In case you missed Part One, find it here.

As I was looking for photos of Megan and Mason to accompany their interview, I realized something: I had seen them well, well before I actually MET them, at an evening of “Indie Electropop” at the North Star Bar about two years ago. I was really impressed by them, but I was also celebrating a twenty-first birthday (not my own), so I was too drunk to risk embarrassing myself by telling them. That was probably a pretty wise decision. Turns out Mason doesn’t drink. At all. Here’s a fun tidbit that didn’t make it into the full interview, but that was just too good to scrap completely:

Mason: I’ve been “straight-edge” forever, and so I never had that whole college experience of getting drunk and being an idiot.
Megan: He never really defined it as straight-edge, specifically. It wasn’t really a choice to be part of a particular movement. It was just part of a personal choice for him. Not so much for me.
Mason: Honestly, it’s just my personality. I don’t want to cede control of my body and my abilities to any kind of chemical. Alcohol or drugs or, you know…
Megan: You know, so many musicians feel, and it cracks me up, like they play better when they’re high or drunk or whatever. It’s like, no, you sound better to yourself, but… When we are performing, I just can’t drink. I can’t even have a beer. I need to be in the moment, and I can’t hold alcohol. I’m a really cheap date.
Mason: Hell, yeah!

They don’t eat meat, either. Some people might think this combination makes them no fun—I think it’s just an essential part of who they are. Especially when they’re getting psyched over Govinda’s faux chicken.

The rest of Canary's interview, after the jump!

So, your client focus is mostly in the arts?
Mason: Yeah. Our interest is in the arts and performers. On the design side, I do some work with other industries, including a law firm or two, but that’s sort of the odd man out as far as our clients go. They get treated well, I do really good work for them, but if I were to define myself, it definitely wouldn’t be “designer for law firms.” We know and focus on and understand the arts, and that’s why we can really go after those clients and do really well for them.

And you have some clients that are big names in the arts scene here in Philadelphia. How did you make those connections in five years?
Mason: It’s such a vibrant community, and in some ways it’s kind of underserved. We were the right people in the right place at the right time, to get in with the clients that we found.
Megan: It’s a very close-knit community. You see the same names in the playbills a lot. That’s what’s great about Philadelphia: it’s a large city with a small-town feel in a lot of ways. The arts community definitely feels that way. For me, when we first moved here, we were still working with a lot of musicians from other parts of the country, so I didn’t really think of us as being a “local” company, but now I really do, because so much of what we do is really tied to what’s going on in this arts community. I feel like we’ve really invested ourselves in continuing to help that community flourish and have more of a national reputation. Working with clients like the Wilma and the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, whose mission really is to highlight the theatre community for all of the wonderful things it has, means I’m always thinking about, not just “how can we get this story in the newspaper,” but also considering that bigger picture of: “how can we continue to get a broader recognition for the arts community here.” I mean, it’s obviously happening. Philly is getting recognized on the covers of magazines.
Mason: To try to answer the question, though, it happened through plugging into one thing and having that snowball. Megan volunteered as an organizer for LadyFest Philly 2003, and that got, partially due to her efforts, really great notices in CityPaper and lots of other publications around town. She met a lot of amazing people through that experience. Later she performed in, and we did the publicity and web design and all kinds of work, for The Broken Hipsters, which was kind of a phenomenon.
Megan: The Broken Hipsters was sort of this phenomenon of local, mostly indie rockers, doing this crazy musical that involved men playing giant babies, running around in diapers, and I play a photographer, and then there were these other people who played old lady punk rockers.
Mason: I think we can boil this down and say, in a cast of about twenty-three, Megan was the one-and-only straight man in the show. The only one who didn’t have some physical deformity to play up for the guffaws.
Megan: But I did have to sing a song about a tripod.
Mason: Sticking up your butt.
Megan: Yeah. Yeah. “I feel like I have a tripod up my butt” was one of the lines. There was also a lot of profanity. The show actually starts out with the word “fuck” being screamed over and over again. That was an interesting experience. It was a blast. I met people through that and then, actually, I think it was Mark Sand, one of the writers of that show, who mentioned me to the Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe. I think he recommended me to someone. People talk.
Mason: People talk. That’s kind of how everything happens for us.
Megan: Yeah, I mean, we hardly do any advertising. I think our anniversary bash was the first thing we spent any money on, as far as promoting ourselves, in probably a couple years. It grows from that. I just signed on another band in Seattle because one of our first clients was in Seattle and they keep recommending us to their friends. It sounds simple, but the key is to do a good job. I think the reason people keep coming back to us is because we get results for whatever it is that they’re hiring us to do. It’s just so obvious that we’re really invested in what they’re doing. It’s not just “pay me and I’ll do this work.” We just had Cloud Cult in town, which includes nine people on tour with them: there’s the band, and they have painters, and a kid, a two-year-old.
Mason: Yeah, the cellist travels with her husband and a two-year-old boy.
Megan: They slept at our house last week when they were playing in Philly. And that’s a given. If one of our bands is on tour and they need a place, they just stay at our house. I don’t know that there are other types of businesses that would do that, but we love it. We want to know our clients beyond…
Mason: Outside of the indie rock world, that dedication, I think, is unusual.
I think that’s what sets us apart from some of our competition. Without investing money, without becoming an official kind of investor with them, we really put ourselves into what they do to the degree that we can give them a better level of service or product.
Megan: And you know, we are kind of selective. We have more people contact us than we take on as clients. Because, first of all, we are a small company, and we can’t take on everything that comes our way, or else we wouldn’t do a good job for the people we’re working for. If a band or some other type of business or organization contacts us that we don’t believe in, for whatever reason, it doesn’t fit with our mission as a company, or we don’t like the music, we just don’t work with them. Which is kind of unusual, especially in the music industry. A lot of people that I’ve run across are ready to take the money of anybody who will give it to them. At that point, you might as well be working some kind of office day job, where you just don’t care about your work. Why go through it?

Any regrets about people you’ve said “no” to?
Megan: No, I can’t think of anybody.
Mason: No.
Megan: Maybe regrets about people we said yes to! But I’m not going to get into that.
Mason: But even that’s a small, small list.
Megan: We say that all the time. How lucky we are to have good clients.
Mason: We’ve got pretty good judgment for who we should and shouldn’t be working with. We’ve said “no” to projects that would have been very lucrative, but would have, for one reason or another, been very bad for us to get ourselves involved with. We really go for what we think is going to be the best for both our well-being and the company’s profits. So really, no.

And how did you guys become involved with the Colbert Nation?
Mason: Same way. A long history of working with one person who talks to another person. I did a contracting job for a law firm, and somebody who worked there had a relationship with the woman who ran Bard Design, a web design company that was very well-connected with comedians. I did her site and a lot of sites for her, including the Dave Attell and Michael Somerville sites. Not just comedians: I did a professional bowling site for her, too. So she started recommending me, and when the Colbert show was floating around, looking for people to take on the project, they contacted her because she knew a lot of people personally, and she forwarded me the information to submit a bid. I submitted a bid, met with them, made a proposal, did the whole thing, jumped through all the hoops, and it turned out I was the best person for the job.

Have you found that it’s brought you any extra notoriety?
Megan: Well, we did get a Citypaper award [for best Surfing the Zeitgeist], which, to me, I love that. I was involved with LadyFest Philly which won an award in 2003, which was cool, but I’ve been wanting to get Canary specifically mentioned in the Citypaper award issue for like, three years. I’m actually pretty psyched about it.
Mason: Yeah, it’s cool. It’s not something that’s really in our nature, to go self-promoting to that degree. We really put ourselves in second-place behind all of our clients, especially if there’s a press release to go out. It’s usually going to be about our clients.
Megan: Yeah, you know, there are some publicists who, the story is as much about them as it is about anything else. Particularly, I think, the ones who work in more social press circles. That’s just so not what we’re about at all. We didn’t issue a press release saying: “Canary designed the Colbert site.” We probably should have, but we didn’t. I think the more interesting story is actually that we kept it very quiet. We don’t even have a credit on the Colbert site, because, you know, it’s supposed to be a fan site.
Mason: It’s all a big, convoluted, inside joke.
Megan: They actually wanted Mason to design it in a certain style that wouldn’t necessarily be what he would choose to do if he were designing something really beautiful. So it’s funny. It looks a little unprofessional in some ways, but it’s supposed to. What happened is that people started speculating about the site. They put a message board up, which the old site didn’t have, and things went crazy right away. We had to get a dedicated server just for the message board.
Mason: Yeah, we had to do a lot of technical things. The traffic jumped from so many hits a day, which was really quite reasonable, to, as soon as we launched the message board, it was quadrupling and quintupling and just piling and piling upon itself to a point where we were having performance issues. We had to take it down, move it to a new server, and do all kinds of stuff that wouldn’t have been necessary before. The community for that show, that personality, is just huge right now.
Megan: And very interactive. There had started to be all this speculation about who “Avery” was. Avery writes for the site. And who designed the site. Someone actually managed to hack into the site one day. And if you know anything about Colbert, you know that for whatever reason, he has something against bears. So there was this big thing when you went there that said something about bears.
Mason: They hijacked the homepage. When you went to ColbertNation.com, what came up was a big bear, taking over the homepage. It was up for a couple of hours because, you know, I wasn’t at my computer to take it down. I get back to my computer, I take it down, it’s been down forever. It hasn’t come back. The whole thing lasted about four hours. For the next two weeks, the message boards are bubbling with: “Who did it? Let’s get them!”
Megan: They actually started their own message board to find out who hacked the site. And so they see Mason has something that says, like “CanaryMason” as a username in the message boards.
Mason: It was an admin name. And I’ve never posted. I don’t really want to be part of that community; I feel like it’s outside my role to be part of that community. So, I don’t post. And so they thought it was a red flag.
Megan: That he had done it.
Mason: They thought, “because there’s this admin, who doesn’t post, he’s probably the one who did it.” And they worked out all these weird reasons: “because it would drive traffic to his site and it would make him money from his advertisers.” I have no advertisers on my site. I don’t know what the hell they were thinking!
Megan: They started threatening to mess with our site, which had just re-launched, to go along with our anniversary bash. We actually probably lost a few hours of work that week because we kept checking on these message boards to make sure that nobody was going to do anything really stupid. Of course, it all died down. It’s all a joke, really, but people get very involved in this.
Mason: I don’t think we were dealing with any Fulbright Scholars or anything, because they never figured out what my name was.
Megan: Even though they actually found our website!
Mason: My username was CanaryMason, and they found my site, which has my name in it, but they never quite put it together, that CanaryMason was Mason Wendell, and that I design other sites that really have nothing to do with Colbert. They never worked out the whole story. So we probably weren’t in much danger.
Megan: I think there’s that confusion, not just with Colbert, but with other sites too… Mason just designed Phawker.com, which is the new blog that everybody’s talking about, and there have been those blog wars between Phawker and Philebrity. People do ask how connected we are to these sites and we say: “Well, we’re hired to design the site. The look and the functionality of the site.” And there’s a lot that goes into web design that people don’t even think about, like how it functions on the back end for the user and how they update it and all those things. But we don’t have anything to do with the content of the site. Once we turn it over to a client, the content is up to them. And I think that does tend to get confused once in a while. People think that we do have some sort of partnership with the client in terms of what happens once the site’s up, and usually that’s not the case.
Mason: We have ongoing relationships. I’ve built new features for Colbert as they need something. The whole [green screen] Star Wars thing, did you see that? I had to build a system to let them upload and manage and all that. It’s such a goof, you know? It’s funny that I have to spend time thinking seriously about how they’re going to upload fake Star Wars videos and do it securely. I have to make sure no one’s going to hack the system, and try to keep them from putting up porn and other weird and awful things.

Did you do the Wikiality site, too?
Mason: That’s a total fan creation. To my knowledge, at least, that has nothing to do with the show. We didn’t build it.
Megan: But [The Colbert Nation] has certainly been a fun project for us to work on. I guess it’s bumped up our profile a bit for the company, which is good. We’re not trying to exploit it at all, but it’s still good to get the extra attention. It’s certainly good to put on our own site.
Mason: We try to exploit it to that extent. But, it’s not all we are, and I think it would be unwise to jettison all of the other things we do and say: “Okay, now we’re the Colbert Nation people.”
Megan: I don’t think our other clients would like that much.
Mason: No.

What else does Canary have in the works right now?
Mason: On the comedian front, we just signed on to work with Paul Mecurio. And I just said that we were not laying all our cards on the comedy or the Colbert stuff, but he is one of the writers for The Daily Show, and he’s their warm-up comic, and he’s got a lot of different things going on. He’s also a touring stand-up comedian.
Megan: And he’s got shows in development right now.
Mason: He’s got a pilot that he’s putting together. He’s at a great transition point and he’s building his team to put that together, so we just signed on to be a part of that team.
Megan: We’ll be working on his web promotions side of things. And we’re going to be doing a website for Kate Watson-Wallace, which I’m very excited about. We are huge fans of her work, so that’s very exciting.
Mason: I’m super, super psyched to be putting that together.
Megan: I am actually working with another Seattle band called Argo, who has a record coming out, called Attack of the Firebots, which is a really fun record. There’s this whole back story.
Mason: They’ve built up a whole mythology.
Megan: Yeah, this whole mythology of a seventies starship. It’s actually based on a seventies animation series called Star Blazers, where there was a ship called the Argo, and that’s where their band name comes from. So it’s not all spaceship stuff, but it’s a fun part of it.
Mason: Some of it is robots!
Megan: Yeah, some of it is robots. They’re really good. They’re really sort of a younger, up-and-coming Seattle band. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get them out of Seattle a little more and get them some national exposure. And I’ve been working with the Minnesota band Cloud Cult, and they’re amazing, and over the past couple years, they’ve really started to blow up and get a great following. And then, of course, the local arts stuff that we do. The Wilma, Philadelphia Young Playwrights, the Barrymore Awards, which just happened, and now the Theatre Alliance is getting ready for the New Play Festival in February, which is going to be a region-wide event, with a lot of theatres producing new works around that time. It pretty much never ends. We actually are trying to figure out a way to schedule a vacation, because when you work for yourself, everyone always thinks: “Oh, I can be my own boss, make my own schedule.” Well, you can make your own schedule, but chances are, if you care about your business, your own schedule is actually seven days a week, and working till two a.m., and it’s really hard to find time for yourself, which is one of the reasons we’re not making a lot of music right now, either. You just get so wrapped up in it. So we’re actually trying to schedule a time and just black it out and say, “Okay, we’re going on vacation.” And we’re trying to go to Europe. But as soon as one thing ends… They all overlap, it’s always running. But that’s good. It’s better to have that problem than the other problem of not having enough work. And we’re kind of expanding a little bit, too. We have brought on some part-time people and we’re getting to that next phase where, hopefully we’ll be able to expand the business.
Mason: Yeah, we’re breaking ground on the new office tower in the spring.
Megan: It’s going to be bigger than the Comcast building.
Mason: Yeah. Oh, and JohnnyBrendas.com. That’s the other big project I’ve launched in the last few months. It’s a beautiful place and there’s some good music happening, and it’s a cool site, too.
Megan: Just needed to throw that in there.

Anything else you’d like to tell our readers?
Megan: I guess just that people our age should go see more theatre and music. That’s what I’m advocating for. I feel like our generation, maybe, is a little too apathetic sometimes, and not supportive enough of the local arts community.
Mason: Well, that doesn’t stop with bands. There’s really creative art happening in all mediums, and people in their twenties and early thirties aren’t just writing songs. They’re doing screen printing, they’re doing theatre. They’re being funny, doing all kinds of great things. And so, you’re kind of ignoring some really excellent stuff that’s out there if you confine yourself to that narrow slice of the pie that you’re already familiar with. It’s worth picking up the arts papers, checking out the guide for the Live Arts Festival when that comes up, and seeing as much stuff [as you can] and taking chances with it. It’s really worth it.
Megan: Absolutely.

Photo by James Wendell