Panelists: Rob Chiarelli, Robina Ritchie-Barker, Ron Harris
Moderator: Michael Laskow
Michael: Do you remember the movie City Slickers starring Billy Crystal and Jack Palance? Billy’s character asks Jack’s character, “What's the secret to life?” And Jack’s character replies, “It's just one thing.” I think that the one thing could be this thing that we're going to talk about today, which is letting go of precious.
First, let me introduce our panelists. On the right is my longtime friend, my best friend, mixer/producer, and five-time (now, six-time) Grammy-winner, Mr. Rob Chiarelli. In the middle, we have composer/entrepreneur, Robina Ritchie Barker, who inspired this panel. She's also the co-founder of TrackStage, which was created for organizing your musical life. I was interviewing Robina, and after the interview we were chatting, and she said something like, “Sometimes you’ve just got to learn to let go of precious.” That hit me like a ton of bricks! And then, when I was thinking of who else I could I put on the panel with Robina and Rob, multi-platinum producer and A&R person Ron Harris seemed like a perfect fit, so here we are! Welcome, Ron, and thank you all for taking the time to do this, today! [Applause]
Michael: Robina really got me thinking, and I became a little obsessed with this idea. As many of you know, I used to work in the studio. I've worked with a lot of smaller artists, I've worked with a lot of mid-level artists, and I've worked with a lot of big artists. The one thing they all had in common was they didn’t know how to let go of precious. Holding on to precious work can sometimes be the result of perfectionism or self-doubt. Have you managed to overcome those barriers in your personal creative endeavors? Well, I've literally spent four hours punching in the letter T on a vocal one night with a very famous artist who I won't mention—who was high on drugs and alcohol—and he just wouldn't let go of that word and that letter because it just didn't sound right to him.
That was one of a hundred—maybe thousands of examples in my life. I remember thinking, “Dude, you’re not going to sell one more record by not having that T sound the way you think it should sound. And it sounds fine as it is.” Most you guys in the audience work at home, alone in your studio. You don't have a producer there with you. You don't have a manager. Maybe you have your wife or your husband or your kids come in and listen to what you're working on. But people get so hung up on a little thing that they don't do what I call “shipping,” which is just shoving it out the door. Go, let it live its life. Submit that song. Don't struggle with perfectionism. It causes people to miss deadlines. You know what? Every time we run a listing, people call us five minutes after the listing deadline has passed to say, I missed the deadline. Oh, really, you didn't know about the deadline for the last six weeks. You missed the deadline? It's because they were sitting there, punching in the letter T (figuratively speaking), trying to make it perfect, thinking it would be the difference between a forward and a return from one of TAXI’s A&R team members.
Ron: I think that it's important and it's a really interesting topic, because so many times we run into artists and writers and producers, and the first thing that they love to tell us, for whatever reason, is, well, you know, “I'm a perfectionist.” Like, that means something, right? You know? And it's like, well, wait a minute. You only want to hear that from your heart surgeon! [audience laughs] Yeah, exactly right. Because then you're like, “But if I don't like it, what does that mean?” So, you've got to learn how to say, “You know, I've done my best,” and let it go. You’ve got to know what your best is, but you have to learn that process for yourself. If you don’t, you just keep stirring the soup, and it's just going to get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse! Now, there are some instances where you have to hold true to something that you believe in, and it happens also.
And here’s a great story—and like Michael said, sometimes we just can't use the names of the artists. But there was a record I worked on, and they already had the song done, and we were just redoing the song from scratch—the whole thing—because this artist was just beginning to really take off. When a new artist’s career starts to take off, what happens is, you get a call that says, “Hey, we're looking for the next single. I need you to rework this song, this song, this song and this song.” That's what happens. And so, we're in the studio working on this song with the head of the record label there, and the A&R guy said, “I hate that version of it. You guys need to change that version.” And the producers are like, “No, we love this version of it, and we think that your idea sucks.” So now you've got this who's gonna let go of precious scenario, right? Is it gonna be the record company? Is it gonna be the record exec who’s had countless hit records? Or is it going to be the producers who may have had just a couple of hit records, but they believed in what they believed in, right?
[Asking the audience] Who do you think should win, guys? So, raise your hand if you think it should be the record company. They write the checks. [Some hands go up] Gotcha! And who thinks it should be the producer? [More hands go up] Okay, so we're leaning towards the producer.
Well, at the end of the day, the producer won, and the song was called, “Come on Over,” so you guys can figure out the rest from who that artist was. Yeah, right, yeah. And that's what happened. It was a remix. That's a producer's job. Hey, you got to know what the vision is. And part of that is knowing when to let it go or when to hold on to it. That doesn't mean that just because you’re the writer or producer that it may be right. You have to listen to wisdom, and you’ve got to have some skill set behind you.
And in that instance, the record exec let go of precious, right? So, it can go both ways.
Robina: But what if you’re working by yourself. What if you’re in your studio by yourself?
Michael: That’s exactly why I'm doing this panel!
“Perfection is the enemy of great, which is the enemy of finished, which is the enemy of success.”
