AARON CARPENTER
Date Signed: February 2018 Label: Capitol Records Type of Music: Pop Management: Jacob Epstein, Zack Morgenroth - Lighthouse Management & Media, jacob@lighthousemm.com, zack@lighthousemm. com Booking: Ben Totis, Joe Izzi - WME, btotis@wmeentertainment.com, jizzi@wmeentertainment.com Legal: Jeremy Mohr, Kevin Eskowitz - Mohr & Binder, jmohr@rmbllp. com, keskowitz@rmbllp.com Publicity: Kristen Kanopka - Capitol Music Group, kristen.kanopka@ umusic.com Web: aaroncarpentermusic.com A&R: Jeremy Vuernick
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y 2013, 20-year-old Louisianian Aaron Carpenter had built an Instagram following of more than 200,000 (now nearly four million). That empowered him and several other social media megastars to book the nine-state MAGCON tour. Later, he recorded and uploaded cover songs, the first of which was Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours.” In 2016 he bounced for Los Angeles. A mere month after his arrival, he connected with a William Morris Endeavor (WME) agent and a meeting was arranged. It flowed flawlessly and led, ultimately, to a deal with Capitol Records. “I moved to LA without thinking,” Carpenter admits. “I was clueless about how to pursue music. I bought a piano and guitar and taught myself to play by watching YouTube videos. Then I met an agent from WME
“I want people to get to know me slowly.” at a party and we set up a meeting. I told him that I wanted to make my own music rather than keep posting covers. I met a writer, we wrote a few songs and I sent them to my agent. He liked them and sent them out. That led to my signing with Lighthouse Management and we started to connect with writers, producers and labels.” Jacob Epstein, a member of Carpenter’s management team, happened to play poker with Jeremy Vuernick, Capitol’s Executive VP of A&R. Vuernick, who signed Halsey, incidentally, heard that Carpenter had taken meetings all around town and requested one himself. “It was an immediate click,” Carpenter recalls. “I wanted someone to step up to the plate and swing as hard as I was going to. We had a second meeting soon after that and I signed with them about five months later.” For now, Carpenter remains content to release singles. “I want people to understand me as an artist before I release a full record,” he explains. “I didn’t want to come out of the gate with everything. I want people to get to know me slowly and sit with a couple of songs before I move on to the full record.” His single “Attitude” dropped on March 22 and has already earned nearly 40,000 YouTube streams. – Rob Putnam 26 June 2019
musicconnection.com
IDA MAE
Date Signed: January 2019 Label: Thirty Tigers Records Band Members: Chris Turpin, Stephanie Jean Type of Music: Americana/Rock Management: Vector Management Booking: Buster Phillips - WME for US/Canada; Oliver Ward - UTA for UK/Europe/ROW Legal: Kent Marcus - Marcus & Colvin LLC Publicity: Missing Piece Group Web: idamaemusic.com A&R: N/A
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hat do you do if you’re in a critically acclaimed rock band that manages to score a deal with a major label, releases three highly rated albums and positions itself on the brink of a huge amount of success, and then splits up? Well, you could do it all over again. That’s what Chris Turpin and partner-wife Stephanie Jean did after leaving British alt-rock band Kill It Kid. That band was signed by Seymour Stein to Sire/Warner Bros. when the whole project fell apart. “We were underground, did a load of records, signed a few deals,” Turpin says. “Ida Mae came at the end of that, after we got sick and tired of being on the road with a rock band and wanted to get back to what we really love, which is roots, songwriting, Americana country-blues really.”
“We recorded most of it live, straight to tape.” Ida Mae relocated from England to Nashville eight months ago, and they’re now signed to Thirty Tigers Records, but a lot happened before that. Two, again, TWO major label deals fell through. “When we left our old band, we ended up signing to Decca, Universal,” Turpin says. “Long story short, we fell out with them but they did us right. We ended up doing half the album and then we got given the album back. Then we ended up getting signed by Seymour Stein to Warner Bros. and Sire Records, who we’d known and worked with in our own band. We did a deal with him, finished the record and then as we moved to Nashville after they got us the visas, Seymour Stein left Warner Bros. So after all of that, we landed in America and they said that they can put out the album, but in actual fact we should step aside and take the album with us. So we left Warner Bros.” So, the band started the album on Universal, finished it on Warner Bros, and were now in a position where they owned their own record and were able to work with Thirty Tigers, the label Turpin says they wanted to work with in the first place. That album, Chasing Lights, will finally see the light of day in June and Turpin is over the moon. “There was no compromising with the record,” he says. “We sat down and recorded the record exactly how we wanted. We recorded most of it live, straight to tape and we tracked most of it in three or four tapes. It was an amazing way to work because we’d never recorded that way before. Even for us, it’s still full of surprises.” – Brett Callwood