Emily Barker – Memphis Flyer

This week, people will gather in Memphis to talk about music. Sure, that’s hardly news. But this week, Memphis hosts an international conference featuring leading music- and business-savvy minds from as far away as the U.K. and Estonia — and even Tennessee’s other Music City, Nashville — for a symposium on creating strategies to promote music as an engine of growth.

The Music Cities Convention has brought music industry professionals to several cities to discuss how music impacts their identities and economies — and how to help it flourish. This time around, it’s Memphis.

“It’s funny, phones from America can’t call outside the U.S.,” Music Cities Convention (MCC) organizer Shain Shapiro commented when he called me to talk about the conference’s sixth iteration. Shapiro is the managing director of Sound Diplomacy, a London-based development agency that helps clients tweak their music strategy and policy, and the conference organizer for Music Cities.

“I’m a nerd,” Shapiro says, so he found himself interested in things like global connections, building codes, noise curfews, and how music makers and cities could strengthen a symbiotic relationship to bring more profit to both parties. “It wasn’t planned,” Shapiro says of the path that led him to be the creator of an altogether different music conference.

MCC gathers organizers, performers, legal authorities, and cultural ambassadors to discuss the roles music plays in the life of a city. Because promoters or songwriters don’t often ponder noise curfews or the economics of entertainment, there’s a need for parties with different perspectives to view the big picture. And that’s where MCC comes in.

Talks will include “Smart Music Cities: Data Driven to Support Artists,” “Every City Needs a Music Strategy,” and “Time for the Cities: Let Music ‘Take You There’,” a panel asking “How can property developers and the creative industries work more cohesively?”

Planners who have re-made their cities as music destinations, from Tallinn, Estonia, to Chengdu, China, will offer their success stories. Memphis’ own talents will also contribute, from singer/promoter Tonya Dyson, who helped develop the Memphis Slim Collaboratory, to Lawrence Matthews (aka Don Lifted), who pioneered genre-breaking performances in non-traditional venues. Deron Hall of the Memphis Arts Engine and Darren Isom of the Memphis Music Initiative will also contribute.

Other speakers include far-flung performers, academics, activists, and attorneys who know how to capitalize on the musical life of a city: Igor Lozada, the head of culture for the city of Guadalajara, Mexico; Australia’s Emily Barker, whose most recent album was recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Service; Justine Avila, executive director of Nashville’s Music City Music Council; and Shawn King, Colorado’s “Music Ambassador” (and drummer and trumpeter for the indie-folk band Devotchka).

The global perspective of the conference has contributed to its success. Its 2015 debut sold out in Brighton, England. Then in October of that same year, Music Cities made landfall in Washington, D.C. It returned to Brighton in 2016, and the most recent convention was held in Berlin, earlier this year. This week’s Memphis Music Cities Convention will mark the conference’s second hosting in the U.S.

When asked what drew MCC to Memphis, Shapiro says that it was important to him to bring attention to cities that aren’t necessarily giant culture centers like New York or L.A., yet are positioned to benefit from the convention’s ideas.

Another factor, he notes, was the persistence of Music Export Memphis (MEM), a local nonprofit responsible for the successful Memphis Picnic concerts held at South By Southwest and Americana Fest.

MEM founder Elizabeth Cawein hopes the international attention will bring more Memphians into the conversation. She says diverse perspectives can help a city juggle the many strategies for bringing music front and center. “It’s difficult to see [just] one next step,” Cawein says. “There are so many things already in motion. So many strategies that work somewhere else might, with a little experimentation, work here.”

While “The Memphis Sound” was refined and heralded from the 1950s-’70s, attracting artists from all over the world, it lost its drawing power as the last century drew to a close. But lately it’s been on the rise again, exhibit A being the mega-hit “Uptown Funk,” recorded at Royal Studios. I spoke with producer Matt Ross-Spang about recording singer/songwriter Emily Barker’s soulful new album, Sweet Kind of Blue, and why international artists fall in love with not just Sam Phillips Recording Service, but the city and its people.

Stacie Huckeba

Memphis Flyer: Is Memphis attracting more artists who want a certain sound?

Matt Ross-Spang: They’re coming now. I used to joke about this — it seems like they always come and do the one funky track. “We have this one funky song, so we’re gonna go to Memphis.” And that would end up being the coolest song on the record. But really, you should do the whole record here. And you gotta finish it here. You gotta do the whole thing here, or it’s not the same feel.

Emily was looking for a producer. She talked about cutting it in Nashville, but I really wanted her to see Memphis. So we met here and did some songwriting. Of course, I took her to Pho Binh and Gus’s Fried Chicken, and it was over after that. She wanted to do the whole thing here.

It’s funny how this room, but also this city, is like the extra member in the band. It really influences people, the sound and song choice, the way people play. So I’m a big proponent of trying to get everyone I can to come here because it’s such an integral part of what we do.

That sense of place, that sense of a particular room, is part of the magic of older recordings. Even when doing overdubs, you get settled in there, you don’t mail tracks from L.A.

Yeah, I agree. It’s everybody in a room together. Whether they do it at the same time, or in parts, everyone’s there as one unit. The stuff Sam Phillips did, or Willie Mitchell, or Chips Moman, you can tell it’s their record, but they don’t put their fingerprint on it so much that it changes the artist’s sound. They just help facilitate, but at the same time you know that was cut at Royal, or it was cut at American. I love that kind of thumbprint on the track.

So how was Emily’s record put together?

I like to do it all on the floor. I don’t like people to memorize or chart the song before we get there. So she let me put the band together, and I got some of my favorite Memphis guys. We just let, in this case, Steve Potts, Dave Smith, Rick Steff, and Dave Cousar come up with parts, maybe change a chord. And it’s always lovely when an artist is okay to let you get your hands all over their songs. She’d show us the song, 30 seconds later we’re playing it, and there’s no overthinking it. A lot of these were country songs, and they became grooves. She was really great with letting that happen.

There were no rehearsals. Everything was nailed in two or three takes. It’s all live vocals on Emily’s part. The only thing we punched would be a harmony or strings or something. The musicians have all played together many times, but it’s been a while, so it was like a really cool family reunion. And they just killed it. I still get goosebumps listening to “Sister Goodbye.” I think that was the first one we tracked, and it set the tone for the whole record. Emily played and sang live. We went till we got the take. And we all loved the rough mixes that [engineer] Jeff Powell did right after tracking. So I just added a little reverb now and then, and it was done. It was a matter of “don’t ruin it; we already had it.”

Emily Barker plays the Levitt Shell Sunday, October 15th at 7 p.m.