Adventures in the sync world
- youngtobacco
- Sep 2, 2024
- 5 min read
"It's a bit like speed dating," is how co-writing for sync was described.
I'd show up to a home studio somewhere in Southern California. Try to hit it off with a songwriter I'd never met before, try to find some creative common ground, then deliver a catchy three-minute tune that rode on the back of whatever Frosting-of-the-Now sound would make it fit in a car commercial or an iPhone ad.
It was a scene that was somehow all new to me, even after years releasing music. A world of briefs, pitches, assignments and the church of Max Martin, with a caste of songwriters in the vast strata between pop star and street busker. A post-band way of existing as an artist outside the million-dollar payday of a hit single, and eking out a living with four-figure licenses paid out every quarter.
Brief: Write a cool, slightly quirky but still modern/contemporary song with a nod to nostalgia, borrowing other references (i.e. world music or vintage instrumentation).
For those of you who don't know (and I was one who didn't know for the longest time), sync is the process of combining music to moving pictures, usually in partnership with a publisher's sync division and a music supervisor for film or television. When you hear your favorite up and coming band on a Visa ad, it's because they've landed a sync and have hopefully made a bit of dough from the license to help finance another record or buy a guitar.
In 2013, the most lucrative sync songs tended to sound a lot like Imagine Dragons and Megan Trainor. It felt a bit plastic at first, but I eventually made peace with it as just something you did as a working musician. Fortunately, something about JC Autobody tickled the ears of half a dozen music supervisors for shows like Riverdale, Shameless and You, and they earned me enough to buy the MacBook I'm typing this post on, among a few other studio essentials.
Making the smallest bit of money from a creative project is the fertilizer that grows the carrot we artists like to chase, and I was all in. It wasn't enough to quit my job, but enough to dream about it. Southwest points and PTO got me to LA for a week twice a year where I'd pair up in Silverlake garages, downtown lofts or at the top of the Wiltern Theater for a daylong session with a just-met writer or producer.
They were sometimes awkward, sometimes fun. Sometimes the brief was right in my wheelhouse, sometimes it was the furthest thing from it. But I was in a season of Say Yes to Everything, so I took every speed date I could get, even if the brief was a straight-ahead fun, uptempo rock song. Needs to have lots of stops and starts with stabs. Nothing too young sounding and keep the lyrics universal. Male or female vocals welcome!
"Sometimes you show up to a session with a new person and just kind of stare at each other," Tom, my de facto mentor from Creative Services would say. "It's normal."
I stared a lot. Too many times, I made the mistake of showing up without anything, no pre-baked ideas or lyric snips, just hoping the muse would rapture us both. Those sessions ended up with me self-consciously nodding at every other thing the other songwriter did, going yeah I like that. And then I'd scribble some lyrics I should have written already, and we'd have something done by the afternoon.
But I learned by watching. I watched how the more seasoned producers would work their DAW, the shortcuts they'd use and the way they'd craft a vibe. I learned how to check a tune for sync-ability by playing it over Youtube commercials with the sound turned off, and learned there are half a dozen tropes that always need music in sync land. Walking away from an explosion, for example. I learned there was a thing called "topline," and you could build a whole career on it, and learned that wavs, stems and lyric sheets were assets to be delivered, collated and tagged.
Like speed dating, I met a lot of great people who would be perfect with someone else. And like speed dating, I met a lot of exes. The ex-singer from Empires, and the ex-DJ from Crazy Town. A guy named Bones Owen. A fill-in bass player for the Pixies. A writer who had a credit on a David Guetta album, and pop-fluent girls with voices and lyrical chops so refined I wondered how they weren't already famous.
"LA is funny," one songwriter said. "Everybody knows each other, so being from Indiana - it's like you always have this new-car-smell."
I contemplated quitting my job and doing the move-to-LA thing, but the income was too sporadic to feel safe, and from 2013 to 2017 I burned the candle at both ends trying to build two careers. Just like the band, I was trying to find some place I fit in amongst musical line cooks who could crank out a polished track in under a week and already had some kind of highly developed sense of what sells and what's current. I, on the other hand, needed to take an idea off to a cave somewhere to gestate out of its cringe first, and sometimes that took months.
Key words: Dark, electronic, moody, driving, epic, anthemic, build, intense, haunting, fast paced, anthemic, epic. Female vox preferred.
By 2018, the sync scene dried up for me for one reason or another - company mergers, tiny-fish-in-a-big-pond sorts of things that no amount of new car smell could overcome - and I pulled my brief-side projects back over to the creative-side. Port to starboard. A reminder that things come and go in waves.
With music, this was always my rhythm. Blow in like a tourist, eat the good cheese, and then I'm off again. By 2022, I had a new pub deal in the bag, but I dropped the ball with too many irons in the fire. Too many gestating-but-never-done ideas, and a hard drive full of songs for Disney, HBO, and AMC pilots that never got used.
But that's how it goes with me. A creative rhythm that's more akin to the coin pusher game at Chuck E. Cheese than a regular grind of weekly submissions. There's nothing for a long time, until one day there's a lot.
So I just keep paddling, looking for the next wave.
Post-script: I owe a great deal of debt (figuratively, not literally) to the old Songs Publishing crew in the little office on Sunset Boulevard for onboarding me to sync-land. Tom, Carianne, Amanda, Keith, Rachel, Rob, writers Danny, Cliff, Bret, Christine and everyone else who I'd listen to records with, eat lunch with, crash in their spare rooms, and who helped me find another wave for a few years in the aftermath of a band.
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What I’m reading: A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row (Eugene Robinson, OXBOW)
What I'm listening to: Ghosts on Broken Pavement (Mount Shrine)
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