Part one from last week's Songbridge

Brian Allen has a wealth of experience in the industry as a songwriter, guitar player, producer, as well as enjoying 15 years heading up the A&R department at Attic Records. He knows what it takes to be a winner in this industry, in mind, spirit and in talent. He has over 10 million in career sales notched on his belt and will be offering up his insight once a month, as a feature contributor to Songbridge, with excerpts from his forth coming book. By way of introduction, we took the opportunity to speak with Brian about his past, present and future.

"You're not into this and you know it…do you think anyone else is buying this either!?" I knew at one point in time I had always wanted to own my own business… and silly me I had never thought of it being (music). I'm thinking I'm going to make the miracle dog polisher, we're going to make a fortune…you know the crazy ideas for the inventions and I was so subjective about the whole thing that I forgot that all of my experience in the music business could actually BE my business.

It all came to me in that one revelation moment with the razor in my hand. I decided… instead of applying it to the wrists … lets clean ourselves up here and go for the gold! I said to myself… "you know you love producing… you know you love being a songwriter, you know you love to help people get along in their careers, you know you've learned a lot by watching success and failure…its time to apply all that before no one believes a guy with a cane and a walker!". So that's how it was formed.

Jana: Are you enjoying being at the helm of your own company?
Brian: I'm getting to do a lot of things with AMPLUS that I couldn't do with Attic Records. Attics' mandate, as it is with most record companies - which is not a fault, it's just business - is to find artists who are somewhere around 85% market ready…knowing that the record companies' brains, brawn and resources can be thrown behind it to top up the 15% and take it to market. Periodically I would see artists who were closer to the 50, 60, 70% market ready but where more innovative and interesting. Yet time and time again, when I'd sit down with the staff to discuss taking an artist like that on, I'd say "please give me 6 months to work with this artist, let me incubate them a little etc"… the label would say… "Sorry Brian, we can't take on that kind of extravagance for the same risk value". So now I'm getting to make that decision on my money…and it's very interesting. I'm not making myself rich, I'm breaking even, but I'm really enjoying my work and I sleep great!

Jana: A lot of producers take a project on because they get paid to do it. What helps you pick your productions?
Brian: First off… I have to actually ask myself, "am I just taking money to do this?" and I don't do that. I do not wish to simply put my name on something, take my pay cheque and go home. I don't believe I'm making a contribution to their career in a conscionable way when I don't believe in them. And it's not making a conscionable investment in my own value for me to do that. And if somebody hears a nicely polished turd with my name on it doesn't do anything for my equity in the market place either.

Jana: So what is it that inspires you to take a project on?
Brian: If I could call it a science and bottle it… we'd all be rich… but, you just kind of know. When it's time to jump you know it's time to jump. Some things are more obvious than others. You can actually detail and articulate the components that lead you to the decision process and other times there may actually be something that looks very dangerously wrong from an economic point of view but something about this persons' spirit or their voice is telling me its worth spending some time to at least work two or three songs, and see what happens…

Jana: So it's all instinct then?
Brian: Absolutely instinct… and the thing about instinct is you can't go and look for Presidents Choice instinct on a shelf. But, if you go out and make enough mistakes and have a few successes… you can develop good instincts. You have to reach. You have to have the pain to get the gain. You have to experience failure to develop good instincts.

Jana: You worked as head of A&R at Attic and at the same time produced some of their artists. Was that a common occurrence at that point in time?
Brian: Uhm…No, I actually wanted to make sure it wasn't … because the first one was Haywire's first album and how that came about was that we made a target list, between the band and myself, of producers we really would love to have on the record. One by one they either didn't feel they were right for the project or the project was right for them or they didn't have the time, or were too expensive etc. We got through the whole list and the whole time we'd been talking about what kind of production they wanted. I knew what they wanted so I said "well if we can just get in the studio and do it. If we can just get this engineer and that studio in X of time etc", and it eventually evolved to "well let's just do it!" It will cost less, and we know what we want. So that's how that happened and literally that's how everyone of those productions happened.