To that end, what do you need to see happen to be able to deem Pono a success?
In Waging Heavy Peace, you spoke often about how energizing the process
of writing that book was for you, and when you finished the memoir you
I just want Pono to survive. The longer it lives, the bigger it’ll get. It’s growing
immediately wrote another one, Special Deluxe. Do you ever feel artistically
slowly. We’re like the Tesla of music. There’s no advertising, we’re just saying,
depleted, or is the cup always full?
“this is good stuff, this is the way it was made.” Pono only sells the original music
with nothing done to it. We have no intellectual property, just quality. And I
It’s a river. It’s not captured in any container. I’m just going with it. I’m seven-
believe in it.
eighths [finished with] my third book now, which is science fiction. That’s a
whole other world for me, I’ve never done that before. My dad did it—not sci-fi,
Did it bring you joy to witness a crowd listening to your music on a Pono
but my dad wrote novels. This is my first real novel. There are no rules with that.
system at the recent Natural History Museum event in LA?
With all of these different projects, how much do you plan?
Yeah, whether they knew they were listening to [Pono] or not. That’s the only
way you can hear EARTH in its entirety; it won’t fit on anything else. CDs, it’s two
I don’t.
[discs]; vinyl, it’s six sides.
If you have a project outlined, you don’t plan?
And was that by design or circumstance?
I don’t have a project outline. Day to day, I have a