MusicPro Magazine

What have you learned about the music business that surprised you or you didn’t expect?

Jennings: When Chapin [Mary Chapin Carpenter] first got signed, she and her manager, and I sat down and had a conversation and I said, “Look I don’t know anything about this but what I think, I mean again this one of those things like when I was twelve, what do you want to do? I want to make a living. So I said, “I don’t know anything about this but what I think is – your job is to write, to sing, to play, perform music, and make hit records. My job is to help you write and to help you play and perform and make music and make hit records and help you with the music. Your manager’s job is to go out there and represent you and run interference for you and be your good face to the public and the record company’s job is to sell records.

That’s their only job. Their job is not too make sure you make good art, their job is not to make sure that you eat right or that you don’t end up in rehab or that you don’t take drugs or that you’re not mean to your pet, their job is to sell records and that’s it. And there are a great number of lovely people who are in the record industry, lovely people. And there are also business people and I think a lot of the time musicians forget that people that have record companies, even if it’s your own record company, the object is not to close the doors, the object is to keep the business running. The object is to make sure that you can make the next record, and the next record, and the next record and you have to create a scenario that you can do that. As evil as people would like to say, big businesses are or whatever; they are what they are. They exist to make money, they exist to turn a profit, and they exist to reward investors.

Okay well now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the music, let’s talk about what you want to do with your art, let’s talk about if you have enough art to do something with it” which is really a sticky subject for most people. There is nothing anyone wants to be told less than you’re not very good and there are better ways of putting that you’re not very good, like you could be better. Well who couldn’t? So at that point, without a sort of something system that existed under the old music industry model, how do you separate the stuff that’s not good from the stuff that’s really good and really solid and really well formed with no waste? And that’s a very, very difficult thing to do; especially if you don’t know anything. And believe me, there are plenty of people that don’t know anything and at least if you don’t have the good grace to admit it.

The stuff I don’t know could fill volumes, but that’s really not the point about being an artist. The point is to say okay I can always get better and let’s take it from that standpoint. But I mean there is no vetting system at this point. Anybody with Garage Band and a guitar, that they can’t tune, can make a record and can sell them at a gig and can do whatever. That’s completely fine. It sort of makes it more difficult, especially for younger artists, because there is so many of them.

I’m a record producer for the most part, I’m also a guitar player and I think about a lot of different things going into this, because basically when an artist approaches you or when you approach an artist you can say it, it’s simple enough, “let’s get together, let’s sit down, and let’s make a record. “We’ll play and it’ll happen and it’ll be great.” Yeah that’s basically it. You have the right people in the room, you put up the right microphone, you have the right environment, and you start playing. And sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you record something that’s extraordinary. And most of the time, without being lucky, you record something that’s really good, but that all starts with the artist being a good singer, being a good writer, hopefully being a good player, although not every artist is and not every artist who’s not a good player insists on playing on their record which is great, doesn’t matter because the record is a vehicle, a vehicle for the arts.

My job is to help the artist tune it up; it’s more to it than that. It’s as simple as saying we’ll get together, we’ll sit in a room and put some microphones up and we’ll record it and that’s really basically what it is, well there’s more to it than that at least for me. But, if I’m doing my job all the artist has to think about is showing up, setting up, and playing, they don’t have to worry about the rest of the [stuff] because it should be a pretty seamless operation. And all of us have been in situations when things didn’t go quite as smoothly as we might’ve liked them to.

I went to this thing called Folk Alliance, it’s big and I had never been to one before, it’s sort of a national conference of folk singers, singer-songwriters, blah, blah, blah. A lot of horsepower, a lot of interesting people doing seminars, lots and lots and lots of young artists who are all scrambling for the same little bit of recognition or money or whatever. I was at Folk Alliance and it was interesting to me to hear so many artists who are sort of after the same thing. And there’s a woman named Zoe Mulford who’s a wonderful singer-songwriter who now lives in England but she’s from the D.C. area.

I did a record with her here a few years back. Her husband is a college professor in England now, there were here but they moved to England, and they go to conferences and conventions for computer folks. And she said, “I have this friend and she’s a blogger and you know how Andy Warhol said that in the future everybody will be famous for at least fifteen minutes? Well bloggers say in the future everybody will be famous to fifteen people” which is okay, that’s great. Fame is… well, that’s a whole different conversation.

Fame throughout history, wherever you are at any time has a certain quality. Well, now fame is sort of everything. I mean, people are famous for being idiots. People are famous for being wrecks, people are famous for being infamous, people are famous for being big politicians or bad musicians or lousy actors or famous porn tape making heiresses or whatever. It’s a different situation because it seems as though fame is a thing to be concerned with and since we are affected, to some extent, by famous people even if we give them twenty seconds of our time then it’s worth giving it a little thought. Maybe?