Need To Know: Phil Putnam

After years of building his own strong musical style and an even stronger fan base, out piano-rock songwriter Phil Putnam hit his stride in 2009. His sixth album, Casualties, produced a string of hits. His video for More Than This ran for a record-breaking 19 straight weeks on LOGOs Click List, finishing the year with the number 5 spot on the networks Top 10 Videos of 2009. More recently, his second single, Im No Prize, has been making a splash on the network as well, and may be the song that pulls Putnam onto center stage; the single has just been selected as the theme song for a major network reality series about the other side of gay life. Here, Putnam talks with Out about the long road that led him to music, the new show, and why he thinks his barrier-breaking musical style has found an audience in the queer community. Out: Your path to being a career musician hasnt exactly been a straight line, has it? Phil Putnam: Well, it hasnt been a straight anything.A gaily-forward line, then? Exactly [laughs]. I didnt grow up in a musical family, so I didnt have the background to provide a sense of direction for me, musically. It wasnt difficult, it was just different. I didnt really sing or do anything musical until high school. I mean, I played saxophone, but I never really made it a regular thing. And when I got to high school, I needed friends! I was that fat girly kid in middle school, and I really needed a friend group -- that's what it came down to. So I joined the choir, and my church choir, and that really gave me that sense of community that I needed. It was a big part of my life, and it really helped give me the strength to come out and be who I am. It sounds like an oxymoron, that the church helped me become gay, but, hey! The church really gave me the strength of character. People dont think of the church being capable of original thought, but because I didnt grow up in a religious family, I had to sort everything out for myself. So, it really had a big impact on my life. Is that why after college you became a music minister? Yeah, I was a music minister. Not really a preacher But combining the two aspects? Yeah. It was because I love people more than anything. People and music are my two greatest loves, and Ive always wanted to make a difference -- a contribution to peoples lives. In high school, I was deciding between studying psychology and studying music, and I decided to go with music because the university I went to had a program more oriented towards music ministry, and I could get in the counseling-pastoral-people aspect as well as the musical education, so thats where the two really came into focus for me. And even now, my number 1 motivation is to connect with people. But youre also a writer, and an editor, and a publicist -- I do a lot of things. A creative professional, obviously. With your music career really taking off, do you feel like those outlets are going to take a backseat? Well, yeah. My first focus has always been my music. I think that as Im growing more and more able to make a real living with my music, the rest will fall away, but the tricky thing about music is that none of the jobs that pay you are ones that youre still working at! A lot of its to keep being busy; I cant just sit there and do nothing, its not who I am. Speaking of working, your last album, Casualties, has been out a year and a half. Are you working on a new one? I am. Im in the process of writing it. Its coming slowly, but I meant for Casualties to last two years in the marketplace, so I knew I wasnt going to release anything after it for a while. I really wanted to spend some time on this record, but Im expecting this new album to drop late 2010 or early 2011. The writing decides everything. Right now, I think Im just getting a sense of what Im going to make this next album about, or at least, which parts of my life Im going to be accessing. This last year has just been getting quiet, getting patient, and re-figuring out how I write albums. Youve got a pretty rich biography to draw on. Do you draw from certain periods in your life, or really whats been going on recently? I tend to write an emotional landscape, like a Michael Cunningham novel, so what Im writing now is all about experience, rather than core philosophies. And I think that was what made it a little difficult this year, is that I couldnt really get to what I needed to say. I think its that Ive always been writing about internal growth, and that the biggest changes in my life are nothing but stories, not philosophies. You have a really big gay following, but your music doesnt really have a very stereotypically gay sensibility. It doesnt. I think thats important, though, because gay people arent just one thing. Were not just gay, but also, if were not expressively, actively using words and pronouns that tell the world that were gay, were still gay. So, I wanted to write the whole spectrum of experience. I dont want to be an artist that just writes about quote-unquote gay things, but if Im going to write a love song, something that specifically touches my sexuality, yeah, Im going to use he in it. Just because you include certain pronouns doesnt mean the song cant resonate with everyone. Obviously, being an out gay man has helped shape your voice, but your other experiences, as a music minister, as a person with Tourettes, how have those shaped you as an artist? Well, I think the greatest thing I took away from my time as a music minister was the social aspect. I really do care about people more than anything. My whole time as a music minister was spent helping people. The moral views of the church towards homosexuality were abhorrent to me, but the ability to help people through music was still the biggest thing I took away from that. And now, I have that same desire to serve the gay community, as well. As far as Tourettes goes I learned at a very young age that "nothing to lose" is a very powerful place to be. You need to pay attention to the people you have, and not the people you dont. People will link you with disability, as different, and it gave me the sensibility at a very young age that in the world, everybody always feels a little out of place. I think thats a sensibility that most young gay people have, even those who feel that they are vociferously in place. Well, now that were talking about reaching out to the gay community, you have a pretty big way to do that with this new television series. Whats going on there? "Im No Prize" has been picked as the theme song for a new gay TV series, which is going to run on a major network whose name we cant say yet, and its a big deal, Im not gonna lie! Its gonna run on major networks in the U.S., in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the U.K., and there are seven other countries around the world that are contemplating running it as well. Its a reality series called Guess What!, with a exclamation point, not a question mark, and basically, it looks at the other side of gay life. The non-dance club, non-stereotypical lives of gay people, but also the parts of gay life that probably 95% of the gay and lesbian people I know actually relate to on a daily basis. I mean, I look back on my last year of touring the country, and the people who come to my shows are looking for something that represents how they feel, what their gay life is like. Im really excited about it, I think its going to be a great fit. Each country its being shot in will have people from those locations, but my song will be used in every version of it around the world. Itll premier in the U.S. in September, but promos for it will probably start airing in late March. So its kind of the opposite of more scene-focused shows, like Queer As Folk. I dont know how its gonna come out, but its not being produced to be the opposite. This is more about just opening conversation between the straight population and the gay population, showing the various ways of living a gay life. And how did "Im No Prize" come to be picked for the show? Its a funny story, actually! It sounds like one of those bullshit indie music urban legends. Before I moved to New York last year, I Facebooked pretty much every gay man in the city. If you came up for searches for "NY+Gay+Music" I requested you, so I built up a huge local network before I came here, and one of them was a fashion designer. I went to the Project Runway season 6 finale, the first season on Lifetime, and I posted a bunch of photos from the show. I got a message from a guy who saw them, and he turned out to be a television producer. He produced Big Brother and The Golden Cage, and he became a fan of my music. Over time, he started telling me about Guess What! and when "Im No Prize" came out as a single, he told me that it matched up perfectly with what he was trying to do with the show. Seriously, I posted pictures on Facebook and my song got picked up for this show! Casualties is in stores now. For more information about Putnam, visit his official website here.Send a letter to the editor about this article.