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There are those in the spotlight, and then there is Everybody Else.
Hosted by Wes Luttrell (Indiana-based artist growth coach and label founder), Everybody Else is a podcast dedicated to the invisible people who make music happen. Featuring solo commentary and insightful interviews with record label execs, tour managers, music tech founders, producers, venue managers, and a slew of others, this show's mission is to pull back the curtain on the lives and ways of thinking of those who make up the modern music ecosystem. New episodes streaming every Tuesday.
Wesley Luttrell (00:00)
This is the Everybody Else Podcast. Who are the invisible people of music today? And what do they do to make music happen? Because behind every great artist, song, venue, festival, and music service, there's a tribe of people who will dedicate their lives to work that if done right, will never appear to have happened. There are those in the spotlight, and then there's everybody else.
Mid-August 2016, I was living in Miami with my then manager, my best friend who was an artist, and had very little else going on. I was sitting at the table eating breakfast by myself, some mixture of eggs and vegetables, I'm sure, and just wondering what the hell I was gonna do with my life. I had just spent two months living in this new city, this place where I knew hardly anybody except those who I was with, and I had put
everything I had into one song. It was an obsession. was a pursuit of some sort of artistic expression of who I was, not just in that moment, but what I wanted to be, an artist, somebody original, somebody who does something different, and not worried about the outcome other than just putting everything I could into this one song, because it was the way forward.
Then my cousin calls me, living in Indianapolis at the time, and says, I just heard your song. Like, dude, congrats, what the hell? And I'm like, what do mean you just heard my song? You know, it came out like a week ago, a week and half ago. And he's like, I was just listening to Fresh Finds on Spotify, and it was the fourth song on the list. And I'm like, what the, what are you talking about? I had no idea. And I pulled up Spotify, and I'm like, holy shit. I run, I.
I'm, oh my gosh, okay, I gotta go, I gotta go. I run towards the hallway to the bathroom where my then manager's taking a shower, which by the way, he was just a completely dedicated, relentless person trying to figure out how the hell to help me help him help us all get this thing figured out with music. And I'm banging on the door, you're not gonna believe this, we're in Fresh Finds. He's like, what, what? He screamed and then he, you know, this is 2016 too, this is a big deal.
And who knows how these things happened in 2016, we don't know. He's just sending out emails all the time. And overnight, 60,000 plays within a couple of days, we're charting number eight in the US viral charts, number 14 in the Spotify viral charts global. And it just seems like the beginning of everything, you know? But it all stems from this moment. As a music producer at the time, my goal was self-expression.
Because the term music producer, it's broad. It can mean that you literally just make music. You can make music for television that's completely commercial. There's still some soul in it to some degree, but it's completely, it's a means to an end. It has a job to do. You could be a music producer who writes film, writes film scores. You're more of a composer perhaps, but you're really a producer of the music. Or you're someone like Rick Rubin who has, he claims zero technical skills.
and it's just a taste giver, an artist director, an artist guide through the process. And at this time in 2016, I'm just trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing. But I'm all in. I'm spending hours and hours a day hanging out in Ableton Live. I'm watching videos, I'm reading books. All it is is dedicated to art. I want to be an artist. I want to figure this stuff out.
But I'm also, you know, at that time I'd already had a small experience, or a little bit of experience making music for other people who I was meeting in Orlando. When I was a student at Full Sail, I had gotten hooked up with a vocal coach who had basically a stable of young artists who were pursuing their own careers and they would be writing songs together. They would be trying to figure out how to put music to it. So then here comes me who makes beats and all this stuff, electronic music, hip hop, make whatever.
and I would put music to their songs. So I take one of the artists who I connected with and I wanted her to sing on this song. name was Victoria Black and this song was called Tuesday Feels. I was the artist paradox at the time. And on one of the trips down to Orlando to visit with her on the drive back, all the lyrics for the song just came. I pulled out, I'm driving on the interstate, I pull out a notebook.
I put it on the right side, know, the middle center console, and I just penned the lyrics in one session, just in one moment, just penned the lyrics, and I could feel it. Here it comes, here it comes. From the beyond, from the out, it's coming in, here we go, and it's coming out of me in these lyrics that are what you're about to hear. ⁓
See ya.
It's gonna fade as you're tainting The day is coming, it's no surprise
you
You
I didn't know it at the time, but completely pouring myself into the song. Being totally dedicated on the edge, on the event horizon of my existence, living in Miami. All in no fucking side job. I'm just making beats for people, making barely anything. Have to ask mom for grocery money sometimes, but I'm paying the rent. We're getting by. I sold some shit before I left Indiana. We're good for like six months, but it's just all out. I'm gonna go.
I'm gonna figure this shit out. And it was that sort of pressure of the moment. The sort of pressure of Earth, you know, the cold turns to diamonds. That's sort of just all in. I don't care what happens. This is sink or swim, baby. It was that complete dedication to making something totally me and totally...
But not about me, just totally from me. And not worrying about, is this gonna work? And when those thoughts would enter, darkness would pursue mentally and spiritually, emotionally. It just, you have to show up, you have to go all in. And then at some point, my manager says, hey, let's do something. So I turn the song in. And at the time, I give it to him, just upload it. I think I'm gonna throw up. I just lay in my room on the floor. I can't even be around this shit. And...
Little did I know I had set the conditions for magic to happen. I had put all of myself into this, all of myself into this weird hybrid pop EDM art piece that I just didn't even want to ever hear again because I had just was over it and it wasn't mine anymore. It belonged to the world at this point. And even once it started taking off to, know, today, I think it has only, you know, somewhere around a quarter of a million streams, you know, sort of plateaued.
And I didn't recognize what was happening. I didn't understand. So there, from there, we start trying to make shit. Let's really turn this into something. We gotta make stuff that's good. We got people's attention. And really ended up sucking the life out of the project. And everything fell apart. So then I come back to Indiana. Well, I moved out to LA for a while. And then I come back to Indiana. And fast forward four years, or I guess three years, I meet this group of high school kids.
out in Santa Claus, Indiana, where Holiday World's at, they had a rock band. And one of them was my now wife, then girlfriend's cousin. And he said, I have a rock band, I heard you record, can you help us? And I was like, shit, I had never worked with a rock band, I don't know what to do. But at the time, I was reading about Rick Rubin, I was reading about Stax Records, I was reading about Jack Holzman at Elektra.
I was reading about these people who had done some shit and I thought, well I could probably figure this out. And I want to figure this out. My whole goal of moving back here was to find my next inspiration in the very land that I grew up. That was the whole call back to leaving the big city, leaving the dream to pursue my dream. So I come back and I find these kids and they're high schoolers and we're going to figure this thing out. Well in the meantime, I start putting together what will become my record label, Wally Opus.
And I'm just learning, I'm learning. What's a contract? What's a LLC? What do I do with all this? Do I invest? I need some microphones. How do I record a band? Where are we set up at? And we chose to record some demos just to see what would happen inside of the guitar player, Rylan Cox, inside of his grandma's living room. We spread out all throughout the house, the amps in one room, the drums are in this room, but the players are all in the same room in the living room and they're running all throughout the house. And I'm just sitting in the kitchen through this kind of
This kind of half window in my cockpit and I got I got my computer set up Same computer that's in front of me right now in my studio. I'm a little monitors. I'm I probably At that time. I don't even know what kind of interface I was using some sort of Sort of old rolling thing that was handed down to me I didn't know it at the time because we were just tracking just to see what would happen
I didn't know it at the time, but what we were recording would end up becoming extremely valuable as the next year and a half unfolded. Right around 2021, after having signed them, after having them, you know, booking them shows, developing their sound, having started what would, you know, become the process of making a record, having recorded those demos, got the keys to the house on a Thursday. This is in March, 2021, April, sorry, April, 2021. I got the keys to the house on a Thursday.
Our son's born Saturday night and on Sunday morning I get a call that Noah, the drummer of the Strangers, has accidentally overdosed and he's passed away. And I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe what the hell I was hearing. I knew he was struggling. I knew he had depression. We had had several talks. We had met with him. We had talked about what are we gonna do? How can we help? And then boom, so we took three months off.
called the band, everybody was in shambles, attended the funeral, gave a little speech on he will live on forever in the music. I didn't know it at the time. I was setting the vision for the project that we were about to make, that we were going to hold to the highest degree. The North Star of the project was gonna be to finish what we started and honor the spirit of our lost friend in this music. I had started toying with this idea of I wonder if we could take the demo drums from that day.
There's not too much bleed, there's a little bleed. And the arrangements are probably gonna need to be switched up a little bit just to make the songs more straightforward and, you know, better. And so, I meet with the band in my studio basement at the time, which was not a studio. There was nothing down here. It was an empty room. I hadn't built the booth. I hadn't put any equipment down here. I didn't have a piano, I didn't have drums. I didn't have all the stuff I have now. No guitars, nothing.
hardly any mics, some like 5 SM57s. We meet, I propose this idea, what if we take the drums, you know, I can do some editing magic just to stitch them together, I'm not gonna change them, I'm not gonna change the timing, I'm not gonna change the performance, what Noah laid down was what Noah is going to be in the songs, and we will re-record the vocals, the guitar, and the bass, and any overdubs over top of these drums, and the band believed.
This is the way. We would have to hold this vision over the course of the next six months. As you know, they're in school, we have time to meet up, we record, we edit, we overdub, we re-record, we edit, we overdub. We just go through all this process to produce eight songs. And you know, along the way, we bring, we get other collaborators, like one guy who wants to help us mix one of the songs and we're talking, he's like, I've been listening to music, man. Like, what do you think about bringing another drummer? Like we can get these drums sounding like this and that and.
It didn't ma- as soon as he said it I'm like, fuck no. We're not doing that. I don't give a shit what it does to the sound. I don't care if it makes him sound like the best drums that make the best quote unquote song- the best songs you've ever heard. That's not what we're doing here. We're here to honor what we started. We're here to finish what we started. And we're not changing that. We're not removing Noah from the music. Then what? He wrote the parts? That doesn't mean anything.
And I think people looked at us like we were crazy. Why would you not make it sound better? Because that's not the point. The point was to honor him in the songs. And we stuck to our guns. We made it happen with what we had. And what we got was an album from the Strangers, a self-titled album from these kids. And their dream, performance-wise, was to perform these songs at the main stage at Louder Than Life, one of the biggest rock music festivals.
in the country, hell on the planet, in Louisville, and I'm like, there's no fucking way. There's just no way, okay, cool. You guys can have that vision. I got a different vision, which is just to finish this record and get a cool release show and book a little tour for you guys. That was my goal. And then whatever happens from there happens. Little did I know, once again, we were setting the conditions for magic to happen, for the world to come in and play a part. Here's an example of someone who owns a truck.
We rolled out two singles, Sweet Holly, Electric Love, and then the self-titled record drops on March 1st, 2022. Followed on March 5th, we're have an album release show at the Astra Theater in Jasper, Indiana. Well, the Astra Theater is a 356 cap room, 57, something like that, cap room, beautiful little theater that was remodeled by a group of believers who wanted this old movie theater to be restored to a concert hall. Great sound system.
really cool people, beautiful space, only a couple years after the remodel. And it's in a town that's not really their hometown. So we're gonna have to figure out how to sell tickets, 350 tickets to this show. And the band sets out, they're on a mission. They set out, they're going door to door. We get the newspaper involved, we get them on the news, the local news, blasting on social media, asking people to come, selling tickets one by one.
And then lo and behold, we sold the SOB out. The night of the show, I literally just got goosebumps because I can feel it now. The night of the show, after all this hard work, after setting this up, all this merch, we got vinyls, we got all this shit. We made it as legit as we could. We have, we hire a great videographer, Thomas Bernard, to come in and tell the story as well. You can watch it on YouTube. And at the show, which I had no idea what was going to happen.
The band's playing with a new drummer, Teal and Atterberry, who steps in and is just a killer drummer. The people stand up and everybody moves towards the stage. This is a theater. Everybody's crowding around the stage now and they're participating, they're singing, they're doing iPhone lights and stuff. And then I walk down and I just sit and I'm just watching and I just feel so much pride and so much gratitude for this moment.
watching this band perform after being through all they went through the last year and I walked past the sound guy and he said, hey, He's like, we keep seeing this light, this streak that come across the video screen. And he's like, we don't know what it is. And I just like, I just thought it's Noah. That's how I felt. It's fucking Noah. He's here. And you know, whether you believe in ghosts or spirits, whatever, it doesn't matter. I'm telling you, it felt.
alive. And then they go on so that we have a have a benefit show for him at the high school where they all went. It was an emotional night. play they end up playing a 25s show, you know, kind of hodgepodge tour around the Midwest. It's mostly weekend runs over the course of two months. And then they come and they say we signed ourselves up for and it was really Lucas, Lucas Washington lead singer signed him up in Danny Wimmer Presents.
battle the bands on the internet and he is, I can't remember what the fucking website is now that they were on Twitch, probably something like that. He signs them up, they start just like advancing rounds, they're getting votes and they're just advancing rounds. And then all of a sudden they have to present a live performance, live stream, come to the studio, come to my house, come to the basement. We set it all up and they live stream. And as this is happening, people around town are catching word of it.
We should support them. And so they start supporting. We keep advancing rounds and then we would find out, you gotta play another round. you gotta do another round. you actually just won the quarterfinals. There's actually four other finals from previous months. We're like, Jesus Christ, they're making us earn this thing. But we're doubling down, back going door to door knocking, sending it to everybody we know, please vote, please vote, please vote. It's happening on this night. And then they win.
They win the virtual, they go to the Troubadour in LA against all odds. I mean, the room was packed with the other, there was head to head with two bands, the band's The Breed. The band Breed brings all these people to crowded rooms. The strangers have maybe 20 people. I didn't even go. I couldn't afford to go. So me and my wife are watching it from the live stream from our bedroom. Both bands play, you know, the strangers need a little bit of attention. Breed's getting, you know, loud applause.
You know, even the DWP people, don't think they were like looking at the strangers. They're looking at Bri. They're like, look at all these people you brought. But the voting happened online. The voting opens, the live stream's going on. We just see this neck and neck tally. And all of sudden, towards the end, here comes the strangers are winning. And I'm jumping up and down on my bed. I'm like, holy fuck, Chloe, we might do it! Chloe's my wife. We might do it. We might do it. And then boom, they won. The strangers. You could even see everybody was surprised. Like, what the hell is this?
How did they just win? The town had rallied, the spirit. And it was, it started in the music. It started by holding strong to the vision of the project from day one, from the music. It set the course for the world to come in, for magic to happen. And guess what those mother-appers won? They won an opening slot on the main stage at the 2022 Louder Than Life in Louisville, and they fucking played.
And it was amazing. It was one of the proudest moments of my young career at the time, was standing stage side, helping them navigate the course of this big music festival, how to get left, right, up and down, and seeing it all unfold and knowing that only a handful of people there actually knew who this band was and what it took to get here in just two years. But really, was a lot, you know, it was everybody's life. It was the culmination of everybody's work and over their lifetime coming to this moment.
I learned so much working with that band, knowing that it really stood the motto of the record label that I had started. It exemplified it. Wally Opus, Wally was an old Scottish slang term I found that was something that was a little wonky. It was valuable because of its faults. was perfectly imperfect. And Opus is large body of musical work. And I thought,
Wally Opus, perfectly imperfect body of musical work. This is it. Records, that's what we do. Everybody has records, Electra Records, Stax Records, Atlantic Records, all the labels I love. We gotta have records in the name. But actually now it's just Wally Opus. Records is just a part of it and we have management as well. But Wally Opus stood for perfectly imperfect. That was the guiding force between all the bands I worked with, all the stuff that I did. We carried that into the next project that I worked on with Swap Eyes.
you
You
No more struggle, no more shiver ⁓
Wait, come on, turn it around
love
Sam Cuban, also works with Ole Opus as a release strategist, and he's a drummer and lead singer of the Chugs, but he comes with these songs that he has for Swamp Eyes. It's a singer-songwriter project. It's a genre of folk, bombastic folk, experimental folk. I don't even, you know, what do you even call it? It's got rock, it's got these loud things, it's like Sparkle Horse, it's like...
You know, I don't even know. I don't know the genre very well, but I'm down to help him because I love Sam and we're going to figure this out. With Sam's Project, it was really about he had the songs, he had a vision for it. I was here to support and I was here to build it out. But a producer's job in my eyes is to pay attention, is to pay close attention to what's going on beneath the surface. What are we actually doing here? And it became apparent that with Sam's Project, he was
He was actually working through the diagnosis of his 17 month old daughter, she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. you know, they didn't know that at first, he was just getting sick and going through this process and it was expensive and it was time consuming. It was scary. Their first born, him and his wife, working through this situation and he poured it into his songs and it became apparent as we were making the record, like, I think you're actually working through something here.
And one day he's like, dinging around and I was like, was like editing something while he's sitting there. was like, you know, what our comping takes. And he was like playing this riff and I'm like, what was that? He's like, Oh, I don't know. It was just like a riff I made up. And I said, you have so many experimental songs on this. They're not very accessible to the average person. What if you took that riff that you just played and you wrote a song around it? What would happen? Like, what would it be? And he's like, I don't know. Let me sit with it. So, you know,
Okay, week goes by, it comes back, I got it. And I love moments like that, because I'm like, yep, I believe you, you fucking got it, we're gonna record it. And he wrote and I recorded and we produced together the song, Cheers. Well, that ends up being his biggest song to date. I it's got over 100,000 streams, very little promotion, very little, you know.
very little on it, it just picked up. People like it still. If people talk about it, people reach out. It still gets added to stuff left and right. And not left and right, but here and there. And it's that subtle awareness of something deeper going on that really brings to life the opportunity for the invisible mechanics of the universe to begin working their magic.
You know, when one commits oneself, all providence moves. It begins this sort of alignment with things you don't even know are happening, things you don't understand that are falling into place around you. And you are working exactly in line with these forces because you're being true, you're being authentic, you're working with reality, you're paying attention, you're serving this vision. And boom, things occur that you never would have saw coming. And oftentimes we get...
All of us who work in music, all of us who do anything get caught up in this idea of doing things a certain way that we think is going to produce success, which is kind of replicating other people's shit or modeling ourselves after others or trying or doing things that you think are going to be cool. Or we should do it like this because it just, you know, that's what such and such did. And it just gets you away from the point. It blurs you. It's cloudiness. It gets you away from the spirit of what you're doing in the moment.
And as a producer, it is my belief that a producer is there to serve. You're there to serve the vision. You're there to serve the music. It's not even about the artist. It's about what the artist brings. It's about what they're going through. But even an artist, I'm not sure a true artist really understands what they're, in the moment of creation, I'm not even sure they understand what's occurring in that moment. They're a transmitter, they're a funnel, they're a conduit through which things are flowing, through which the inspiration's flowing.
And if they're experienced, if they've worked at this long enough, it's flowing in a direction that aligns with the vision. And what you get is some authentic original expression of their soul, of their spirit, and of their vision. And it's, of course it's informed. is first of its kind. It's informed by what they've been listening to over a long period of time and who they like and what they want to be. All these things are coming together in the moment. But when it's really
When you're really serving something true, you're being honest and saying like I don't know about that Let's try this let's try that and then the vision emerges and then we now we this is guiding us and we're saying hold on That doesn't fit this does fit. Let's try this. Are we on here yet? Let's try that What if we throw this shit in and it's like yeah, take it out. It's that sort of real back and forth no external bullshit just focused on this moment
This is when magic occurs.
Super official, go on and tell the whistle You can call me out the fools and it's safe inside the middle Keep it simple, no middle Label superficial just while I am
you ⁓
Shy Kid Redemption, Jax Fleming. I met Jackson when he was the lead singer of Atlas of the Dogs, a small band from Henderson, Kentucky, who opened up for the strangers at a local bar show here in Evansville. And when Jackson walked in the room, I thought, I don't know who the hell that guy is. I never met him really. But he carries some sort of presence about him that just feels attractive and like it takes over the room without him even talking. He's not loud.
He just like walks in and he just got it. And I thought, huh, and we just talked and he's like, yeah, whatever you're doing for the strangers, I want you to do it for me. I'm like, okay, I don't know, I'll figure this out. And it took, you know, I helped him with that band. He had a manager, I kind of co-managed them for a time and I started working on a couple of Atlas of the Dog songs. But me and him had a bond that continued after Atlas came to rest. And it took...
another two years before we would land and we worked together almost weekly writing sessions. He would bring music, I would bring music, he would bring lyrics, I would bring lyrics, we'd try stuff. Nothing was really landing, nothing was really getting until there was just a time period where we really sat in the moment and I was like, you know what, enough aiming at all this bullshit. Just talk to me, just tell me about your life. Who are you? Like, let's unpack this shit.
What was your childhood like? And we really dove deep into his journey in life and his upbringing, his relationship with music, his relationship with art. And we began this sort of, and then we started tying it to where he was at in this moment in his career. This had been a year, year and a half ago. And this idea arise about him being a shy kid growing up.
you know, with a kind of a broken family, ⁓ a background of insecurity and some depression and figuring out what is this, what are you doing now then? Like, what are you pursuing now? when you get on the stage, because he's played some big stages around our area, the Victory Theater, played at the Ford Center, not on the main stage, but he played during one of the hockey games. It was amazing. And he's played
I said the victory there which is a big stage. He just demands the big stage. He looks he looks like he fits up there Like what are you doing? Really? Like what are you pursuing? We kind of narrowed it down to this like he's he's redeeming The the shy kid that he was he's he's really outgrowing that in in in turning that into the force that drives him when he's creating and when he's when he's being a rock star Okay, what is that? What is that?
And as he continues to step out of his shell and become himself, even after he had had a rock band, know, playing these shows, playing these bigger shows and going on his own Midwest tour and releasing on releasing his own album that was very much, you know, kind of modeled after his inspirations. Now we're going to pursue something original. What are we actually aiming at? Well, you're, you're if the North star is like shy, it redeeming that.
that shy kid and turning him into a rock star. What is that? How can we exemplify that? Well, one of the things that came up was this idea of superficial. People are calling him fake for stepping out of the, honestly, the persona of a rock star to become himself. He's gonna pursue, he likes pop music, but he also likes rock. He likes alt music, but he also has this story to tell that's unique to him. How can we bring that out as a producer?
How could I help him marry that story to his art in the most authentic, meaningful way? Because again, he's going through it. He can't necessarily see what it is. He's just, he's making stuff. He's bringing me music. He's bringing me things he likes. What can we do with this? And so with the song Superficial, we thought, we just sat and we just worked out the song. We worked out the song. This idea of super, I'm going, like let's tell, the verses are gonna tell your life where you're at.
