Raul Midon - Synthesis - International Music Network

"What I try to do is take the parts of it that I think have a shot at being commercially viable ...and put those on the record," Midon says. "You cannot make a record — I can't, anyway —thinking about, 'Will this play on the radio?' If you do that, I think you're gonna end up making arecord that you're not going to like. Because, let's face it: Pop radio is pretty bad these days."Midon says the narrow arena in which artists are forced to compete for attention on the airwavessaddens him."There's a sort of conflict," he says. "People want to hear something new and somethingdifferent, but what the sort of values of commercial radio are — it has to sound like the last thingthat was a hit on the radio, which nobody really wants."But he also says it's difficult to tell the difference between what will sell and what won't. Midonsays that the way people listen to music now — for example, putting songs they like into an iPodplaylist — might actually be good for his sales."I hope people will listen to the record and get where I'm coming from, and that ... it's not aboutgenre," Midon says. "I think people in a certain way are getting that now, because people havetheir own musical universe where they are living now with the iPods and so forth. People areliving in their own musical universe, so it's not out of bounds to hear Madonna next to Mozart."Midon says the best way to hear him is to see him live — just him and his guitar.And he hopes that will convince audiences to vote with their wallets for the other Raul Midon.