Rock & Roll (Icky Ew Ew)
So when I’m not searching for a job I will probably never find or wrestling with Social Security to get benefits I am told I need, which would be great but I’d rather not need them at all, I am sifting through and producing music sent to me by my AHi artists. What is AHi; I know you are asking with feverish intensity? It’s a media company I founded in 2021 at the height of The Pandemic™ when I decided that I was tired of women getting a pass on singing about lesbian or bi love while the same music from a man was treated as icky ew ew.
(Yes, I know there are many, many songs written and sung by queer men and women that are subtextual. But when you have a talent like Bright Light Bright Light write a song called Cold Sweat, Hot Boys, only to have the immensely talented Ana Matronic perform the vocals instead of performing the vocals himself, in my opinion, we have a problem.)
After twenty years in the yacht design industry where the mantra is evolution not revolution, I basically decided that was bullshit. AHi, or Ardshiel Heavy Industries, is accelerationist in nature. None of the artists we’ve signed so far are evolutionary. No, they sing openly about queer love, longing, and grief. And when they get stymied by an idea they can’t find a lyric for, they turn to me. That’s a wonderful feeling because they make me feel needed and valued as a writer. As a for instance, our country act Circuit ’72 is fronted by a fellow Houstonian named Griff. Not his real name, I’ll get to that in a minute. Griff is a political machine who bailed on the United States in the middle of Bush Jr.’s first term. If it were up to him, he would just write scathing diss tracks about how American corporations have partnered with purchased politicians to squeeze every last drop of life out of the people. I don’t disagree with him, but I have to constantly remind him that sometimes it feels like he’s punching down when he shares a song. He’s a nag who wants the American people to wake up, and his first album released almost a year ago was a 50/50 split of political songs and good old (queer) country. But after he finished, he wasn't completely comfortable with the tone. I ended up producing and writing his entire second album Rodeo Queens, which is coming in May. My gosh, what a pleasure that was, and what a thrill that he was so excited to take my lyrics and shape them into something he enjoyed. It was just a heartening process.
Today, though, I am working on two different releases. One is by a fellow named Reg, who goes under the nom de plume King Drift, from Shoreditch. He’s a young man who spits rhymes. Proper British Grime, he calls it, though he has a lovely singing voice. Like Griff, he’s a political machine and his self-titled debut album released at the start of this month. I really don’t know much about grime but it’s a good record. Very difficult to work on, though. I don’t mind a challenge, but he’s an old school beatboxer and getting that kind of percussion into music mastering software is challenging. Along with the beat, I am only given the vocals. I have to use loops, my own terrible keyboard skills, and plead with Griff to add some guitar or bass to bring the album together.
His debut landed with a thud.
In this era of streaming it’s difficult for an artist to make it. When I was young and in a Christian band it was relatively easy to get people to listen to our music. And they took the time to offer advice and tinker with the sound. They did all this on their dime, but that has inverted. If King Drift wants to get ears, there’s no clear avenue. We’ve tried TikTok, Insta, Meta, X, Threads, and fuck knows what else. While we get many likes, except on TikTok which is blatantly homophobic, it doesn't get anyone into Spotify or Apple music to listen to the songs. So 100,000 likes on a Facebook ad translates into exactly zero new listeners.
The only means to get more listeners is to pitch your music to a Spotify editorial playlist and hope they pick it up and it gets high placement and people enjoy it. Because we have no funding right now, I have to rely on a third party to push our music to all the streaming services, and then I work with the artists to pitch their music. Now, I can pay the third party publisher to pitch our music to Spotify on our behalf, but it costs £800. And that's for 8,000 organic listeners, whatever that means. For £1,500, you get 1,000,000 organic listeners, which is still pennies from Spotify. In Spotify economics, that might net the artist £3,000 on a good day, but after the middleman takes their pound of flesh and you factor in the months of lead time, you're essentially paying for the privilege of being seen, not for a paycheck. But it does give the song a chance of getting popular on other services, and perhaps someone will buy the single or the entire album. So it’s very slow going, and I feel bad for King Drift because he doesn’t want fame, but I know he could use the money. Whomst amongst us could not use more money?!?
On the other hand, I’m working with a well-known pop star who had their debut album with AHi in late February. It’s a piano driven, blue-eyed soul affair that has a few lively tracks, but you will never know who the artist really is because they aren't out. They found out about AHi through a friend of a friend. They go by Falwell, which I am not sure is a wink or if there is some connection to Jerry, but Jerry would not be happy with Falwell’s music because it’s very gay, and I love that this pop star trusted me with this secret side of themselves. Griff is out, but he has a real job, a job that requires him to fly below the radar so he can’t put his real name on his work either. It’s all very intriguing, in a way. Only my husband and I know the secrets of the label, and fortunately at this point no one cares to ask who these people are.
Falwell, like King Drift, is a very talented writer and a classically trained pianist, so most of what I get from him is finished work that I just have to tweak and listen to repeatedly in order to make sure I’m not missing some pop or hiss that will detract from his message.
In all three cases, it’s incredibly rewarding to be working with such talented people. What I was working on today specifically was a single release for King Drift which will land in June, and an EP for Falwell which will land in May. We haven't quite worked out the exact dates yet.
I daydream about being able to fund those editorial pitches to Spotify, but we aren't there yet. We’re giving the whole project that is AHi five years. If we haven't found success after that, the label will die and no one will have noticed or cared, and that’s okay. For now we are having fun, and working on music is a wonderful distraction from the mundane existence of living here in Costa Rica, which comically was named one of the five happiest places to live in the world.
But I’ll address that another time.