I've been working every day saving my money like a fiend. He works his day job, he works his bar gigs, he's making money saving it up for what? And it's for his dream, it's for his pursuit of the dream. Let's tell that story and then let's talk about this idea of going super official, like you're gonna go all in on it. Even if you look stupid, even if people are judging you, it's just because they're comfortable and they're not taking risk in their life. Are you comfortable saying that in a song?
Yes, it feels true, okay. And then what's funny is we work out this song and he has this beat that he made, but then I take it and I take it into Ableton and we just start kind of, I start mixing it. And my method of mixing really is tied into the production itself. They're not, I mean, you should see a finished session. It is not clean. I went to school for music production at Full Sail. I took a mixing class in Pro Tools.
And we didn't do anything with Ableton Live. was Pro Tools and Logic. And I have studied mixing. have books. You know, I Bobby Ozynski's book on mixing. And I had read some other books in school about mixing. So I kind of had like what the... And I watched a shit ton of Pensado's place and videos on mixing. I always wanted just to make the song sound like the songs I like. That's the pursuit of mixing for me. But then it became, you these days it really is just about let's just bring out the song. Let's make the song feel great.
Let's make the song hit. Let's make it emotional. Let's make it impactful. And with Jackson's song Super Official, we're just working it out, man. Like, I'm throwing shit at it. I'm trying this. I'm trying that. Does that feel cool? And I'm doing that on my own when he's not here. And when he comes, it's like, what do you think? OK, we can work with this. And we're recording vocals, and we're tracking it out. And we've got to fill in the bridge. What the fuck's the bridge going to be? Well, let's just see. And then at the time, we were listening to a lot of Neon Pill.
⁓ by K. J. Elphin and I love the sound. I love the polished but also edgy, it's great songwriting, great arrangements, but it's still got this noise in it and it's rough in some areas, but it's intentional. How can we apply that sound to what you're doing?
So we start in on that and we're just working it out, working it out, hours and hours and hours. I mean tons of hours, I shit you not, tons of hours into this song. And then me and Jack's sitting here one day and he's like, I don't know. I'm like, I don't either. Like what is this? I have no idea. Is this good? I'm like, ⁓ I am not the guy to ask if this is good. Like it sounds cool and it's totally you. I mean this is an authentic.
Like it's your story that we put into this and it's your voice. ⁓ I think we've done as much as we can do with this one. Like I think it's time to ship it. And we were ready to put out a first song for him with this new project, which is just self-titled. Let's see what happens. And you know, he hadn't put out stuff in a while and I don't even know if anybody's really paying attention to him anymore, but we're gonna bring in Christian Potts, you my cohort at Wally Opus and...
videographer and just overall great creative marketing guy based in Owensboro and we're go down there and we're gonna we're gonna do some some some reels with him and even with you know I could even tell like in the night when we're doing the reels like we're playing the song and just playing I'm like I don't fucking know about this song man like it's cool but it's weird is it good I don't I just don't know and it's you can't really think like that because it doesn't matter that's not what the goal was the goal was shy kid redemption
The goal was to bring out Jax's authentic voice. And that's what we fucking did. That's all we did. That was the exercise. That's what we did. In doing so, we were successful. Okay. The rest is up to the world. We build up the release. The song drops. And people start texting me. Damn dude, this song is great. Holy shit. One of my buddies who I would have never thought would listen to this song texted me, congrats.
and just couldn't believe how the song sounded and what we had accomplished, just me and Jax. And I didn't even check. I think the song has a hundred thousand plays or close to it now. And it just started what is now Jax's pursuit of his authentic voice after four songs. We're about to drop his new EP here in a month that has Superficial and five other songs on it. But it was really that going for it.
because even people in his life saying, why don't you do more of the shit you used to do? You had something good going, why are you changing it to this more pop, know, weird sounding stuff? It's because why would you not bet on yourself? Everybody else has taken. What is the meaning in copying what other people are doing? I mean, yes, I am not debating. You can make a good living being in a cover band or reiterating other people's work, but imagine the pursuit of you.
Imagine the pursuit of bringing you, your story, as ordinary as you think it is, as regular as you think you are. Imagine unpacking the extraordinary, the sort of, the archetypical aspect of your life and where you're at in your journey. Imagine unpacking that and putting that into your art, embedding on a career, betting on a long-term unfolding of this and not getting worried about whether it works today or whether it works tomorrow or whether the
people are gonna like it. This is about bringing to life what's true and what's authentic to you. And then a most recent example I wanna share comes with the singer-songwriter, also from Henderson, Kentucky, named Maggie Hollis. She's gold and I'm silver She's wood, bird, I'm cheap liquor She's everything you want and more
She's classy and I'm reckless She's kind and I'm ruthless She's got you obsessed No, she's got you obsessed, oh She's got
Now I'll only ever be second best
When Maggie came to me earlier this year, she called me and she had said that she had recorded a record in Nashville a couple years ago when she was younger. She was 16, I believe, and now she's 19. And she said, I just feel like at the time we were kind of, you know, was like, and this happens. People do, this is a common thing people come to me with that, or a somewhat common thing. happens a couple times a year where people say, and I don't always work on the project because it doesn't always make sense or it doesn't always align.
But people come and say, recorded a record in Nashville. Because people think that the stamp of Nashville validates some sort of, you know, gonna be great. Even though if you work in music and you work on a lot of projects, just because you live in Nashville and work on a project doesn't mean shit. And so she goes down, pays for a record, they make it. She's excited about it, sounds good, but she didn't really have any participation in the whole process. She sang on it, she wrote the songs.
But really the guy produced it and turned back in the record and this is what you get. But she wanted something different. She wanted to participate. She wanted to be involved in the production. She had written the songs. She wanted to be involved in the decision making, the direction of the music. And really she trusted in the process of discovering what the sound would be. Because I didn't know. I have no idea. And she likes Taylor Swift. She likes Gracie Abrams, Lizzie McAlpine.
Okay, cool. Let's figure that out. So she comes in, she brings the songs, just me and her in the studio. I'm like, play me your songs. So she plays me the songs. I'm like, okay, hold on, let me set up the mic. Let's just record demos of these songs. Let's just do guitar and vocal. So we track those out, it's to a click. And no, it wasn't even to a click, sorry. We'll just track them out. Okay, cool. I'm gonna send these to my buddy, Tealan from the Strangers, and...
I'm gonna see if he wants to some drums to this, see what we can do. And really the goal with this, in my eyes, was Maggie wants to participate in the music. She wants to be in the music. And I listen back to the demos over and over and I'm thinking, why doesn't she just play the guitar? I mean, Gracie Abrams' song is a guitar heavy, know, acoustic guitar driven. Why don't we, why doesn't, why don't she just play the guitar and then we'll figure out what the arrangements around that. We'll work it out. We'll figure it out as we go.
And we're gonna trust in the process that by her leading, her leading with what she brings, that will guide us as to where we need to go. And it will emerge the theme and the direction of the songs themselves. And we're gonna just try to stick to what we have. And so we booked some days with T-Lan. T-Lan comes in, Maggie comes in, we just begin. We're tracking drums, and T-Lan's a master.
mic setter up around his drums, so that's perfect. I'm not the best at recording drums and I don't really enjoy recording drums, but he's a great player. So, and he knows how to set up the mics really well for what I just say, hey, this is what I want. He can set it up. That's something that changed over the years. You know, I've been making music on a computer since I was a, let's see, like a sophomore in high school, since I was like 15 or 16.
and I'm 31, so it's a long time that I've been just in the computer making music. And I always was just making use with samples or just sounds that I would record from the room or record a sound on my iPhone of knocking on a table or banging on a ⁓ bucket and using that as a kick drum or like... ⁓
all kinds of weird shit that I did over the years, just playing around, just learning. But doing like the legit drum thing, I did it in college, I'm like, this isn't me, I'm an artist, I do other shit. But as I've gotten older and realized how great well-performed drums sound and how the performance is the magic of the take, I really don't care about mics, I really don't care about all of the technical stuff that goes in.
You know, sometimes I've actually had a couple phone calls with younger people, like maybe they're in college or in high school and they want to talk mixing and microphones and all this stuff. And they're like, well, how do you treat like a, what kind of compression do you put on like a snare drum? And I'm like, oh my God, I fucking hate this question. Cause I don't know. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. And I just always talk, I always revert back to like, well, what does this song need? Like what is the...
What are you aiming for in the song? What kind of compressors do you have? I don't even know where you're at in this journey. It's just such an arbitrary question to me because it's really about, what's the point of the song? Like Andrew Schepst said, all that matters is what comes out of that speaker. That's it. That's all that matters. If it sounds great, it sounds great. Who gives a shit about the rest? Of course we give a shit about the rest. I just told you I spent...
years watching YouTube videos and Pensado's place and experimenting and trying on all this stuff, going to school for it even, but at this point, who cares about all that stuff? All we care about is making the music sound great and fit the artist and express their vision. That's all we're doing. If we've done that, we've done our jobs. I'm also not an explicit mix engineer who's a gear head. That's reserved for other people in the music industry.
