(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana it's the Cube. Covering .NEXT conference 2018. Brought to you by Newtanix. >> Welcome back to the cube. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. If you didn't hear, in our opening into we had some sounds of the city, and have a different interview than our usual technology talk here. Happy to welcome to the program Robert Mercurio, who's the bassist for the band Galactic. New Orleans based. Was one of the performers here last night. We we're right over at Mari Gras World next door. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so for those of us that aren't at this show, New Orleans is a special city. Great music. Great food. Some place I like to come. Not too often though, because I don't get enough sleep, and I eat too much. (laughter) >> Robert: Try living here. >> This is your hometown, so give us a little plug. >> Yeah, I mean it's the greatest town in the world, I feel like, and we've toured all over the world. And, we're gone a lot. So, probably about half the year I'm gone, and it's just an awesome city to come back to. It's small enough where I feel comfortable, and clean enough, but there's obviously enough culture to keep us entertained, you know. >> Alright, and tell us about your band. Galactic been over 20 years. >> Galactic's a band that we started here in New Orleans, in college, in like '94. So, we've been a band for 24 years. Been touring for about 22 years. Never really have taken much of a break. Which I would love, but no. We're just working all the time, and we've been original members since the beginning. And, just happy to have New Orleans be our home, but we bring the sound all over the world. >> It's interesting. The connection I'd make here. If you talk to like IT folks, it's like, yeah we'd all like a break. >> Robert: Yeah right. >> There's always more stuff. There's the next thing. How do you keep inspired? What, you know. How do you, the next creativity, and keep going? >> Well I will say that the city in general is inspiring. You know I mean, there's so many great musicians. There's so many great clubs. There's always new music coming out of the city, and just going out on any old day of the week can be inspiring in that kind of way. I also get a lot of inspiration, I do, I'm a producer. So, I produce other bands outside of Galactic. And, that's inspiring as well. You know, diving into a project with a band. Really diving into the songs. Figuring out their workflow. Figuring out their process can be inspiring. It's something I can take back to my band. >> So after 24 years, producing, now that you've gotten into producing. What surprises you? Like when you get to a band, and you're like, "Oh wow!" "That's amazing." >> That's a good question. I mean. It. Song. The song is what it always comes down to, you know. And like. What really surprises me is when I meet like an amazing songwriter. That still, no matter what, I'm just like, "How do you do that?" You know, because, I don't claim to be the best songwriter. And, when you do, or you're in the presence of somebody, and you're working with somebody like that it's pretty special. I mean, it's a real talent, and it's a real gift outside of just being a good musician. Having that craft is next level. >> So after 24 years, ton of experience. How do you nurture raw experience when you see it? Or raw talent? >> You know, I mean advice. Giving 'em maybe perspective on stuff. Inspiration and confidence, you know, to give to an artist, a young artist to kind of keep them going, and keep them inspired. It's a good question. It's a hard thing to answer. I guess I just kind of, >> Interviewer: There's no science to it? >> No yeah exactly. There's no science to it, and if anything I see my self with a younger artist, in somewhat like a fatherly figure, you know or something like that. Like somebody you can get solid advice from. When I work with a young band, sometime I feel like, now that I am in my 40's, and sometime the bands are in their 20s, I'm like I could be their father, so you know. >> Alright, so Robert, you've toured the world. >> Yeah. >> You're playing live in front of audiences all the time. Have to imagine there's things that go wrong. How do you deal with this? Any good stories for us? >> Good question. God, you guys are just full of them. (laughter) Yeah, things go wrong. You learn to roll with the punches. That's part of being a pro. Stuff, will happen. You will get sick on stage sometimes. >> Interviewer: THat's a story. >> You got to improvise. (laughter) You got to roll with it, and you know, it's not the kind of job that you can call in sick. So, sometimes you're up there, and you're not feeling that great. And, sometimes you have to maybe go throw up in the middle of a song or something like that. It happens if you have the flu or something, and you just kind of learn to roll with it. >> I think Anthony Bourdain probably has some more stories about things like that too. >> Yeah, yeah I think. (laughter) Who knows, but he might be able to take an off day here or there, I don't know. >> So after 24 years, >> Yes. >> How does the band collectively stay creative. I mean that's a long time together. >> It is. It's a long time together. We are a band that's known to collaborate a lot with other artists. Starting about 12, or maybe even longer, we started making albums with different guest vocalists. And, I guess instrumentalists, and stuff like that. So we're kind of unique band in that we don't really have a permanent singer. And, usually a band is all about their singer. And that's the band pretty much. Without Steve Tyler of Aerosmith, they wouldn't be Aerosmith, you know. Many examples like that. But with Galactic, we've gone through a bunch of different lead singers, guest vocalists, and we collaborate and song write with different people all the time. So, we've been fortunate to work with some of the New Orleans greats. Before he passed, Alan Toussaint, who's one of the greatest New Orleans song writers. We've worked with Irma Thomas. We've worked with a bunch of rappers. We've worked with, Corey Glover from Living Colour toured with us for 3 or 4 years. We've toured with Cyril Neville. Currently we're working with this artist Erica Falls, and she's been touring with us for a couple of years, so. Just kind of like. That's definitely been a recipe for keeping the band fresh and creative. >> Robert last thing. I'm just curious, with the impact of technology on what you're doing. How you reach your audiences. You know engage. >> Technology has change the way that we record. It's changed the way that we've been able to collaborate. We can write a song with somebody that lives in San Francisco. Like right before I got up for this interview, I was on the phone with this rapper that I'm producing his album. And we're not going to be in the same room ever, throughout making this whole album. Which is kind of crazy. But, through the internet, and through computers, and you know the cloud and all that, it's made it possible to be able to do stuff like that. We also, you know touring, we toured, We started touring in '96, and that was before cell phones were popular. It was before smartphones, you know. It was before everybody had a personal computer. So, that has been able to change the way that we can communicate, and keep in touch. It's kind of crazy to think when we first started touring we had to use payphones, and put a bunch of quarters in to call home, and it was a lot harder, you know to wrangle everybody up at the end of the night, and stuff like that. Now you can just send out a group text, and it's time to go. Or, you know, we have our whole tour book on our phone. That's something I tell young artist too, and they just are like, "How did you ever do it?" "You didn't have GPS?" "How did you get to the." We had to use a map. (laughter) >> Interviewer: Had these paper things we hung up. >> Yeah it was totally a whole different experience to what people have now. It's gotten, and made things a lot easier to do what we do. >> Great. So, people want to find out more, galacticfunk.com is the website. >> Yeah galacticfunk.com. And, we're doing a huge national tour in August and September, and hopefully we see somebody out at the shows. >> Alright, well, Robert Mercurio with Galactic. Thanks so much for joining us. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Mindeman. Getting back towards the end of two days of live coverage here from Newtanix .NEXT 2018. Thanks for watching the Cube. (light music)