Michelle Featherstone interview

I consider myself lucky to have been witness to the flowering of a very talented singer songwriter. I was there when Michelle Featherstone played her keyboard and sang a couple of original songs for the first time at a small party, simply for kicks. It was at that time that she realized the possibility of doing this for a living, and a few years later, she has done just that. I had an opportunity to have a phone interview with Michelle as she was getting ready to release her latest album Blue Bike.

Blue Bike, this is your sophomore album correct?

Yes, it is technically my sophomore album, people who are die hard Michelle Featherstone fans… …would know that there are two albums that preceded these two that are up on itunes, which I used to make out of my house and sell them via pay pal. I had a lot of placements over the last few years, and when I first started out there was no iTunes, and no way to find out who’s song was on what TV show, but somehow people were finding me. And I found the desire and the need to start sort of compiling CD’s together. The first one was sort of an amalgamation of a couple of songs that had been on TV and a couple on new ones that’d just come out of the studio doing and I sold that. Then, I got a few more placements and they were mostly piano vocals so I ended up doing a second album that was just piano vocals, which I’m sure just bored the pants of of everybody (laughs) but it was basically to supply the demand, and believe it or not people bought them! That was pretty cool. Then Fallen Down which was my first album that I did within a studio and got it up on iTunes. That was my first attempt at getting out into the world, having a lot more exposure and not having to make the CDs myself. That came out in 2006.



I started work on another album in 2007, but during that time I left my publishing company and we decided that the best thing to do was to start off completely fresh. If I was going to go out independently again, then I might as well own everything from scratch. So, I spent the last part of 2007 and basically all of 2008,writing and getting the material just right, and spending some time co-writing, which is a fairly new thing for me. So the product is Blue Bike, the majority of work that I wrote through the latter part of 2007 and early 2008.


What is the major difference between the prior albums and this one?

I think the major difference is that I set out to make a cohesive album. The previous albums had been compilations of music that I’d written over time, so some of those songs hadn’t even been written anywhere near each other in terms of months and some had been written years prior, so we just sort of compiled my catalogue of material and put on the songs that sounded good or had been placed on TV. This was the first time I sat down and really wrote everything, in some ways chronologically, and that goes for the emotions too. I did go through another break-up, which was incredibly difficult for me to get through and I’m very lucky as a musician, I do have an outlet, and a vehicle to express myself but, I didn’t want to make up an entire album of just break-up songs so (laughs)… I hope I haven’t done that again! I know there’s several on there….BUT some of them mean different things some of them have different aspects of the break-up. Silverlake is about moving, moving back to an environment that was comfort to me, that I’ve lived before, that I was familiar with. 10 stories down has that sort of feeling that, I wanted to shut out, being this sort of kind of person that was constantly sad and miserable. I wanted to turn the television up so no one could hear it, so nobody could see it. There was a hibernation aspect. It was the idea of just wanting to sleep through this pain and get through it. I wanted to have the album feel like a process, because that was exactly what I was going through as I was writing it, and as I was recording it. I think by the time you get to good to be alive at the very end, hopefully it feels like that. I remember writing that song so well. I had moved. I’d been writing all this dark music. And there was a moment of it being a beautiful day. I took a walk around the reservoir and I came back and I felt like I got to see it again. I got see the world again, without looking through a glass shield of pain or sadness or heartbreak or worry or anything else. I definitely got to see a positive side, like, o.k, here’s moving on. So I think that’s what makes the album different. I really sat down with the intention to write a cohesive album from start to finish.

Did you find that process enjoyable, of making a deliberate cohesive album, or did you find that you lost a bit of spontaneity?

Yes, I found it enjoyable. I feel that most of 2007 and 2008 I was very prolific as a song writer because I had left my publishing deal and because they owned my catalogue up to that point, to that last song, I had to make sure that I had a lot more material coming in if I was going to hope of getting another publishing deal. So, I just spent a lot of time writing. The process allowed me to exacerbate all ideas that were coming out of me that were personal that were about my journey and my process and also because I was co-writing with different people, I was still getting to write in a different style and write in a different way. It didn’t feel like I was writing one song to the next to the next to the next, there were definitely several that were all by the end, some that stood out to me, that represented who I was and who I am as a musician right now. So the process didn’t’ lack spontaneity at all rather I was just more methodical. I made sure that I wrote in a consistent, daily, weekly basis. Then, once that I had done enough, that I had a consistent catalogue of work again, I could then go back and say, this ones are clearly ones for me as an artist and these ones are for this cool boy band, you know, whatever…(chuckle)

Did you get what you wanted to from this album?