I'm more in the Rick Rubin field in the study of the expression itself of where it comes from and staying true. So we have Maggie in the studio and she's really, she's driving the sessions. Her performances, her ear, what she likes and doesn't like, it's driving the sessions. Of course, I'm helping take risks, I'm pushing things forward, I'm suggesting things, I'm mixing when she's not here and I'm presenting stuff back.
And once it land, once we, you know, the thing is, once we set out, I really don't know where we're gonna land. I can't guarantee anything. I can't promise what we're gonna get out of this. That's not what art would be, you know? I can't say, like I'm not that kind of producer who can just, you know, I'm the guy who's known for this thing. I'm just gonna make whatever she gives me into whatever I can land on with what we've got, with the other instruments and with, you know, with what we have.
And once it's all finished, me and her are listening back and I'm like, what do you think? She's like, it's perfect. I'm so, she was so excited and so proud of what we had done. And she played on the record. She made decisions on the record. She told me what she liked and didn't like. She wanted this, she didn't want that. We even tried stuff that we ended up taking out because it was like, I think we should just stick to it being simple and true to the art. And I'm really grateful that we did that with her.
Yes!
I say all of this to exemplify my approach to producing music. I'm not guided by what I think is going to be cool or what I think is going to work. I'm not guided by what I want or even necessarily what the artist thinks they want coming into the session. I'm guided by what I'm discovering in the moment. And I'm guided by what I'm, what's unfolding and what the artist is telling me because what they're telling me is
is true and even if they say something, it might actually mean something else that's more subtle and that might take some encouragement to really bring out, like you really should step into that. I think that's the truth. And I've been in moments where it didn't work, where clearly we were not entered into this agreement understanding the commitments we were making. Perhaps the artist thought, well, you're gonna just make, you're gonna make me sound like such and such.
you're gonna make this record sound like Morgan Wallen. And I'm like, I don't want it to sound like Morgan Wallen, gonna sound like you. And I've even been in a moment where one guy came in and he's showing me these songs. I'm like, okay, cool. Oh yeah, that's good. I mean, it's good song, it's cool. But I don't understand how it associates to you. I don't understand where you're at in this. He's like, well, I think write a couple songs about, I'm really sure to them with anybody. And he shares them and I'm like, whoa.
That's it, man. That's it. That's different than what I thought you were gonna bring. It's different than what you think you should be making. That's it. But he didn't agree with me. He didn't agree, even though those were his personal songs that he wrote that he hasn't shared with anybody. To me, I'm like, that's where the fucking magic lies, man. If we can unpack that, that's gonna unlock so much other things in your career. It just will. Because once you start expressing yourself authentically, once you start creating from a place of truth, it's gonna carry over.
because you're know the feeling now. You know what it feels like to express yourself in that place and it's gonna start carrying over into your content. It's gonna carry over into just all the other areas of your project where you are presenting something other than who you actually are. Or even who you want to be. The real thing that you're aiming for that means something that's rooted in who you are and in your ordinary experience that's, like I said earlier, that's being.
ordinarily brought into an extraordinary light. That we are making what is imperfect about you. We're displaying it for the world. We're highlighting it as the truth and as is what it is. It is what it is. Isn't that what art is? It is what it is. And you just do that over a long period of time and all of a people are like, oh yeah, that's him. He does that thing. That's her. Yeah, no, she does that thing. Yep, it's great.
And at the time, when you started making it, nobody knew what the fuck was going on. People were probably like, don't do that, that's a bad idea. Just like when I moved back here from LA, people were like, that's a death sentence, there's nothing going on in Indiana. And I'm like, that's fine, we're gonna go build it, we're gonna go create it, we're gonna go figure it out. There's no artists there, bullshit.
Anyway, for producers like me, for people who are guided by what's real, what's authentic, what feels good, there is commitment in the ordinary to uncover something extraordinary. And if we do this well, we have been successful. We finished these projects, we have been successful. the thing is, the invisible, unpredictable thing is, if you do this well,
If you operate from a place of intention, a place of integrity, a place of vision, and you stick to it, you set the course for magic to happen. You set the conditions for the world to come in and set the damn thing ablaze.
Hey, thank you for listening to the show this week. Visit everybody else podcast.com to learn more about this show, including a list of past guests and previous episodes. You can find me on Instagram at West Luttrell, where I post my own work, including activities related to this show. And you can also find the show on Instagram at everybody else podcast. This show is self produced and hosted by me, West Luttrell with artwork by Ethan Douglas and music by Jim Neuer.
grateful that you spent a little time this week listening to our podcast and learning more about the invisible people out dedicating their lives.
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