 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. If you didn't hear in our opening intro, we had some sounds of the city and having a different interview than our usual technology talk here. Have a welcome to the program. Robert Mercurio, who's the basis for the band Galactic. New Orleans based, was part of one of the performers here last night. We were right over at Mardi Gras World next door. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, so for those of us that aren't at this show, New Orleans is a special city. Great music, great food, some place I like to come. Not too often though, because I don't get enough sleep and I eat too much, but. Try living here. This is your hometown, so give us a little plug. Yeah, I mean, it's the greatest town in the world. I feel like and we've toured all over the world and we were gone a lot, so probably about half the year I'm gone and it's just an awesome city to come back to. It's small enough, where I feel comfortable and clean enough, but there's obviously enough culture to keep us entertained, you know. All right, and tell us about your band. So Galactic's been over 20 years. Yeah, Galactic's a band that we started here in New Orleans in college in like 94. So we've been a band for 24 years, been touring for about 22 years. Never really have taken much of a break, which I would love, but no, we just work in all the time and we've been like original members since the beginning and just happy to have New Orleans be our home and but we bring the sound all over the world. Well, the connection I'd make here, if you talk to like IT folks, it's like, yeah, we'd all like a break. Yeah, right. There's always more stuff, there's the next thing. How do you keep inspired, how do you the next creativity and keep going? Well, I will say like the city in general is inspiring. You know, I mean, there's so many great musicians, there's so many great clubs, there's always new music coming out of the city and just going out on any old day of the week can be inspiring in that kind of way. I also get a lot of inspiration I do, I'm a producer, so I produce other bands outside of Galactic and that's inspiring as well. You know, diving into a project with a band, really diving into the songs, figuring out their workflow, figuring out their process can be inspiring and it's something I can take back to my band. So after 24 years, producing, now that you get into producing, what surprises you? Like when you get to a band and you're like, oh wow, that's amazing. That's a good question. I mean, the song is always what it comes down to, you know, and like what really surprises me is when I meet like an amazing songwriter that still, no matter what, I'm just like, how do you do that? You know, because I don't claim to be like the best songwriter and when you do and you're in the presence of somebody and you're working with somebody like that, it's pretty special. I mean, it's a real talent and it's a real gift outside of just being a good musician. Having that craft is like next level. So after 24 years, you, ton of experience, how do you nurture raw experience when you see it? Or raw talent? I mean, advice, giving them maybe perspective on stuff. Inspiration and confidence, you know, to give to an artist, a young artist, to kind of keep them going and keep them inspired. It's a good question. It's a hard thing to answer. I guess I just kind of give them some sort of- There's no science to it. No, yeah, there is, yeah, exactly. There's no science to it. And if anything, I see myself as, with a younger artist as in somewhat like a fatherly figure, you know, or something like that, like, you know, somebody you can get solid advice from when I work with a young band. Sometimes I feel like now that I am in my 40s and sometimes the bands are in their 20s, I'm like, I could be their father or so, you know. Robert, you've toured the world. You're playing live in front of audiences all the time. Have to imagine there's things that go wrong. How do you deal with this? Any good stories for us? Good question. God, you guys are just full of them. Yeah, things go wrong. You learn to roll with the punches. That's part of being a pro. Stuff will happen. You will get sick on stage sometimes. That's a story. You got to improvise. You got to roll with it. And, you know, it's not the kind of job that you can call in sick. So sometimes you're up there and you're not feeling that great. And sometimes you have to maybe go throw up in the middle of a song or something like that. It happens if you have a flu or something and you just kind of learn to roll with it. Yeah, I think Anthony Bourdain probably has some more stories about things like that too. Yeah, yeah, I think he knows. But he might be able to take an off day here or there. I don't know. So after 24 years, how does the band collectively stay creative? I mean, that's a long time together. It is. It's a long time together. We are a band that's known to collaborate a lot with other artists, starting about 12 or maybe even longer. We started making albums with different guest vocalists and guest instrumentalists and stuff like that. So we're kind of a unique band in that we don't really have a permanent singer. And usually a band is all about their singer. And that's the band pretty much. Without Steve Tyler of Aerosmith, they wouldn't be Aerosmith. Isn't many examples like that. But with Galactic, we've gone through a bunch of different lead singers, guest vocalists. And we collaborate and song write with different people all the time. So we've been fortunate to work with some of the New Orleans greats before he passed Alan Toussaint, who's one of the greatest New Orleans song writers. We've worked with Irma Thomas. We've worked with a bunch of rappers. We've worked with Corey Glover from Living Color toured with us for three or four years. We've toured with Cyril Neville. Currently we're working with this artist Erica Falls and she's been touring us with us for a couple of years. So just kind of like, that's definitely been a recipe for keeping the band fresh and creative. Robert, last thing, I was just curious with, the impact of technology on what you're doing, how you reach your audiences, engage. There's some, I mean, technology has changed the way that we record. It's changed the way that we've been able to collaborate. We can write a song with somebody that lives in San Francisco. Like right before I got up for this interview I was showing the phone with this rapper that I'm producing his album and we're not going to be in the same room ever throughout making this whole album, which is kind of crazy. But through the internet and through computers and the cloud and all that, it's made it possible to be able to do stuff like that. We also, you know, touring, we toured, we started touring in 96, and that was before cell phones were popular as before smartphones, you know, as before everybody had a personal computer. So that has been able to change the way that we can communicate and keep in touch. It's kind of crazy to think when we first started touring, we had to use pay phones and put a bunch of boards in to call home and it was a lot harder to wrangle everybody up at the end of the night and stuff like that. Now you can just send out a group text and it's time to go or, you know, we have our whole tour book on our phone. It's just, that's something I tell young artists to and they just start like, how did you ever do it? You didn't have GPS? How did you get to use a map and, you know? We had these paper things we hung up. Yeah, it was totally a whole different experience of what people have now and it's gotten and made things a lot easier to do what we do. Great, so people want to find out more GalacticFunk.com? Yeah, GalacticFunk.com and we're doing a huge national tour in August and September and hopefully we see somebody out at the shows. Robert Mercurio with Galactic, thanks so much for joining us. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Getting back towards the end of two days of live coverage here from Nutanix.NEXT 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE.