Coachella, the multimillion-dollar-grossing festival in the California desert, anticipated a major change in music in 1999 when it gambled that regional festivalgoers would come to Indio to hear all kinds of indie genres instead of just what was being played on the radio.

Last month, Coachella founder Paul Tollett rolled the dice again with a belief that the hundreds of thousands of people now coming to Coachella from around the world would continue trekking to Indio for music that wasn’t primarily from the United States.

Tollett, president and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Goldenvoice company, traveled the globe last year seeking international artists that could keep Coachella ahead of the festival competition. He booked acts for April’s Coachella from every continent except Antarctica, including BLACKPINK from South Korea, Nina Kraviz from Moscow, Christine and the Queens from France, Mr Eazi from Nigeria, J Balvin from Colombia, Calypso Rose from Trinidad and Tobago, and Tame Impala from Australia.

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He even had a tent called The HP Antarctic that could be considered representative of the frozen continent. It featured music by the Australian band, RÜFÜS DU SOL.

Tollett, who has homes on the festival grounds and across the street in the Madison Club, gave an exclusive interview to The Desert Sun last week in his trailer in the Artists Village of the Stagecoach country music festival. It covered a range of topics, from his vision for keeping Coachella cutting edge to how he managed to accommodate the envelope-stretching ideas of his Madison Club neighbor, Kanye West.

The chronology of questions and answers was edited for brevity and readability:

THE DESERT SUN: You had an experience a little over a year ago where you watched “Black Panther” in a theater in Brazil and saw the audience react joyously to a line about Coachella that was translated into Portuguese subtitles. Did that have a kind of epiphany-like effect on you about your international reach?

PAUL TOLLETT: It probably did. That was kind of exciting to hear that people in the theater knew about it.

Did it make you feel you could bring more international acts to Coachella?

It probably did, yeah. I think there’s definitely an international thing going on in the states with large artists from other countries being huge here. You saw what J Balvin and BLACKPINK (did). Africa had Burna Boy and Mr Eazi. These guys are giants in their markets. But, those artists can be big here now. I think that’s the difference. We’ve had artists from around the world from Day 1. If you look at the first year’s lineup there were people from tons of different countries. The difference is, now some of these are huge in America and in their home country.

In the digital age, there’s not such a boundary between the U.S. and other nations.

Correct. And I don’t think there’s so much of a boundary anymore between different languages. People are listening to different languages and selling out arenas all over.

Was that the last barrier for Coachella? Are international artists already at a point where they can draw 100,000 people?

Yeah. When you think J Balvin can do multiple arenas; BLACKPINK, singing in a different language and a lot of people who don’t know that language are still OK with that show — still having a fun time and maybe know some words. You start finding an artist that sings in a different language and you start learning some words, it’s interesting. There’s still a language barrier for sure, but it doesn’t get in the way of selling tickets or listening to streaming.

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You did a lot of traveling in this last year. What was the plan?

Here’s what it was: Finding talent, and then talent that we found, filming them where they lived. Then, when I was out doing that filming, we were finding other artists. So that was cool. We thought there were some good stories with some of our artists.

Like Nina Kraviz?

Yeah, Nina Kraviz. She’s from Siberia, originally. Moved to Moscow, becomes a dentist, becomes a DJ, becomes a promoter, works on cosmonauts’ teeth and becomes a known DJ around the world. We’ve had her twice (before) and I didn’t even know that was her story. And, when you hear that story, you’re like, “Wow, that took a lot of effort to get from Siberia to Coachella three times.”

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So, we just started checking into these other artists we had booked. We had already booked Calypso Rose. So, we went down to Trinidad and Carnival (the annual event held before Ash Wednesday in the nation of Trinidad and Tobago), and it was interesting to see her story: the first woman to win the Calypso King award at that point. She had to fight through it in 1977. Seeing how strong she is: inspirational.

Did you know her story?

Not when we booked it. I just knew three songs. I knew her name because I like calypso and old ska, but, I was in France and someone told me, “Are you done booking?” I said, “Yeah, I have no space left.” He said, “Let me show you one video.” He showed me that “Calypso Queen” video and I was like, “Wow, I’ve got to find space.” She was 78 years old and the song was just so good. Then I started watching other videos. I think there was four great songs right off the bat – videos and songs.

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So, we decided to go down there and that’s where I heard her whole story. I said, “We should film that and show it livestream before she plays to give people a little understanding of the back story.” We filmed her in her hometown, showed Carnival and, when she was here between the two weekends, we took her to Tim Armstrong’s studio in L.A. and we recorded “Amazing Grace.” The Interrupters were her backing band. When I was down there, I asked her if there were any songs she wanted to record and she said, “Amazing Grace.” So, I went, “While you’re in town, let’s go record that.” And that shows a little more personality.

You had a lot of African acts this year.

Yeah, it was good. We had an art piece from Burkina Faso (in West Africa). One of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met, Francis Kere, (is) from there. We visited him and saw he was the son of a tribal leader who went to Berlin to learn English.

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He came back an architect and built schools for all the village. No one in the village used to read or write. Zero. Now they’re in schools learning isosceles triangles. So, he had a big art piece (the 12 60-foot towers titled “Sarbale ke,” meaning “the house of celebration”). That looked good.

You had some really good artists from Chile, too. Did you make a trip down there?

I didn’t. Rene did. Rene Contreras. We met him at the Glass House when he was 14 and he’s booking the Sonora now. It’s a big globe so we split it up and he went down to Chile. He found a couple things and interviewed them. We think we’re going to try that some more. We had never done that before — flying somewhere and interviewing them for livestream. You want to get backgrounds on these artists so they’re not just names on the poster.

That’s also become a big part of monetizing the music.

Less than the monetization, I think it’s just getting the story of the artist out there. When you see a festival poster, it’s a blur of 150 names and sometimes you don’t know one from the next and you start seeing a piece from that artist’s home country, it puts it in perspective what they’ve had to do to get to where they are.

Twenty years ago you had this concept of taking different kinds of music, from raves, hip-hop and punk, and seeing if their individual audiences could create one mass audience. Do you see yourself doing the same thing with international music – creating a new audience with artists like in Russia, who aren’t making a whole lot of money in America, coming together with people from Africa?

I don’t think it’s all money. I just think the walls are down and anyone, no matter what country you’re in, can play shows and come to Coachella. With the way streaming works now, when you’re listening to music, you don’t know where it’s from all the time. So, we’re just trying to make it easier for those artists that are invited here.

I feel like you’re a little defensive talking about artists making money.

No. It’s just that every topic, you keep bringing up monetization and that wasn’t the motivation. For instance, Nigeria, we feel that it takes a lot for an artist to come over here – so many hours. It’s a sacrifice for someone who is an arena or a stadium act to come here for the first time and play a smaller stage. The last few years, people have even dropped out after they were advertised because it got difficult, to get on the plane and everything.

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Getting passports.

Yeah, getting visas. We just felt, we have to do our part. If we’re going to book someone from Africa, after flying all the way over here and giving all that effort, we can’t just bury them (in a bad time slot) at the show. We have to give them a voice so people here can learn about them.

Everybody has been talking the past few weeks that the polo fields seemed less crowded (for Coachella and Stagecoach).

Thank you. I don’t know if you noticed, but all the hedges were taken off. If you’re standing at the main stage, and you look out towards the "Spectra," which is the rainbow tower, that used to be all hedges. All of those are gone. Three hundred feet – almost a football field. Before, from the main stage to Sahara, you had to funnel through. And coming out of it, going to the second stage, you had to funnel through the mouth.

There were fewer vendor booths out there, too.

Yeah. We just revolutionized. We took that Indio Central Market and put that far back and moved up Sonora, Gobi and Mojave all in a row. Three tents in a row. It made it seem like you could bounce back and forth. I think for us, it was our best year of public assemblage operations.

Pedestrian traffic?

Yeah. It was something we worked on all year. We have heat maps, where you can see where everyone walked from noon until midnight, and you can see bottlenecks. So this year, we worked really hard to get rid of those bottlenecks and the main thing? We had to take down a football field worth of hedges.

People also say in-and-out access to the parking lots were better. Is that because you’re leasing more land?

I don’t think we leased any more land. I think we’re pretty much done. It’s knowing how to use it. Again, we have film of traffic patterns. We used to have cars crossing each other and trying to put too many cars through a single lane. No matter what you do, it’s going to be three hours. So, we’ve learned.

You also spent money widening some streets.

We got Madison widened this year. I would almost put that as No. 1 this year. That felt really good. I was driving up and down Madison during the show and there was never traffic. It was crazy because you used to get out there and get stuck for an hour.

Are you still buying land?

No. I think pretty much we’re done. I’d like to sell a little bit. We might have over-bought.

What happened with the space for Kanye West? The story is you couldn’t come up with the kind of structure Kanye wanted just before you announced the lineup in January. What kind of structure did he want?

It sounded like a dome in the middle of the field. We had already turned our plans in for the main stage to the city and it would have been too hard to change things around.

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Do you think the Sunday Service he wound up doing at Coachella was something he had wanted to do for a long time?

I don’t know, but he comes up with ideas more than most people. I thought this idea was really great: a hill the people could sit on, and a hill the artist is on, and then people all around it. It had a look I had never seen, a feeling I had never (felt). It sort of reminded me of the vibe I felt when I first saw the “Wattstax” movie (documenting the 1972 Watts Summer Festival featuring performances by Stax Records artists, including Isaac Hayes and the Staples Singers, plus Richard Pryor, Jesse Jackson and others). There’s something innocent about daytime. And what’s interesting is, none of us were in a hurry because the show (Coachella) didn’t start for a few more hours. No one was leaving to go back to L.A., so it was kind of a chill moment. That might play into it.

Was there any significance to having all of the musicians play with their backs to the audience? I’m not saying it was offensive, I was just wondering if there was cultural significance.

Well, it was a circle, so someone’s seeing the front and someone’s seeing the back.

I saw it as a continuation of the Beyoncé tribute to the HBCU (Historic black colleges and universities) halftime shows. I thought it was a nice continuation of what Beyoncé did and I was wondering if there was a conscious effort to connect those two?

I can’t get involved in commenting on any of that. I just know he came up with a really good idea and he was able to get our team and his team together and knock it out on really short notice.

How fast did that come together?

The hill wasn’t started until Tuesday morning with the dirt and grass. It seemed that day, everything he was talking about was so great. A handful of us were standing there. After we walked away, we were like, "Wow!" He said six or seven things and they were all super great.

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What happened with Solange? She said (she backed out due to) a production problem. But, it wasn’t on your side?

Not on this side. We just got a call, she couldn’t make it because of production. “Oh, well, OK.”

In the past couple years, it seems like the women (performers) have come into their own at this festival. Have you made an effort to bring in more women or do you see more great female artists out in the world right now?

It’s just chock full of talent out there.

Katy Perry said on stage she’s been wanting to play Coachella for a while.

And she has. She’s so great to the show. She’s been so nice.