If this issue’s Top Three Picks in Music and Sound Design signify one thing, it is the importance of taking risks and experimenting. With each of these tracks, the composers and arrangers were going out on a limb and trying new approaches, all with great success. One team of composers dared to offer its client something totally unexpected. Another team mixed something tried-and-true with something brand-new, while another talent re-worked an old tune, giving it a totally different feel.
Number One
Sometimes it is best to go into a project without strict guidelines as to what you want. For example, the creatives at McCann-Erickson, New York, certainly had an idea thematically of what kind of music they needed to accompany their MasterCard Debit Card spot. Called "Running Errands," it was directed by Samuel Bayer of bicoastal Mars Media. "We knew we wanted high-energy music that would drive the spot, recalls Larry Platt, VP/senior copywriter at McCann-Erickson. "At the same time, we also wanted it to have a little bit of a wink. But we had no set ideas."
"I think that attributed to the success of our process," relates composer Sherman Foote of Big Foote Music, New York. He noted that his team of composers was able to experiment and simply take inspiration from Bayer’s film, which centers on a mom who’s on a mission to buy her son last-minute items needed for school. Using her Debit MasterCard to make the purchases, she ultimately delivers the stuff to her son in dramatic fashion—leaping off a bridge, landing on top of his moving school bus and handing the kid a bag through an open window.
After some general discussion with the agency, Big Foote Music came back to McCann-Erickson with six tracks. "One of the great things about working with Big Foote is they always share a lot of ideas, so we heard all sorts of interesting things that went off in divergent paths," Platt says. Big Foote Music’s composers came up with everything from electronic to jazz scores, but it was a high-energy, big-beat track created by Foote and composer Darren Solomon that made the final cut.
Foote says that initially he came up with a beat and was thinking of adding guitars, bass and keyboard to make a more traditional track. Solomon heard what he was doing, got hooked on the beat and started playing around with it. Essentially, Solomon took old tracks from Big Foote Music’s extensive library of outtakes and ran them through a Kaoss Pad, which distorted the sounds.
Solomon utilized a variety of music. "I completely ignored the original music and paid attention to what the Kaoss Pad was squirting out," he explains. "If it sounded cool, it was cool. It was as simple as that. You are working almost more like an editor in a sense. You’re taking ideas already out there and doing strange things with them, which is what the DJ process is about."
While the hip sound works amazingly well with the footage, it certainly isn’t what one might expect to accompany what plays like a mini-action flick. In fact, Foote admits he wasn’t confident that McCann-Erickson would choose this track. "It was like, ‘Wow, I don’t think they’ll go for that.’ But they did," he shares, pointing out that he is glad his company took a chance and offered something unexpected. "There’s a tremendous amount of risk-taking that happens on a daily basis in this business—creative risk-taking that we’re doing constantly, and that’s what really gets the juices going."
Number Two
When the creatives at Ogilvy & Mather (O&M), New York, were formulating a new ad campaign for Cotton Incorporated, they wanted to make use of the client’s signature phrase, "The touch, the feel of cotton. The fabric of our lives." But they also wanted to do so in a fresh way and decided to take advantage of a current trend in music: remixing, according to Karl Westman, senior partner/executive music producer at O&M.
With that directive in mind, Westman set out to find the best team to do the work, deciding to go with JSM, New York, and onda, a music production company made up of composers Michaelangelo L’acqua, Gregg Fine and Rene Arsenault, who operate out of JSM’s facility.
"The job was tricky," recalls Joel Simon, president/executive producer at JSM. "You get jobs that go really smoothly, and you get jobs that have real problem-solving issues—and this was one that had real problem-solving issues. They didn’t want it to sound like an ad. But they wanted to use the line, ‘The touch, the feel of cotton. The fabric of our lives.’ "
Without laying eyes on the footage—"Hotel" was directed by Jeff Preiss of bicoastal Epoch Films and was already being cut by editor Michael Saia of Jump, New York—onda set out to create modern music, incorporating Cotton’s well-known line. The composers ended up with a track that had a "big beat overtone to it with elements of country music, funk, soul and hip hop," explains L’acqua. "It’s an eclectic track."
It’s also a dense, rich track. Throughout multiple listenings, different elements poke through and catch one’s attention, from guitar riffs to snippets of Cotton’s signature line.
It was up to Saia to make the music work with the commercial, which finds a variety of people—presumably dressed in clothing made of cotton—getting into the groove at a hotel. There are a family comprising a mother, father and daughter line-dancing in its hotel room; a hip young girl wildly dancing about in the hallway; and two women slowly swaying to the music in side-by-side elevators, among other images.
Saia was given elements of music (recorded live at JSM), "and he would get into remix mode, changing timings of certain elements, changing the mix, adding effects," Westman relates.
Simon points out that there was a lot of back-and-forth: "We would work, then we’d hand it off to the editor, and then he would work and hand it back." Keep in mind that throughout this process, the creative team was also listening to the work as it developed, and offering opinions.
Given the fact that so many people were involved in the creation of the music—from the agency, to JSM, to Jump—Westman stresses that trust was important. "Everybody was able to give up creative propriety, so to speak, and let it be what it was," he says, "and it turned out to be quite special."
Number Three
All too often music is an afterthought in commercials. Not so in the case of the Visa ad "Petsmart. com." From the start, the creatives at BBDO New York knew that the Show Boat tune "Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man" would be a vital part of the ad, which finds a man using his Visa card to shop on Petsmart.com while his loving pets—a fish, a bird, a dog and a cat—lounge around the living room, singing the tune.
"We knew we had the song, so that was a given. Then it was a question of how we wanted to arrange it," explains Loren Parkins, VP/executive music producer at BBDO, who called David Horowitz of David Horowitz Music Associates (DHMA), New York, to arrange and record the song.
"Initially, the idea was to do a classic/Broadway-style arrangement of [the song], using lush strings, and have the pets’ voices be very character-ish," explains Horowitz. "This was well before they even shot anything," he notes. "We did a couple of versions like that, and at some point they thought that may be going over the top and decided it should probably be a more intimate, warmer sound. That’s when the idea of doing it as a jazz thing came up."
The style of the track was essentially dictated by the approach to the spot taken by the agency team, and by director Erich Joiner of bicoastal Tool of North America, who helmed the live-action portion of the spot, and Bill Westenhofer of Rhythm & Hues Studios, Los Angeles, who handled the visual effects direction. They ultimately chose to aim for a low-key, realistic spot rather than a cartoon-like production.
So Horowitz shifted gears, re-harmonizing the track with jazz chords to create a mellower, more intimate version of the tune. He recorded a simple track comprising piano (played by Horowitz), bass and drums. "It was done live. The musicians all sat together. You can’t get a good jazz feel by overdubbing parts," Horowitz points out. "Everybody has got to be breathing and sweating together."
Four New York singers—Dennis Collins, Curtis King, Marlon Saunders and Lenora Helm—sang the parts of the various animals. Two background singers—Darryl Tookes and Vaneese Thomas—also contributed to the ad. The talent was actually able to get a look at the spot before performing. It was pretty much completed by that time, according to Horowitz, with the exception of the animation of the animals’ mouths. That was finished once the track was done.
Parkins praises Horowitz for delivering a subtle, tasteful version of "Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man." "There is a sense of sophistication to it, and that’s due to David’s musicianship as a player and writer," observes Parkins. "He doesn’t have to be heavy handed with the playing or writing for the feeling to come through."
For his part, Horowitz was particularly fond of this job. "It was a real kick for me because I started out as a jazz pianist and arranger," he says, "way back in the twentieth century."