Oh it’s a long road from start to finish. You think, I’ll start it in August, I’ll be done in September, it’ll be up on iTunes by the end of September and it’s February and it will be March before it will be up on iTunes…I think I got everything that I needed out of this, yes. I think it’s a ‘good’ sophomore attempt at my record. I show growth as a professional songwriter and hopefully, musician and singer. I certainly don’t feel done yet. I definitely want to explore more creative ideas, develop my songwriting even more, work with different people. I have to say that at this very moment, it’s sort of exhausting. It’s done, but there are so many little bits and pieces that you have to think about as an independent artist from, finding and aggregator to be the middle man between you and iTunes, to finding and online store to, getting the aggregator to pay the publisher rather than you, having to work out the accounting, to graphic design to, set list, track list, set order, I mean it never ends. It’s a never ending process really. Then, there’s promotion, distribution, then there’s gigs, then there’s support for that, and paying musicians and tours and the list goes on and on and on. I think that I’m lucky that from the process for this album in particular I’ve had to learn how to do everything. And I have a great team of people who work with me, a manager and a lawyer. You hope to add to those people, like a booking agent, a placement agent, hopefully this, hopefully that…but you know it has been an interesting process so, I have gotten out of it all that I wanted from this process and a hell of a lot more.

Do you want to get signed? or would you prefer being an independent artist?

Well I think the right answer is…of course I want to get signed! I’ve been able to work in this business for the last few years, so I’m well aware of how the business has changed. I think I’m going to be my own worst enemy because I know too much about how the business works. Unless the deal is particularly good for me, I’m not sure that I would give up my control and the ownership I have over the masters and at least 50% of the publishing. I don’t think I’d give that up for a random deal. It would have to be with someone who I’d know could take me to a level that I couldn’t get to by myself, and that is becoming more and more difficult, as labels are loosing, struggling to find a way to keep up with what’s happening with iTunes and the digital revolution.

As a musician what avenues do you have for making money?

Apart from the income that comes from CD sales I license music to photographers, who want to use wedding songs or happy songs, I do have happy songs amazingly enough… (laughs)


I know it’s shocking. I have a wedding song that was featured on One Tree Hill and the Rachel Ray Show, it’s called Man and Wife. It got a lot of exposure because it was on One Tree Hill and I actually got flown out to play that song on the show. So that song got a lot of attention and photographers started using it for their wedding sites. There was another song that was on a TV show called Inconceivable, which was basically about a fertility clinic, and that was called Sweet Baby. That song got a lot of attention based on the promo for that show. The show itself didn’t go past two episodes, but same thing, people thought that song was great to use for compiling DVDs of pictures together, and they license those songs from a company that uses me on their page.

The royalties from songs on TV shows have been consistent. The placements have been consistent. A couple of ones have been good, others have not been too great but if they are consistent you can survive. I had a commercial last year that ran in Canada last year, also using the Man and Wife song. I was lucky that I have a few songs that have a sort of ‘commercial’ sound, and that has sort of assisted me in driving my career forward. I’m constantly working. I think the biggest misconception is that as a musician you kinda just get to sit around and just play your guitar and your piano for a little while, and that’s all you do, but that isn’t. I work on looking up MySpace, connecting with people on Facebook, going to MTV Soundtrack, going to American Song Space, looking up on Craig’s List, on any kind of tool that I can find, musicians union. I work with people who are guitar players for this band and that band, I offer my services as a demo singer or demo player. You just get really creative, and think it comes literally from a desire to NEVER WORK AS A WAITRESS EVER AGAIN (laughs).

Honestly, that is where my motivation comes. If I have to go back to the service industry, if somebody asks me for a refill of iced tea I will stick a fork in their eyeball. There’s no way I could get out of that, and I would go to jail. I would be in jail for stabbing somebody with a fork and I wouldn’t mean to. It would just be a natural response!

I try to make all these decisions for myself and my life. At this stage I won’t be doing this anymore. It didn’t always go that way but the more I realized I’d found this niche in television, I really wanted to work that. I wanted to provide good songs of the same quality as any other song on the radio. It would just give the music supervisor a cheaper option, because I didn’t have a label saying, you are going to pay us forty grand to use this song. I was like, what do you guys have in the budget? and they would tell me the budget and then they would say but we can only pay you an eighth of that cause you’re an independent. So, yea. That’s that.

Do you ever feel like you would rather NOT let TV shows use your music?

No, I never feel like that, not ever, because it’s a kind of exposure that I couldn’t pay for. There are people watching that TV show in every state in the United States and pretty much a lot of different countries in Europe, Scandinavia, and even Japan and China, and there’s no way I could get out to all those places. I can’t afford to just tour around, hire musicians, get a bus and tour all over the united states. I just can’t afford that at this point. I’m hoping to do that with this record, but it’s difficult to do that because you have rent to pay and responsibilities to take care of and it’s hard to just get in a van and head off in the open road to play gigs for 14 people. TV has offered me a kind of exposure that I never would have had. To do this independently, there’s absolutely no chance in hell that I would have gotten out as much as I have. Ultimately that drives TV sales, it gets people interested in who you are, it gets people coming back and listening to more music that you’ve done, and hopefully checking you out when you have another album. Yea, I would never turn anything down. You know there was a moment where I had to sort of swallow and just say, yeah alright, that was many years ago and I still reap the benefits from it even if it was viewers paying for CDs afterwards.

Read part two of iProng Magazine’s Michelle Featherstone interview in our next issue – Michelle talks more about her new album and shares her favorite iPhone apps!