I’m a city guy. I like to visit the country, but at heart, I am a city guy. One day while reading the Sunday paper I grabbed the help wanted section and joked, “there’s never any music jobs in the paper”….. I was wrong. The ad headline said, “music producer wanted for growing Wisconsin based publisher”. Well, I was curious. So I sent my resume’ and after talking with the creative director, I found myself driving to Minocqua, Wisconsin to “C” this operation myself.

        “Ever work with nature sounds?” asked Bob the sound engineer. Uh, no, but I’m a quick learner. I did know a thing or two about the music business though, and knew how to get projects done! It turned out I got the job as executive music producer for the NorthSound music label, part of Tom Klein’s (Loon Magic) amazing NorthWord press.

This company was growing like crazy with accounts like Target, WalMart and thousands of nature themed gift shops. NorthSound invented the interactice display. I’m sure you’ve seen them everywhere, push a button of the cover and a sample of the music plays. Through my almost 3 years with this job, I not only learned a lot about nature and nature sounds I, “the lucky guy”, was able to combine my own piano compositions with the sounds of nature. I never thought that as a little piano student that my music combined with thunderstorms, loons, wolves and even big ocean waves would be my big break into the music world. Did it work? I was able to sell over 2 million CD’s! Because Mother Nature was good to me, that success helped me land other recording contracts (American Gramaphone) and new executive producing jobs (Baby Genius, Medacy, Allegro and others).  Thanks Mom Nature! Where do I send you royalty checks? 

Click for a sample of “Solitary Shores”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 11:10 pm and is filed under music news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.