Chris Knudson

What is the most useful piece of career advice you got as a student, and who gave it to you?

While I was living in New York in the late-90s, I had an introduction to a prominent music supervisor via an up-an coming film director Wes Anderson I had grown up with. I had already co-scored the soundtrack to "El Mariachi" while still at student at the University of Texas in Austin a few years prior. That was a lucky break I could not have predicted. A college friend of mine at the time was dating the sister of Robert Rodriguez' girlfriend (and later his wife and partner). Robert asked my friend Eric to record some music in his little apartment studio for this Spanish-language movie he had shot in a Mexican border town. Since I had been working on demos at Eric's house, and he had a Tuscan 8-track and an old classic Mac with a sequencing program and some synths... more than I had at the time, he asked me to work on some of the music for Robert. Little did I know a year or so later I would be taking my parents to the local cinema in Houston to watch a movie with my name in lights! And a Spanish-lan gauge movie with subtitles at that. After graduating with a BA from the University of Texas, fast forward a few years, and I had moved to New York from Austin to join a new band Mind Over Matter that I had started as a songwriting project with my friend Barry, whom I had answered an ad in the Village Voice back in the Fall or 1988. After that band dissolved around 1995, I did open mics around lower Manhattan and got a few regular gigs, eventually starting my Val Holler Band project. As I mentioned previously, I met with a music supervisor at his office and gave him a copy of my self-released record. I wanted to see what we could do together, or I guess if there would be any interest in signing me to the label he was affiliated with at the time. "You've got to work a little bit harder." I don't remember the details exactly or suggestions on how to do that, connection or referrals. Boy did that sting! I even wrote and recorded a little song that I never released that was inspired by those words. "You've got to work a little bit harder." It's been roughly 20 years since that conversation, and I've released a number or records on my own since then, even landing one of my songs "Wheels" in HBO's True Blood. Now more than ever, you've got to work harder than anyone else to get your music noticed, and then hopefully make a few dollars along the way.