I watched Mad Men for I don’t know how long before I found out that you did the theme music. Are you appreciated for that by folks that don’t care about your other music?

I’m not getting people that come to shows, hear that song and then leave. I have a hard time believing that there’re people out there who heard that theme, went and checked out a record and were like, ‘All this other shit sucks.’ It’s possible, though.

Have you done other commercial work?

I’ve done a few different things. I did a video game back in 2006. A bit of stuff for ads, but not a ton. One that I’d love to tackle, though, is the score to a movie.

I lived in Oakland for a few months last summer and while I was driving around there was an ad on the radio with an instrumental from the Soul Position disc. Had you licensed that to somebody or did you get robbed?

It was for an ad? Do you remember what ad it was?

It was a local Oakland business of some sort, I don’t recall.

Definitely not licensed. This is the second that this has come up in the last couple months. There’s some company that’s running an ad with “Ghostwriter” and they didn’t license it either.

It sucks. I reached out to this company and tried to come to an amicable solution, but they just blew me off. I might have to resort to threatening them with a lawsuit. But I don’t want to do that. I want to be able to approach them mano y mano and figure something out. License for a products trade, you know? And we’ll call it even. But they blew me off. So, unfortunately, I’m going to have to address it.

I was going to ask you about criticism and commentary that you’ve encountered on the internet, but in talking about legality, have you had trouble with your music being pirated?

Am I gonna sue some kid for downloading mp3s?

Or get the site shut down.

That stuff’s laughable. There’s no point. I don’t even bother. I’ve never been the kind of person to do that. I’ve deleted links to my albums and I don’t feel bad about that. I would never go after somebody or chastise them, though. However, I did used to get angry about it, but it’s just par for the course.

Young kids these days don’t even understand the morality behind it. When we posted the first video for The Colossus, somebody commented on it with a link for the album to download. He did take it down, but this is very indicative of kids today – he took it down immediately and was very apologetic. But his response was, ‘One man, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you didn’t want that. I was just trying to share the record, because I really love the record and I want people to hear it.’ They’ve just grown up in a culture where everyone gets music for free.