Talking Music and Tech with Web Developer Travis Morrison — Part 1 of 2
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**Jenn Schiffer: **Hi, I’m Jenn Schiffer. I’m the community engineer of Glitch.com, the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. And today, I am talking to a friend of mine, Travis Morrison, who is a web developer and a musician. Thanks for coming here.
**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, yeah.
**Jenn Schiffer: **So what are you doing these days?
**Travis Morrison: **Well, I make applications for managing lead distribution for a marketing company in the Midwest called Element Three, I chase around a toddler, and I’m writing an album.
**Jenn Schiffer: **When did you get into tech?
**Travis Morrison: **Do you really wanna hear the story?
**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, I do.
**Travis Morrison: **Okay. So in 1983, I was 10 years old. Now I’m actually starting to doubt the numbers…sometime in the mid ‘80s. I was a tweener; let’s put it that way. And I was reading magazine. I don’t know why — I was 11 years old and Washingtonian magazine is one of those corny lifestyle magazines like Bostonian. There’s always one.
**Jenn Schiffer: **That show up on the hotel benches and stuff?
**Travis Morrison: **Inside Dallas, yeah. And there was an article about bulletin board systems which talked about these strange worlds. I don’t know why this was in this magazine about Washington — I guess it was accounting for the Washington ecosystem bulletin boards where people could dial up with their computer, connect it to a phone and look at a system on a screen and write messages to other people and get files, and some of the files were games. And I was like, “that sounds incredible!”
So I went in hard on my parents to buy a computer. There was the Atari 400, the Atari 800, the Commodore 64, and then a couple of others I was just like…no. I didn’t wanna do Texas Instruments because it was membrane keyboards, and they always still hurt my fingers. Membrane. I hate membrane. Awful, awful. So I wanted the Commodore 64. It’s either the 64 or the Atari, because I like full — [Travis taps on the table mimicking typing on a keyboard] — Atari 800 or Commodore 64.
I got the Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem and I immediately called the one bulletin board that that article identified as the most degenerate — like a glue sniffing teenagers board — which was called Spectrum. Within 15 minutes, I was like — [Travis mimics the connection sound of a modem connecting via telephone]— and I signed in as “The Aquatic”, because I was on swim teams. I was the world’s worst swimmer, but I was really into being on swim teams. And immediately, a life was started. I started talking to people like me; I saw my first flaming immediately. Like, why are they so angry and so off-topic? What is this?
**Jenn Schiffer: **So we’ve been doing that since the ’80s. That’s not a new thing.
**Travis Morrison: **Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m sure that pre-dates the ’80s. And recently, actually, there are now websites where people log old bulletin board systems by phone number, area code, and username. I don’t know if reunions are happening or stuff like that, but I have dug around on a few of those things to look for some of my favorite hangouts. I haven’t seen Spectrum. I don’t know what happened to those folks. But of course, a lot of them are only on at night, or you would call and you’d be like, “Hello?” You know? And it’d be like, “Mom?” Like, “Hi he’s not…he’s grounded. He’s not on anymore. Can you hear me? Are you there?” But that was my start. I would say that was my start with tech.
**Jenn Schiffer: **You wrote one of the greatest indie rock albums of the ’90s. I think I’m not the only person that would say that.
**Travis Morrison: **Oh, okay, if you’re gonna say the ’90s, alright. Top 50 of the ’90s, I thought we were gonna go — [Travis waves his hand in a slow, upward arc]
**Jenn Schiffer: **But since you were into technology really early, did technology have any effect on your music and writing around that time? Because we think now a lot about technology in music today, where GarageBand — and I mentioned Fruity Loops in another interview, and I guess that was years ago, not really now — but what kind of technology was being used back then for music?
**Travis Morrison: **Well, I think one of the more forward aspects of The Dismemberment Plan was…we had a sampler, and we got a lot of mileage out of the sampler. That came from loving hip-hop, which was both the most lyrically pertinent and sonically fresh music of that time. But there were also a couple of bands on the periphery of indie rock that were messing around with using hip-hop technology and hip-hop ideas in a punk context. There was a band, pretty obscure, called Moonshake, who were guitar, bass, drums, and sampler. They were a huge influence on us. The band Soul Coughing was like live hip-hop; it was much less of a band that wanted to create a punk rock din with samples. We didn’t just think it up; there were bands we saw who did it. We were like, “Hmm, yes, yes.” Moonshake was a loud as hell hard punk band that had samples and crazy hip-hop record noises floating through the soundscape. And I would say they were crucial for us in that regard.
But sampling…it wasn’t quite yet home recording. We were experimenting with it at the end, and it was kinda awful. It didn’t really work yet. by Beck was a famous “all in digital at home — wow!” And it probably was the most gruesome process; it probably crashed constantly. Great album though. Great album. And an interesting soundscape. It has a thumbprint that’s very interesting. It doesn’t really seem like sampling. Sampling kinda got shot in the head by the music industry. The golden moment of Public Enemy, * — *where you created soundscapes out of samples, and De La Soul got kinda crushed by the legalities of songwriting.
**Jenn Schiffer: **I guess it’s just the litigiousness of it, makes not only the artists be afraid to do it, but then if they do do it, it makes the people who are paying for them to make their record sort of hold back from doing that stuff.
**Travis Morrison: **I mean, to be fair…you’re Hall or Oates and you’re like, “Hi, De La Soul? Listen, I love your track, but that’s my song. And a Steely Dan song.” I mean, I’m not a tool…I get it. I see both sides. But I don’t know if I feel like the heavy samples art form thing got shunted to some very strange extralegal zones like what Girl Talk does. It prevented it from becoming lasting major pop music. People started to do things like what Dre did, where they were like “Oh, you won’t let me use it? I’ll just write something really similar or hire a really good musician to write something that gets me the same — ”
**Jenn Schiffer: **Or like…Weird Al it.
**Travis Morrison: **He’s really good.
**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, he’s so good. I think a lot about someone who also does satire and parodies and also open source. With open source software — and a lot of the stuff on Glitch is open source — we encourage people to remix already existing apps, and we have a functionality where you can add a license to your code that gives permission to people to copy stuff over. I know that there are projects that musicians have created — I think Moby has started one — where you can upload your own music and license it so that anybody can use it for free, attributed or not, like in movies and stuff like that. I’m wondering if as more musicians are becoming or remaining independent…like Chance [the Rapper] for example having more control over what is done with [his] music. I would like to see more of a open source mentality. Like, you can sample this with attribution or asking for permission, and you can bypass a lot of —
**Travis Morrison: **Right. Or less control, right?
**Jenn Schiffer: **Less control, yeah. When you’re not independent, you have some other person…a rando…well, a manager’s not really a rando, but like Dead or Alive had become a rando, and they own your stuff. I think a lot about that in terms of software ownership. When I make something at work here at Fog Creek, if down the line someone makes something out of it, can Fog Creek go after it? There’s a lot of talk with lawyers about stuff like that in all software companies.
I know I had a friend who worked at one of the really big, major companies of the top three who had made something open source but forgot to list it when they joined that company, and then they remembered it, and because they didn’t list it when they joined, if they release it to the world the company actually owns it. So they’re not able to release it. So we have our own weird, intricate ownership things.
**Travis Morrison: **But aren’t stars in this day and age afraid of the power of street justice? Like, “No one will ever wanna work for you again because I will make you sound like Satan.”
**Jenn Schiffer: **I don’t think that people of power in tech have to answer to accountability quite yet. We’re only just starting to see that.
**Travis Morrison: **They have no fear, and no laws.
**Jenn Schiffer: **Right, right. We’re only just starting to see that with companies like Uber.
**Travis Morrison: **Like last week.
**Jenn Schiffer: **And all the examples are companies like Uber. Just company Uber. Because what other companies have to deal with that?
**Travis Morrison: **That’s true. Okay, yeah, you’re right. The idea that all of a sudden all the baddies are just getting whacked left and right…it’s not true.
**Jenn Schiffer: **How did you end up at Element Three?
**Travis Morrison: **I was doing freelance work, and I met them over the wire on a Laravel-focused job market or bulletin board.
**Jenn Schiffer: **So you write PHP?
**Travis Morrison: **I do. I’m mostly in PHP.
**Jenn Schiffer: **I also used to write a lot of PHP.
**Travis Morrison: **I, too!
**Jenn Schiffer: **“I, too. Been there.”
**Travis Morrison: “**I, too, used to do that.”
**Jenn Schiffer: **Well actually, Glitch; we focus mostly on Node and JavaScript, but we do have some fun troll examples. It’s a Docker container, so essentially you can run anything on it — so I’ve written PHP on Glitch.
**Travis Morrison: **Well, ain’t you something.
**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, to troll Anil I can try to get Movable Type on there.
**Travis Morrison: **Let’s troll him. Just get a name, just troll the hell out of him.
**Jenn Schiffer: **So you found out about them over the Laravel board.
**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, yeah. I was doing some contract work for them, and after a while I was like, why don’t we make it official?
**Jenn Schiffer: **Facebook official?
**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, we made it Facebook official. Worked there for about eight months…and they’re great. It’s cool to work with a company that is…you’re inside New York, I’m inside New York, and I’ve actually found it very gratifying to work with a company that’s working in a space that isn’t mostly manufacturing and Midwest marketing that is outside of the New York zone. A professional culture that’s very unlike New York professional cultures, which has its own qualities. Yeah, it’s really been great. I go out to Indianapolis a couple times a year, which is a really cool city. I think that — you didn’t say this was “predictions with Travis” time — but we’re moving to that part of the show.
**Jenn Schiffer: **Welcome to Predictions with Travis.
**Travis Morrison: **I think we’re going to start seeing the great dispersal of tech from a couple of major American hubs to a whole bunch of regional communities.
**Jenn Schiffer: **And those communities are waiting for it. I know Nashville is thirsty for tech people.
**Travis Morrison: **Nashville’s a little too expensive for me now, but I love that town. If I could have lived in Nashville? I’m like wow. Why are you doing this? That’d be incredible.
**Jenn Schiffer: **It’s interesting. A lot of cities are hoping for more tech people to move there, and they’re all literally offering to change their name so Amazon builds their second headquarters there, and giving away taxpayer money and whatever, so they’re extremely thirsty for large tech companies and just the community in general.
**Travis Morrison: **And this gets back to my original point. How much of the tech world is gonna be like, “I wanna have a mid-sized town with a mellow commute and walks to my children’s school, and I don’t need 17 good coffee places. I need one good coffee place, and I want some tech jobs.”
**Jenn Schiffer: **And “I want a tech job, and I want to be in tech, but I don’t want to be in a neighborhood of just tech jobs, so it has to be affordable housing so people of different industries can all live together,” because that’s what a community generally is.
**Travis Morrison: **But how many of our people want to live in the town version of the show ? What if it’s more than we think?
**Jenn Schiffer: **The issue with accountability in tech is that a lot of people are complacent with where tech is going.
**Travis Morrison: **Like an infantilization?
**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, and I think as students they start to think maybe the housing crisis in San Francisco is bad. Elon Musk puts a car with a dummy inside of it with a bunch of Douglas Adams references towards the moon, and everyone’s like, “Oh, actually, tech is good.”