NEW ACTS, CONTINUED FROM PG. 24 I KNOW THAT TUNE!, CONTINUED FROM PG. 24
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By the end of the session, he’d written a whole collection of tracks, including “a fake White Stripes song, a fake country song, a fake Killers song.” It was released last year by Authentik under the name The Borough Fields. Fun aside, Verbanets suspects it was just a one-time thing. “I don’t think I’m very good at it,” he says with chuckle. Meeting of Important People isn’t the only band in town jumping on the placement train. Poppy threepiece Donora has also been extremely successful in this regard, and is featured prominently in a couple of national advertisements. Most recently, the band had the song “I Think I Like You,” from its 2008 debut album, featured in a Nationwide Insurance commercial. It’s one of the few songs that Donora actually wrote for placement — though it wasn’t for Nationwide.
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PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 03.20/03.27.2013
Hardo
“That song was written for a specific scene in a movie,” explains lead singer Casey Hanner. Though the band started fighting for placements early on through various licensing forums such as Taxi (an online A&R service), Donora has since picked up a licensing agent. For Verbanets, placements occupy a weird space in the evolving world of music. He admits that even “a decade ago, people would’ve seen that as traitorous.” But at this point, given the challenges of selling music, he’s adamant that “the only way that an independent artist can actually make a sustainable living out of music is to seek placement.” Placements are, of course, more viable for some bands than others — Teen Mom probably won’t be contracting with any black-metal artists anytime soon. But Meeting of Important People and Donora both fit the clean, poppy bill, and their songwriters say they haven’t found themselves changing in order to make more placements. “When we go into the studio, we’re just trying to write the best songs that we can,” Hanner says.
In addition to Vills, one of REMember Music’s best-kept secrets is Wilkinsburg native Hardo. The 20-year-old rapper generated a buzz in 2012 with a series of music videos, four of which eclipsed 100,000 Youtube views. Soon after his “Stressin’” music video was released earlier this year, Hardo ended up incarcerated in Greene County, where he remains; he’s been in and out of jail in the past on charges related to drug possession and distribution. “I just went about a couple things wrong when I was out there,” Hardo says via telephone. “I got a chance to do something that a lot of people don’t get a chance to do. On the strength of being back in here, and just looking at it … like, it could be something that quick that could take away the dream and put me right back into the street life.” An alternative to street life has been making music. Hardo’s history working with Miller dates back to his 10th- and 11th-grade years at Taylor Allderdice High School, which both attended. The two lived near one another and would make music at Miller’s studio. “After school we used to take the school bus and go to his crib and record,” explained Hardo. “I recorded two or three songs at his house, and he told me, like, ‘Yeah man, you might be the hardest motherfucker that ever came through my crib and recorded some shit.’” Hardo also contributes to his own group’s Trap Illustrated movement. The Trap Illustrated crew’s mixtape will be made available in the coming months, around the time of Hardo’s release from jail. While incarcerated, he’s been writing songs for a solo mixtape that he will present this summer. “I done seen a lot, and I’ve been through a lot, and I’ve done a lot,” he says. “So it’s like, for somebody who actually lived the life that a lot of people rap about and never been through, it’s easier for me to think about so much shit [to write about] that I’ve seen or that happened to somebody that I’ve been with. We come from this trap shit, this street shit, but that’s not all we can bring to the table. We have fun with it.”
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portant Meeting of Im rbanets People’s Josh Ve