Company description::
JAN BUCKINGHAM: SONGWRITER / PUBLISHER / PRODUCER
Twice Grammy-nominated songwriter-producer Jan Buckingham has penned hits for a plethora of artists (i.e., Pam Tillis, Whitney Houston, Tim McGraw), and composed for television (Hollywood Wives) and film (My Cousin Vinnie). She is one of the fortunate few who has transitioned through the portal of technology of the last fifteen years. She owns fourteen active publishing companies, and enjoys the luxury of having recording artists, producers and managers browse her on-line song catalogues at her web site www.janbuckingham.com, when looking for hit material.
The ever-active Ms. Buckingham maintains offices in Los Angeles and Nashville. This interview was conducted amid a flurry of recent recording sessions in the Los Angeles area.
Q. What is your background as a songwriter?
A. I’ve been writing my whole life. I wrote “Oh Sad Little Bluebird” when I was 8 years old... scripted it out as a piece of sheet music with the treble and bass clefs... I went through staff writing deals with the major publishers... Warner/Chappell, Lorimar, Windswept-Pacific, and then I formed my own publishing companies.
Q. What are some of your successes?
A. Pam Tillis, Whitney Houston... Artists in a lot of different genres... With Pam Tillis, I had a few singles... “Blue Roses...”and “Cleopatra, Queen of Denial,”which was a big one. With Whitney Houston, Arista Records put my song “Moment of Truth” out on the B side of “Oh, I Want To Dance With Somebody,” which was Whitney’s very first single, and then Clive (Davis) put it out again on the “Shoop, Shoop” 5-song single.
Q. What are some of your early influences?
A. Some from college that I’ll never forget include the Sound Farm, and it’s great lead singer Ken Sheppard, who’s like the Sting of the Midwest. Then there was a guy a named Lee Ruth... a tall, great carrot of a man with a big long red beard. Lee would put Christmas lights in his beard around the holidays and stand on the corner playing a mandolin with those lights and his eyes just twinkling. He was like the magic wizard... One night he looked at me through his big spectacle glasses, which made his eyes look HUGE, and said: “If you write songs, you should pick up a copy of Rolling Stone Magazine and enter the American Song Festival.” So I did... The first few years I got honorable mentions, and then I won, which gave me the confidence to start taking my songs to publishers in Nashville and LA, which is when I started getting cuts.
Q. What artists are you currently working with?
A. Renee Olstead (teen star of the CBS sitcom “Still Standing”) is one of my most recent productions. I took her to David Foster, who’s producing her for his record label at Warner Brothers. I’m working with Thornbird, they’re kind of a cross between Third Eye Blind, Linkin Park and Matchbox 20... cutting-edge rock-alternative stuff... They’re wonderful! I’m currently working with Tracy Bartelle, who scores for television and film and also produces. I write with a lot of artists and producers in Nashville and Los Angeles... some established and some up-and- coming.
Q. So, you go back and forth between Los Angeles and Nashville?
A. Yes, I sort of drift back and forth depending on what’s going on here and what’s going on there.
Q. And how do you balance that? Which one is your home?
A. My permanent residence is Nashville, Tennessee, but I try to split my time between there and Los Angeles, with occasional trips to London or Finland or wherever the work takes me. I have home offices in both Studio City, California, and in Nashville, Tennessee.
Q. Do you consider yourself a country songwriter?
A. A commercial songwriter. Artists of all genres have covered my songs. I write what you hear on the radio, on TV, in the movies.
Q. What is your inspiration?
A. Oh, boy... Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shaharizad, Ike and Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, The Rolling Stones, John Sebastian. Those musicals my parents played when I was a kid. Chuck Berry and Don Henley. Those are my lyrical idols.... And George Jones. What a vocalist! New stuff like Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” lyrics... Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand... great singers like that. And of course, my mother had the greatest influence on me, singing and clapping these old Missouri “cotton field” worker songs to me when I was a child.
Q. And where did you grow up?
A. St. