work in Pita Jungle, so I've been cooking a lot of mediterranean stuff, obviously, [and] southwestern dishes. But I cook a lot of seafood, that's my shit.
So does the winner get to pick the dish? They can pick whatever they want . . . within reason. Obviously, I can't afford to be cookin' a salmon dinner for an entire family of five. Another cool part of that incentive, though, is we'll play the mix of the record that we have right now while I cook. So they'll get their own little private listening session.
Do you do a lot of cooking at home then? Yeah, definitely. It's a therapeutic thing for me. It's a nice way to cut loose and get my head off of music and working for a little bit and just hang out for an hour and make something delicious.
It's definitely my main hobby. If I'm not making music or at work I'm probably cooking.
What can folks expect from the new project? It's a really unique record. We have a ton of people on it from outside genres. We have Jason Devore from Authority Zero, Kristina Moore from Where Are all the Buffalo, Sean Lee from the VeraGroove, and Danny Torgerson from Captain Squeegee are on it, too. So it's been cool to see people who aren't necessarily familiar with us, but are fans of these other artists, get to know our music.
The These Are the Good Times Kickstarter is scheduled to end Friday, August 23
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