Forget about March Madness, Junior’s Cave’s music page (Music Now) has its own March Madness with a ton of great music spotlights that we know our readers will enjoy! This next spotlight with Allan Hayslip of BONEDOME certainly adds to the music magic that our publication has become know for these days. Hayslip reveals his passion for music and what he hopes to accomplish with his bid to get his music across to the masses. Here is our online conversation in its entirety for your reading pleasure.

Isaac: It’s an amazing time to be a DIY artist/performer/band/musician. What do you enjoy the most about being an indie performer?

Allan: I'm totally independent to make the music I want to make, including occasionally some music that might have a little trouble finding an audience—there's no pressure to compromise. Of course that kind of independence from mainstream market forces also makes it hard for us to garner any mainstream economic benefits, but so far it's been a reasonable trade-off.

Isaac: If you had an opportunity to sign with a major label, would you sign now knowing you may have to give up some of what you have build up over the years about you in the process?

Allan: Ha, maybe, but they might withdraw their offer after hearing my terms. Most of the traditional major label roles are kind of obsolete. We really don't need them for the production/manufacturing money...those costs have necessarily dropped dramatically and other ways of raising money have supplanted the majors' huge budgets, with the added benefit that artists own their own product now.

And nobody's really buying CD's or physical product (except vinyl, which I would argue is more cleverly used as a marketing product), so the traditional distribution networks seem kind of ever less relevant. But, man, there's nothing quite like a shit-load of money and a clever marketing team to get the word out, and put CD's (or at least the artwork) in front of likely customers.

And if you include meaningful tour support in the marketing budget you really have a chance to reach some people in ways that we just can't do when we stick our stuff in storage and hop in the van for 6 weeks of dusty floor-beds, cheap tacos, and shoving small change in the fuel tank.

As great as it is, the democratized noise-floor of the modern all-access Internet music world is rackety, and sometimes it seems like the only way to get yourself heard above the cacophony is with a louder, clearer message targeted at the people who are most prone to liking it, and the majors still may have some use in for that.

Isaac: I remembered Simon Cowell from American Idol talking about the “it” Factor that makes a musician/band stand out. What do you think is your “it” factor that makes you stand out from others in the music business?

Allan: Intensity and integrity, and a certain bear-ish ironic charm. We lovingly labored over every layer, every note on this record and we thing the intensity and integrity of care that went into it puts the music on par with some of the best stuff we've ever heard, and we think our audiences will intuitively appreciate that when they're exposed to it.

Isaac: Why should music fans listen to your music? Describe what they are going to get when they listen to Bonedome?

Allan: One reviewer said that Thinktankubator "rewards the listener with every successive listen", and that's exactly what we were trying to make happen. At first blush, we want the songs to have a quirky hook—something that seems immediately familiar but different, maybe even a little weird.

After that, we think they'll discover that we've drawn on sonic influences that they recognize from every decade and many genres, without concerning ourselves at all with wearing "cool" influences on our sleeves, and this makes the individual discovery of those influences that much more genuine and meaningful for us and the listeners.

People have discovered, in fact, influences that we didn't even recognize when we were making the recordings.

Finally, we think people will find some truths in the lyrics. Almost all my lyrics are about relationships, and almost all relationships evolve or end; we've found that, no matter how dark or how funny, these things do resonate with people, and with any luck we're saying something they may have already been thinking, but hadn't yet found an expression for.

Isaac: Briefly describe your humble beginnings that led you to where you are at musically now.

Allan: My friends and I started a cover band in 7th grade—I chose bass because my best friend already played guitar, and I didn't want to compete with him. We had the requisite rock 'n' roll fantasies of sex, drugs and fame even if we didn't quite know yet what we'd do with any of those things.

We also had parallel (and slightly contradictory) notions of punk-rockness, but we didn't let that slow us down. After a few years and a few school dances, we kinda lost interest in playing covers—it obviously wasn’t the path to stardom—and started writing our own stuff.

We persisted with that band throughout high-school, eventually playing our first "real" club gigs, through college when we were on breaks, and for a couple of years after that. When that band finally broke up, our youthful fantasies never fulfilled, I went on to play bass in a series of bands, including one or two that had some major-label interest/activity, writing songs (some of which are on Thinktankubator) all along.

Really since the end of that teenage dream, each new project has represented a sort of re-reconciliation of expectations in the context of reality, a real ongoing lesson. One of the great things about the lesson is that all of it led up to making a record that we're really proud of, and I expect the next one will be even better.

Isaac: You have some strong iconic influences. Of these influences, which artist/band do you relate to the most and why?

Allan: Many of my musical influences are icons in their respective genres, but I confess it would be a little ridiculous and vain to pretend that I relate to them. I don't personally know David Bowie or Peter Murphy or John Lennon or Paul Weller or Ray Davies or Jack White or Angus Young or Buddy Holly, and I don't know if I could relate to them individually or not, despite how much I obviously connect with their music.

I really relate to more to my friends and former band-leaders who have literally been in the same place as me, and managed to do so much that I respect and admire. I played with Kim Pendleton Bonner (of The Backsliders) and Paul Quigg in Vibrolux, with Bill Longhorse in Sixty-Six, with Johnathan Lacey in Prince Jellyfish, with Barry Kooda in his Combo, with Trey Johson in S.P.A.M, and many other musical visionaries. They've all exert the strongest influences on me—some of Bonedome's songs were written as if they were part of the repertoire of those bands, years after they no longer even exist.

Isaac: Do you feel that Indie music gets the respect it deserves? Why or why not?

Allan: Sure. But I'm not sure what metric we'd use for "respect." The mainstream marketplace shows it's "respect" for things by co-opting it, which usually kills the independent spirit that made it great in the first place—might not want too much of that kind of respect. Local and national "indie" communities show their respect (or lack thereof) by making it exclusive and/or elite, and in doing so they run the risk again of marginalizing some otherwise great stuff that may not seem as fashionable—ironically this is a lot like a small version of the mainstream music marketplace.

The best place to find respect for independent music is within the participants themselves - the artists, the venues, the fans, and things like college radio. If all those participants can respect themselves and their own choices then they can make/leave room for an inclusive and mutually supportive scene, without ever becoming "indie fundamentalists".