I honestly can’t even watch those big budget videos, because I absolutely HATE looking at this high-gloss, makeup and hair, styled by a team and overall watered down version of myself. (Readers Digest: All of this money is recoupable, and i would have had to pay it back if i didn’t get dropped, despite not having a real say in where it got spent.) Fast forward to now, I have music videos that my boyfriend shot in my bathtub for FREE that have more views and streams than the singles and videos they chose and paid for. They spent about $60,000 on THREE music videos. I think you can probably guess how it feels to write hundreds of songs and to have THREE released, so I won’t write paragraphs about how sad and pathetic I felt, and jump straight to the budgeting. The best/worst part of all this math? Guess how many songs my major record label put out…. I did sessions like this for over THREE YEARS. There’s about 60-70 sessions just within this three or four month period, so if you do the math? I wrote about 65 hooks and 2,080 bars of rap in just 3 or 4 months. I showed up to every session and wrote a hook and 2 verses. Here’s a few months of my calendar from 2015/2016, and as you can see, there’s a LOT of writing sessions (4-5 a week, sometimes 2 a day, sometimes weekends). I was working with people who worked with freakin Beyonce and Eminem. At first it was fun, i was meeting new producers and writers almost every single day, and I felt like i was really living my dream. Immediately after I signed I started doing sessions. My lawyer looked it over (I’m not a complete idiot) and told me it was okay to sign, and honestly, at 24? A record deal was a dream come true. I signed my name on the line, not really knowing what I was signing, even today, 7 years later, I STILL have to call my music industry mentors to have them, once again and repeatedly, explain things like publishing and master splits and royalties. I often referenced Weezer and Wu-Tang, and they truly understood my creative vision. The songs were good, not great, but they saw my skill and most importantly my potential. I brought them a handful of alt-rock / rap songs that I’d been working on with a few music industry veterans who believed in me. At 23 or 24, my dream came true, and I signed a decent record deal with Mercury Records (which then got sucked into Island and eventually spat me out on Island Def Jam).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |