Q&A With Weathervane's Brian McTear

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Q&A With Weathervane's Brian McTear

POSTED: Thursday, June 25, 2009, 6:06 PM

Filed Under: Music Philly Bands

Photo by Michael T. Regan

Brian McTear

Brian McTear ' super producer at Miner Street Studios, frontman for Bitter Bitter Weeks ' recently talked to me about his new Weathervane music non-profit. (Read all about it here.) Here's more with McTear on the who and the why and the how.

City Paper: So why start with these particular artists? Why these artists at all? Certainly there are a handful of maybe better known people that you've collaborated with ' or is that the point?

Brian McTear: Like any music presenting group, we too are most excited by the idea of bringing new artists, or lesser known artists from obscurity into the limelight. This Project Series will feature mostly the lesser known types, though we have a couple better known bands also up our sleeve. We chose Sunset and East Hundred, and the other upcoming groups that are in production right now, for a wide variety of reasons ' the quality and sophistication of their music and their work ethic are the most important factors. We also want to make sure it's clear to our audience that artists can and will come from anywhere and everywhere, and can even represent different genres of music, cultural backgrounds, etc. So as the season unfolds, people will hopefully notice the variety.

CP: I get that you're doing this because there're fewer labels willing to take risks ' but I wouldn't say the artists you've chosen so far are necessarily avant-garde. So what is the level of chance and sound you're looking to invoke?

BM: Things are bad for everyone. Pop or avant-garde. The whole problem is that the one part of the process that is absolutely essential to make great catalogs of music, namely quality recordings, is expensive enough that if you are not already a successful artist, no one will have the incentive to pay for that start-up cost.

CP: What is your criteria for deserving and/or great artists in this regard?

BM: Well, to start, the music has to be excellent in our estimation. It's a curated series, and we're the curators, so it should all be of an artistic level quality and sophistication. Our definition of independent musician is any artist that is not obligated to relinquish ownership of their master recordings to a third party record label or otherwise. If we were to do a project series with Beyonce, well, that'd just be a hand out for Sony! We want to make sure that the artist is clearly without any question going to benefit the most from their participation.

CP: I saw this thing on your web site where you say 'Today it is nearly impossible for artists to sustain a living from sales of their recordings, and because of this few musicians (even great ones) can afford proper recording production and promotion.' Are you giving the artists on your series the money?

BM: No. For now, we don't have any money. This is our start-up year, and as such, we're producing the Project Series with an entirely volunteer staff, studio crew, video crew, etc. We wrote up a detailed business plan last year that presupposed unlimited financial resources. We were really impressed with it, until we realized that we should have been writing a plan based on our actual budget, which was $0.00.
In January, we decided to just do it. I could put up the studio time and my engineers were willing to work on a volunteer basis for the series, Andy Williams helped me find a video production crew that would be willing to do the same. The Project Series in 2009 would be a vastly reduced version of what we hope to do once we're really up and going. More than anything we knew that we could only raise money if we had something to show for ourselves, and I can't believe it, but it is working. Now this is real.
One main objective is to produce recordings ' at no cost to the artist ' that they can sell, and from which they will receive the majority of the financial benefit. So for instance, with East Hundred, we produced 'Hammerhead' which we'll release Monday June 22, and they've already added it to the second pressing of their new album Passenger. In the future we hope to produce whole albums for great independent musicians, and we hope it leads to opportunity for them from the for profit sector. There's a lot of great music that will never get made and never get out there if something like this doesn't start to happen. That's bad for the musicians, but it's arguably worse for our culture in the long run.

CP: I take it you don't mean Andy Williams from 'Moon River' and rather that you're talking about the Executive Producer at DIVE visual effects and film finishing house. Anyway, I'd feel better if somebody wrote a song about 'Hawthorne' or 'Kingsessing.' Why Fishtown, B?

BM: Bill surprised us with the song 'Fishtown.' We had nothing to do with it. Ha! He had been poking around between me and Quentin in the days leading up to the session so we started to give him all the fun details about the neighborhood. When the got here, somehow in the craziness of everything we needed to do, he got away and took a long observant walk around, too. I have to say, not many of the people who've lived in Fishtown since the real estate boom know that 'Sepviva' is pronounced su-VI-va.

WV Project Series 2009: East Hundred from Weathervane Music on Vimeo.

CP: Why call it Weathervane and don't say the Dylan song?

BM: Yeah but, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, A.D. Duh. No, weather metaphors have been interesting to me for a long time. My old band Mariner Nine had a noise record called 'A little something from the Weathervane's Perspective', and then the band after was called 'The Weather.'
Weather for me conjures a beautiful mix of pleasant and terrifying. It also makes me think of the state of things, the status quo. While we can't change the problems we're faced with, we can adapt to the climate so to speak. A weathervane points into the wind to say 'there's a storm coming.' It helps us see the future a little bit. That's really it.

CP: What's the ultimate goal of this other than love and money?

BM: Our ultimate goal for now is to come up with a new way for our culture to produce great works of art. We want to solidify the connection between great artistry and success, and in the process we want to change artists' lives and careers. That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

Weathervane's Launch Event is tonight, Thu., June 25, 8 p.m., $10, with Papertriggers and the Armchairs, Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 N. Front St., 215-291-4919, kungfunecktie.com, weathervanemusic.org.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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