Recording - January 2013 - 52

Continued from page 51 “This has got to be an introspective, organic, vibe-y, male vocal song, so this character that is looking for his father can have this soulful moment.” Then I convey that to the record label, and a couple weeks later they say, “We have a great song,” and it’s an upbeat Katy Perry song, you know, or something like that. What’s great for them is when the dates of the film’s release line up with the dates of working the single. I think a lot of people imagine that as a music supervisor you get to hang out in your office and just listen to music all day and go,“Oh, I love this. This is so cool. I think I’ll put it in my next TV show or movie.”Is it anything like that? John: It’s like that. But it’s more like 11:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. that you get to do that. The rest of the time you’re jamming on emails, or we’re in the editing rooms a lot, or on the set a lot for shooting music-related scenes. This past summer I had to go to Atlanta five times for different on-camera issues. Yeah, it’s just a constant flow, and our house is filled with CDs, our computers are filled with links that are downloaded and waiting to be listened to. You’ve got to work that stuff in, but it’s certainly not leisurely. I’m gonna tell you a story about Kevin. He walked into my office the other day, and he said,“This is what I live for.”And I said,“What?”He found out that Julie (Houlihan) had put a song from a TAXI member into a show or a movie that she’s working on. You know, people want to believe that our screeners are trying to keep you guys out.“Oh, the screener rejected me. TAXI rejected me. The screener didn’t like my music.”The screeners are [people like] Kevin Houlihan, and he is a musician… All these guys are huge fans of music and the people who create it. But for him to walk into my office—we didn’t have a meeting or anything—he just came down the hall because he was so excited. And on behalf of that member who he didn’t know, he said,“This is what I live for.”So I just want you guys in the audience to know that he represents the spirit of the TAXI A&R team better than anybody I know. [applause] Kevin, what goes through your head when you sit down and start looking through 300 submissions from TAXI members? Kevin: I’m just am looking to do what I can to help the artist get plugged into a TV show or film. There’s a lot of great music out there, and a lot of the submissions that we get at TAXI are strong songs, but often not exactly on target. So I’m sort of the middle-man between the artist and the supervisor, figuring out what they need. I’m really just trying to do a service to the artist to get their music out there into the world, and a service to the supervisors to try to make their job easier so they don’t have to stay up until three o’clock in the morning.
52

...which John will anyway. Kevin: Which he will anyway. [Unless] he’s got somebody going through 500 songs and coming up with a short CD of seven forwards. John: I’d like to add that for someone in Kevin’s position, he’s got to earn and keep the trust of the people looking for the music, because if he sends in music that’s too far out of a narrow lane, there are other people who are playing songs that might be more accurate and more worthy of their time. So you don’t get many chances before someone goes, “You know what? It’s not going to so-and-so for search, because he comes back with the wrong music that no one has time to listen to.” Julie, tell us what a music editor does. We all see it in the credits, but so few people actually understand what an editor does. Julie: Well, a music editor is usually involved— especially in a film—in temping the score before the composer comes along. It’s finding that tone, along with the supervisor, and actually just doing the work. The music supervisor might send you three scores that are really, really good, but somebody’s got to put the video in, and somebody’s got to time it to each emotion or each turn in the scene. So you’re physically cutting the music on the computer to fit the scene. And then once you’re past that, you might be taking the song… Usually you get a hand-off from the editor and the music supervisor, and you’re matching what the editor—or improving what the editor did—and preparing the session to go to the mix stage. Then you spend the day on the mix stage just making sure that everything gets mixed in properly, making any changes that the producers might want to make at the time. In TV, a lot of times you’ll go in with two or three different songs for a scene, and they might decide right there, or it might be whichever one clears in time is the one that you use. So you’re sort of like the technical glue for the supervisor and the composer. And then when the show or the film is done, you do the cue sheet, which gets turned in to all the performing rights organizations. So it sounds like you really need to be a musician in order to be a good music editor. Julie: I think so. I think you have to have a really good ear, more than being able to push the buttons. Like somebody said, “Oh, you’re a gearhead now.” I’m really not a gearhead. I just know what I want, I know what I like. I’m not the most technical music editor out there, but I know what I think sounds good. So that’s what I do. But I am a musician. I have a degree in music and those types of things. Yeah, I think it’s important. Do you ever have a director who hands you something or a supervisor hand you something and you just can’t

make it work? Julie: I recently worked on show where the editors did some of the worst music editing I’ve ever heard. They would just pull different parts of songs, and they would edit the picture without regard to the music. Sometimes, when I would get the music back, it would be all different pieces of a song. So, in that case, you either do the best you can with it, or you go to the producer and you say, “You know what? This really doesn’t make sense, and I don’t think the integrity of the song is being held up here. So how about if we do it like this?” And so they do look to me to fix things and make them work better. What can you do when you’re stuck with a horrible music edit? Julie: Well, there’s a mixer’s trick, which is, you put a car driving by, or a door slam—something over it and you can kind of hide it. But then there are other little technical things you can do. You can expand a beat; you can squeeze a beat. Because a lot of times what they’ll do is they’ll get the beginning how they want it, and they get the ending how they want it, and they don’t care what happened in the middle, they just want the music editor to fix it. So sometimes they’ll let you slide it one way or another, but they really get hooked on “the vocal comes up right there at the end,” and they really don’t want to lose that. So you do some things that you wouldn’t normally do, but, hopefully, you smooth it over so people don’t notice it. I love the car driving by. That’s really cool. Do we have Patrick on the line? Patrick, you there? Patrick: Yes, can you hear me? Helloooo. Yeah, we can. This is so awesome. We’re looking at a cardboard cutout of you that’s life-sized, sitting next to Julie on the panel. It’s pretty awesome. Patrick: I was hoping you were going to be able to thin me out a little bit more with that cutout. Julie: You look very small. You’re lookin’ good. We have been doing the Road Rally for 15 years, and you are the very first cardboard cutout that we’ve ever used. Anyway, let me ask you a question. (It’s really weird talking to cardboard.) As a studio music executive, do you get actively involved in supervision, like really hands-on doing it yourself? Or are you supervising the supervisors? Patrick: A little bit of both. In the age of the shrinking film budgets, there’s not a whole lot of times that I’m able to hire a music supervisor on Continued on page 55

Recording - January 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2013