A Labor Of Love
Soap Opera Digest: So, it must feel good to have the CD wrapped.
Kathy Brier: Yes, I’m really, really proud of it. Every songwriter on the album has had a No. 1 hit at some point in their career, so they’re all amazing, amazing writers. I was really lucky to get them to agree to give me music for the CD. And every musician on the album has played on a gold or platinum album. I hired two producers to help me, and I have to say, it’s a really good album. I’m really proud of it. Digest: Did you get a label to help you distribute it?
Brier: Right now, the goal is for me to try to sell a certain number of albums myself and then pitch it to the major labels to take it up and distribute it. I opened my own record label for this and self-produced it.Digest: And did you do that so that you could maintain creative control over the project?
Brier: Yes. If I went to a bigger label, I’m sure I could’ve gotten a huge budget, but then they probably would want me to lose weight and become a certain type, and I just didn’t want to deal with any of that. Digest: How did you assemble the team?
Brier: I met a woman named Liz Morin, who works for Encore Entertainment in Nashville, and she’s a friend of Kassie DePaiva [Blair]. Through visiting Liz in Nashville — she’s a song plugger and a publisher — she helped me find music. She helped me find the producers, and they helped me find more writers, so it was just word-of-mouth and networking, and before I knew it, I had 11 songs and two producers. So I put together a budget and [the producers] helped me find the musicians. It was a slow process, but just submerging myself in that world and having the balls to take it on [laughs], I got it done. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just thought, “I think I can do this myself.” And I actually did do it, but I think the only way I get things done is to be naive about the situation and not have a clue about what it really entails to do it. So I was just stuck in the middle of this and had to do it, had to make it work.Digest: What part of self-producing the project was the hardest?
Brier: Finding the music. I thought about writing some music myself, but then I thought, “I know what I’m good at and what I’m not.” The fans had been after me for such a long time to do an album, and I knew if I wrote the songs, it’d be at least another year before the album was done. But when you’re not writing yourself and you’re trying to find songs that other people have written that you can relate to and fit your voice correctly, that’s the hardest part. You have to have an open mind. Sometimes the demo isn’t the best demo, but you still have to be able to know if the song is really good. Or sometimes a song is in a different style. This album is all rock ‘n’ roll, but I actually found a lot of music in Nashville for it. That’s what I love about country music: There’s so many directions you can take it. But if the songs aren’t presented to you in the genre you want, you have to have good enough of a musical ear to be like, “Okay, can I take this and turn it into this kind of a song?” Digest: How long did it take you to put this together?
Brier: The entire process took about two years. But we recorded it in the studio in a week. Digest: Is this a lifelong dream of yours?
Brier: It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but when I was younger, I looked at the music business and thought, “Well, no one looks like me.” As a young woman in the business, I thought, “What record label will take someone like me, regardless of the fact that I have a kick-ass voice?” I just thought even if I knocked on those doors, no one would answer them. That’s how I got into musical theater. I started out singing rock ‘n’ roll and R&B, but even though I’m an artist, this is a business, so when I took a step back and looked at the entire business, I thought with my type and my voice, I could do musical theater, so I started training for that and kind of changed my style of singing. But it’s fun now to go back and do stuff more based in rock ‘n’ roll. Digest: Did your theater background help with this record?
Brier: Yes. Some of the writers who’ve heard the album have commented on how much the album sounds like I actually wrote the songs, and I think it’s because I’m able to take the song and pull it apart and make it my own. I think that definitely comes from musical theater training.
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