Autumn Rowe

Tor Hermansen interviewing Album of the Year - Grammy Winner Autumn Rowe

Tor

I'm very excited by this week's mentor because I've known Autumn since, I mean, for over 10 years and she's always been an incredible songwriter we met through music. The first song I ever heard her write is incredible. And we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna play it. But the journey that Autumn has gone on, to where she, I mean, I'm sure, have you guys done zero research and then Google Autumn and you see the amazing work she's done. And also, you know, it's not every day we have someone in here that won a Grammy for Album of the Year. That's as big as it gets. It's a crowning achievement. It's the one that you can, you know, when you have grandkids and you're eighty years old, you can say, look at that I did that. It will be with her forever. It's really an amazing thing and the fact that she's here to share her experience with you guys, it's a gift. So I just want to introduce and welcome Autumn Rowe to LAAMP. Hello, Autumn:

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Autumn

Thank you so much for having me. Before we start. I just need to congratulate all of you for being here. You are literally with two of the best people in the world, especially in the music business and I have to credit so much of where I am today to these two men. So, just congratulations, you are in the best of hands. These are world class human beings and just already from what I've heard, your music is amazing. So just congratulations to you all.

Tor

Can we get her her check now? Thank you for saying that. Let's talk about you and your music. I wanna go back to where we met each other because the best way to meet someone is through music. Our, my manager and our mutual friend and publisher Danny D, he came into the room and said, you guys listen to this song. You had taken a beat, a dance record by deadmau5 and you had taken this weird instrumental and you had written a song on it. The song was top to bottom a smash. Not only was it smash, it was original. It was beautiful.  It was, it was different. I wanna know how you came up with this and how this whole thing started.

Autumn

So I wrote Happiness, I think in 2009. At the time, I was working a full time job at a shoe store called Aerosols and I was in a wedding band on the weekends and I was in my own bands. I was miserable. I hated my life, pretty much hated all of my jobs. and I just, I was about 27 years old, 27, 28. And I really wanted to make music full time but I didn't know how to get there. And I read a book called The New Earth. We always talk about books, right?. I read a book called The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and started changing how my perception of the world was a big part of it. And I focused on making a shit load of demos. So basically, I'd work from 9 30 to 6 30 or 12 30 to 8 30 depending on my shift. Go to the studio where I had access to which was a two hour commute each way, write demos and come back home and do this for an entire year. This is not a healthy life. I got super sick. I was very underweight just because I couldn't even eat enough. with the amount of I was working and after a year of doing this, I saved up a year of paid vacation and said outside like to the universe. I said I need to write a song so I can quit my job.  So I got a hotel room near the studio in New Jersey. I lived in New York in the Bronx and I think on the second or third day, I wrote a little song called Happiness. At the time, I didn't have access to producers and co-writers. I actually never even co wrote before with other topliners. I didn't have much so I was just getting tracks or would find tracks on the internet. So the mouse track was given to me by Danny D. And it was almost like a dare because at the time, I think Flow Writer Kylie Mino, a bunch of people have attempted to do something over this track Kascade and no one quite nailed it. So it was almost like a dare. Like no one really thought I would nail it. But I love a challenge. So,I didn't see it as a dance track. I just saw it as music. I don't really like to put things in boxes. Sometimes I just like to see things as like, these are chords. This is a feeling, this is an emotion. These are drums. This something about this track felt very warm and I already was pretty familiar with cutting things up on pro tools. I did have an engineer though. And I was like, OK, this is the arrangement. So I cut up the track, blah, blah, blah. I wrote a song over it. just treated it as like an R&B song and I didn't think it was that good. It definitely sounded weird to me, but I didn't know at the time I couldn't tell if a record I wrote was good or not. I didn't have those ears yet. I just knew how to write a song. I thought. So turn the record into Danny. Months and months go by. the act, actually, I don't know if you know this, the record was first cut on a different artist. Do you know about this? Yeah. So the record was first cut on a different artist, from Israel. And, I cut it on her three times and it never sounded how it needed to sound. But it was because her voice was more of a rock voice. Her voice wasn't the type of voice to fit that record. And just as she was closing her deal, something went terribly wrong. I don't know what it was. I wasn't in the meeting and all of a sudden the song was back to me and maybe a couple months later you heard it? And I was so thrilled. So when I finally got the call that you and Mikkel heard it and you guys have an artist for it. I was like, my God, that's so exciting. When the song, so I'm still working at the shoe store. You guys cut the record on Alexis and we started working together. We wrote Good Girl. We wrote a Hush, we wrote a bunch of songs.  Then I signed to your publishing company and, I kept my job till the very, very end.like, I was very, not sure about the industry. I'm, I'm still not sure about the industry. and once I finally quit my job, I still kept my wedding band for like two years. right. And that ended up being complicated because I ended up paying to be in a wedding band because I would have to fly back for weddings. I'm like, I just didn't want to mess up people's weddings. So I was like, basically was paying to do their weddings at this point. But, yeah, so finally Happiness. Ok. So I signed to E M I UK Stellar songs. I had never been to Europe. I'm, I'm 28 now. I'd never been to Europe. Hadn't traveled my first trip to the UK was terrible. Absolutely terrible. I hated my hotel. It smelled like fish. I didn't have any friends. I couldn't get any good sessions. my meetings all sucked. I just thought it was, I didn't know where to eat any good food. If you don't know where to eat good food in London, it's miserable. Like everything sucked. And I went to the President and I was like, this place just isn't for me. Like, I don't think I'm supposed to be here. He's like, you have to keep trying, you have to give it a chance.  So he said come back in two weeks. Happiness came out. That week. Happiness debuted at number three in the UK, which was huge, especially for an artist with like so little promotion, completely unknown artist. And the song just took off in the UK. It wasn't very big here, but it was huge in Europe. And that next trip to the UK two weeks later was a completely different experience. All of a sudden, I was getting great meetings, great sessions. When they say a song can change your life, it really, really is true. And that was basically like my intro into being a songwriter, like how I am now

Tor

And you hit the nail on the head there because one song can't change your life.  But before you got to that one song, you probably wrote hundreds of songs in that year when you were commuting and you were grinding and you were working. So there's something about that that yes, that's the moment, but no one sees what's underneath and sees, you know, all the trials and tribulations that went into, to the effort to get to where you could write this one song.

Autumn

My God. So I started when I was 16, right? So I started at 16, didn't actually have any real success. I'm 28. So from 16, I started interning at Island Records. I was in four choirs at once. At 16, I was performing at Radio City Music Hall at Beacon Theater. I was in a girl group for five years. I was in my own band for five years. I was singing jingles. I was a real working New York artist. I was singing backgrounds on David Letterman, backgrounds on Jimmy Fallon. any job I could do in music I was doing, I was singing demos for other people, for songs. I didn't write. I always had a job. I probably had a new job every three months. it's interesting. I meet a lot of people now. They're like, I don't know how to do music and have a job. I'm like, you just do music and have a job. Like, that's how you do it. You know, like that's how you do it. It's possible. It's just hard. None of it's easy. But, I lived a lot of lives and something that I really want people to understand is like, nothing you do is a waste of time. So, like, you know, you're working in a retail job. It's not a waste of time. you're singing songs you don't wanna sing. it's not a waste of time. Everything I did. I ended up needing those skills later in my life. Every single thing, I was so grateful I was like, I'm so grateful I had that crappy job because now I'm doing this, even though it looks unrelated, it actually is because I have this different skill set which I can implement. So nothing is a waste of time. Everything builds character, everything builds stories.you need to live, to have stuff to write about, you know. So yeah

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