Robina: The creative process is such a magical thing. Maybe I'm going to seem a little woo-woo here, but the creative process can be very sacred, and it's very easy to fall in love with what we're creating. It's very easy. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, “Well, these are my babies.” And I understand why, because it’s such an incredible creative experience that you're going through, you're going to fall in love with it. The trick is, you're going to have to fall out of love with it. To be able to get it out into the world, because perfection is the enemy of great, which is the enemy of finished, which is the enemy of success. So, we really have to understand our relationship to the love that we have for our music, while also stepping back and realizing that we are more than this baby, and we have a lot more magic in us to give out there. And if we get stuck on this one baby, not only does that baby not see the light of day that could lead you to potential success, it also backs up all the other songs that you're meant to write. So, yeah, but it's hard to learn how to do that to yourself.
Michael: That's such an important point, Robina! Again, the reason that I wanted to do this panel is that the key to success—especially in the sync industry—is cranking out a lot of music. You have to create a lot of music and get it out the door, because the more often you throw your line in the water, the more fish you're going to catch. And so many people get hung up on minutia. They miss a deadline or they just don't submit because they get hung up or go into some sort of infinite loop of indecision. They vacillate between should I or shouldn't I, to the point where they just don't do it at all, and they're missing out on these great opportunities.
But going back to your point of working at home alone; So how does somebody flying solo learn to do that when you're in the studio and you’re trapped on that hamster wheel of “precious”?
Robina: It can be very difficult. I'm certainly guilty of having a few of those pieces of precious still stuck there. But ultimately, you know, you have to put on your business hat. You're technically a manufacturer, and I know that's a very cold-sounding term for what we're doing as creatives, but if you can kind of put yourself into that frame of mind and recognize that once you once you hit audio mix down, when you get that final mix, it does become a product. It becomes a product that’s meant to serve a purpose, and that purpose will have an impact on whoever purchases it or listens to it. So, for me, there are two times where my music's sacred; and it's during the time where I'm writing it, and then it's when it's being listened to by the end listener. And I have no control over that one, that piece of sacred. I have no business knowing about it, but everything in between those steps, it's a product. Does it fit this brief? Does it work for this? And get out of the way about it being the best piece of music I've ever written. But it takes practice. And it really is about, okay, am I just creating this for me, or am I creating this for something else?
Michael: When Rob was about 21 years old, we met and ended up working together in the studio. He recorded his hit, “I Took My Mom to the Prom.” That was supposed to get a laugh! Great title!
So, here's this 21-year-old kid who would fly from Boston on People Express airlines with his Strat, with his base, and his full drum kit. Then he’d take a bus from Newark airport to the Port Authority in midtown Manhattan and stack that stuff up and push it all the way across Midtown Manhattan to meet me at the studio. And I would start after I finished my day's work of doing advertising stuff, and we would work to one or two o'clock in the morning.
Rob was constantly leaning over me, asking, “Why'd you turn that knob? Why'd you move that fader?” I literally never touched the console without Rob asking me a question, and it was super annoying in the beginning, but I…
Rob: So, the record cost five times as much to make because of that, of course, right?
Michael: Right! Because you didn't let go of precious, but I came to understand he really wanted to understand the entire process. And, you know what? One hundred gold and platinum records and five Grammys later, I think he did pretty good. [audience applause] Congratulations. But being that it was his first real recording endeavor, he didn't want to let go of precious. But now, you’re in the control room sitting at the console working with huge artists. So, Rob, do you have any stories about…
“‘When it feels good,’ as Stevie Wonder said, ‘It is good.’”
Rob: Do I have stories? Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting, because it's a process, right? We all start and we fumble around, try to learn our instrument, and we suck, and we keep at it, and we still suck, and we keep adding. Then finally, we get a moment. It's not much different than golf, I suppose. But it took a while for me to understand that excellence is what we're going for. We're not really going for perfection. It's never sold. It never will sell. And it's just we want to do the very best we can, but there's a lot to unwrap in this. I think we have to work within a framework, and that could be time, and it could be with the talent that we have in the room. It could be the budget and so many other things we have to consider.
I'll tell you a funny story. One of my mentors is Reggie Calloway, who’s a very famous producer—many hits—and we mixed a song together. And after about six hours of mixing, he came into the room and he said, “Rob, that sounds awesome. Print it.”
Two hours later, he comes back in the room and I'm still working on it. And he said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I heard this little thing and I wanted to tweak it.” And he said, “Rob, there's no such thing as awesome.” And then he looked at me, and he said, “And I bet you think that was time well spent.” And I thought, “Yeah, I do.” But then I realized how wrong I was. So, when you catch that “vibe” that we talk about all the time, you need to know when to stop. And there are so many producers and writers I've worked with over the years, and they beat the hell out of a song until the vibe is gone. When it feels good, as Stevie Wonder said, “It is good.” Who am I to argue with that? We can overdo it, but we have to have a certain discipline that comes—I think—with experience. We have to be able to say, “You know what? This feels really, really good, and with all of its imperfections, it's time to print it and sometimes, you’ve got to live with that.
Now I'll add one little thing. There was a writer that we were going to sign, and I met with him, and he gave us this record that I hadn't heard. And I asked, “How long have you been working on it? He said, “A year and a half.” How many songs were on this record? Two! Like, okay, well, this is a problem. And you want to be in this sync world, and you're going to write one song every nine months, it's not going to work. And I listened to it and I'm like, “Oh my God,” it was the most sterile thing I ever heard in my life.
Don’t miss Part 2 of this panel in next month’s TAXI Transmitter!