You do not need awards to feel the value of your contributions. Creating and collaborating is the glory. But I grew up on rap, old r&b (mom influence) and heavy metal (the latter never in the same song with the others it must be noted). So getting 6 nominations this year gives me a moment to acknowledge that I am fortunate enough to work with the finest artists in the world. So with humility in knowing my privilege and good fortune, big-ass thank you and congrats to mike, rob and tobias for letting me be a part of your journey.
sometimes even us in the business need music more than just as a job. we need it to heal and get through tough times too. i hit an emotional lowpoint earlier this year. and then one day, my friend and now co-manager caleb moriarty sent me a video and some links to demos. i listen to everything anyone sends me especially those whose taste i have grown to admire. i pulled over and started crying by the fourth song.
listening to @verydeadly music was more than a gift, she was an angel in a moment of need. her lyrics, while pointed, carried the universal messages of pain, hope and joy. so i decided very quickly to go meet her and see what the source of her art was and if her ambitions were as great as the songs i was hearing. the most telling moment in the meeting was when i suggested releasing the demos as is. she quickly replied “oh, i was only singing at 80%”. i was floored and touched. i was in. and now i am helping @verydeadly in any way i can.
today, she released “Into Oblivion”, a captivating bit of songwriting that delves into personal uncertainties, political tensions, and poignant reflections on American society. it is up everywhere. take a listen.
a lot of times, “they” talk about an artist as being singular. i have interpreted that as “one and only”. sampa is certainly that. her message of “zambia ku chalo” has guided much of what we have done over the past year. taking sounds and creatives from her home country of Zambia and projecting them to the world. but also, and more important to her, bringing the world to Zambia. whether it’s having the members of Witch on the album or repping Zambia in the trailer for Black Panther II with her anthem “Never Forget”, Sampa is a force.
@furmaan.ahmed@shervinfoto@constantine_spence@pvssykrew@rharha_nembhard@ntombimoyo
denzel is a force. he gets his ideas out in the same staccato style of his signature flow. melt was our most ambitious project yet. we talked as far back as 2019 about great filmmaking. in 2020, i watched Kirosawa’s Ran for the first time since college and immediately called him to talk about lighting and frame composition. he texted me a 20 minute youtube video on the techniques of the master japanese filmmaker with a subsequent “everyone on the project needs to watch this.” denzel is nothing if sincere, clear and demanding. he meant it. so we embarked on an epic creative plot that took us to the jungles and deserts of Peru, the streets of Atlanta and a soundstage in Montreal. all along, we designed and built a to-scale X-wing for Coachella that still hangs in the Palm Springs Air Museum. Denzel is a treat. He is boundless and pushes you beyond reason.
comebacks are not an especially sexy thing in the music business. they are fleeting. they imply there was a low place to comeback from. so i am not particularly fond of projects pitched as such. i prefer artists that never go away.
when an artist has a re-discovery or just does never goes away (i’m looking at you nick cave), they are constantly evolving in all aspects of the art. in my role, i am able to look specifically at the visual presentation of a *seasoned artist and see what is lacking and what the opportunities are. generally, artists i am fortunate to work with are down for it. renaissances are a bit of secret sauce i have developed professionally.
KORN came to us with a really invigorating album. i admittedly had not listened to the band’s music but after seeing JD’s eloquence in the recent Woodstock doc, i gained more insight. also, he name checks The Birthday Party, Dead Can Dance and Salo in his What’s In My Bag (oh yeah, google Salo when you get a moment). so we had a lot of common ground between us.
i hired Tim Saccenti to direct the video for “Start The Healing” and to take the press photos. tim is a savant and maybe has the best bed-side manners of any creative i’ve ever worked with. patient and attentive. but unflinching in his vision. he fights for his ideas but always in the frame of giving the artist what they need. he is a very, “they do not know what they love until i show them.” he leaned on Anthony Ciannamea for all of the VFX, drawing heavily from JD’s HR Giger microphone stand, of which there is only four in the world and the mold is broken. priceless.
the result is a music video that as tim put it, makes it feel like a kick to the groin at the MOMA. i could not agree more. peep it sometime. it’s the most metal art thing i’ve ever made.
i was making a punk playlist for my partner recently. going through all the songs was a bit like opening up a timeline tracing back to 8th grade when i first heard Minor Threat. (sidebar: if Instagram were around then and around today, that would be a treasure trove of embarrassment).
i have worked with a few punk bands over the years. some do arenas, some do basements. but none of them do fashion boutiques on the Bowery like Fucked Up did in 2008. part of what i love about the punk ethos is the irreverence. being on a record label just meant more people to fuck with and i think Mike in Fucked Up just liked to throw things out to us to see if we would do it. we were more toy than anything that could help their career. we would get these long emails at the beginning of a campaign that would be more an exercise in obtuseness though they had the best marketing ideas i had ever seen. sometimes when you do not give a fuck, the opportunities show up.
one such idea was the band playing for 12 straight hours at the Rogan boutique on the Bowery in NYC (it is now the OVO Store for anyone needing an $85 ash tray). oh, it also came with a wish list of celebs to perform ranging from Moby to J Mascis to Ezra from Vampire Weekend (there were about 5 other ideas in his marketing list that included Ezra, it was 2008). answering the challenge, we booked the store, got just about every special guest (including Ezra) and told them “touche” you are now performing for 12 hours.
when we were setting up The xx’s second album, we did a tour of all the major tech companies to field ideas. the hope was Apple or Google or Facebook would have some novel technology we could showcase. outside of Xbox, Microsoft only showed up when my finance guy weaponized spreadsheets to bust me on creative overages. but we ventured up to Redmond anyhow because there was a guy who was a genuine fan.
The xx were a band whose music is intimate. you learn about them from a friend. you want to share it with someone because it will associate the music with your relationship to then forever. you get a lot of, “thanks for turning me onto them.”. it was viral before that was a tenet of most marketing campaigns.
at the time, i was obsessed with Aaron Coblin’s beautiful data visualizations of global commercial airline traffic. how they ebbed and flowed in the course of 24 hours. i wanted to recreate that visual sensibility but for tracking the spread of the first single we released on the album. so on a whim, i asked the Microsoft team if we could give a song to one person and track its spread visually. they said “no problem, using this new canvas implementation on IE, blah blah tech talk tech talk.”
i would not call myself an environmentalist. but i’ve had this pet project for years to try to make records out of 100% sustainable materials. i don’t know how many records end up in the ocean but we have years of CDs, LPs, cassettes and others to reckon for.
a few years back, i was reading about all the sustainability projects at Amazon, including being carbon neutral by 2040. Iggy had an album coming out and while this was not reflective of his politics, he is innovative, loves the ocean and people listen to him. i was also inspired by the work Cyrill and Parlay did with Adidas for their trainers made from recovered fishing nets left strewn about the ocean. Nick Mulvey also did a limited 100 piece run on ocean plastic records a couple years ago. but we need to do this en masse.
the challenge with making vinyl out of ocean plastic comes down to chemistry. the polymers for the type of plastic are very specific. soft enough to mold at a modestly high temperature, but durable enough to maintain audio information in the grooves. ocean plastic is by nature heterogenous in its chemistry. so you have to somehow refine the process for the inputs to get some acceptable level of consistency. on a referral from Brandon at Memphis Recording Press, i went to one of the largest suppliers of the pucks they use to make records, TPC Plastics, who are based in Texas. everyone, especially big petroleum, have ESG initiatives and i thought they could be down at least for the PR value. the main guy, Jack, was very receptive to the idea. he was not sure they could make it 100% ocean plastic but a percentage was maybe possible. we just needed a big partner to help kickstart the research.
our artists generally believe in the concept of an album (oh, we can debate “concept albums” later), listening as a journey where your emotions, mood and experience is guided by the music for 35-40 minutes. little things like how much dead space between songs can mean a lot.
for sophie (neh soccer mommy), her last album was divided into three parts; a blue part, a grey part and a yellow part. the album had a lot to do with mental health and representing the moods via colors. but with color so in the fore, it was a field day applying this scheme to our entire visual system.
but these colors express themselves differently and required separate textures depending on what mood we were focusing on for a photo, a video, the various physical formats. our art director, @lordess.foudre , fleshed out the system. yellow set-ups were block color and “spotify-tastic.” the blues were gauzy and soft. the grey zones were slick and shiny (luckily sophie had a dope pair of silver balenciaga sneaks for the job). it offered up variety into the campaign visually while serving the narrative. and it all worked together as one system.
i do not really believe that the visual world for a campaign has to be one set color way, just like an album is not just a series of songs in the same key, tempo and instrumentation. the cohesiveness comes with mood and intent and aligning with the music. the whole “matching luggage” phenomenon is actually quite easy. creating the right emotional zone across all of your visuals the harder bit.
you get a brief from a quasi-satanic Swedish rock band that just says “Singing In The Rain x 28 Days Later”. luckily, ghost had worked with Roboshobo before and he knew how to juxtapose seemingly diametrically opposed concepts.
we shot Rats at a backlot in Anaheim in late February on what was the coldest day of the year in 2018. cameras went up at 9p and stopped rolling at 6a. our talent was doused with water, wore prosthetic masks and laid on the cold concrete for long spells, all without any complaint. directors typically get a lot of credit (and robo deserves heaps) but the excellence of a video comes out via the sharp ends. your wardrobe, art dept, choreographers and DPs. it really shows on this one. so props to the crews who never get enough praise and also freeze their asses off in California from time to time.
all big ideas start somewhere. the idea for denzel’s clout cobain video was inspired by his manager hanging backstage at rolling loud in the Spring of 2018. he called it a “clout circus” and texted me this idea from backstage. we had a super team on this one, tasked with finding a real circus, wrangling and painting 100 teenage extras and convincing denzel to wear full makeup. he was in the chair before we even asked…. he took zero convincing.
this video blew him into another stratosphere. the icing on the cake was denzel seeing his face on a billboard looking over Times Square and having a flock of teen summer campers mob him minutes later. i would be lying if i didn’t well up a bit seeing his stardom blossoming right in front of us.
these are pulled from a failed artist pitch but only failed in we failed to sign them. but the visual ideas were dope because the music had a 70s feel but contemporary tones and hues. i thought we could pull this off.
i was turned on to Braniff Airlines by a 70 year old woman sitting next to me on a redeye to Detroit. she started complaining over the service and i asked her how much flying back in the day was this glamorous affair vs the athleisure derby it is today. she busted out her phone and started showing me all these images of Braniff and it felt like the visual world i was going after for this pitch. she was a stewardess for years and talked about the experience with innuendo like it was a wild and fun time. so dope. but Braniff based its whole marketing effort around design and style. they hired artists de riguer like Calder to paint their planes. the ad campaigns by industry disruptor Mary Wells had wit and sass and vibrancy. it is a brand i have grown to revere and love.
steal it if you want….
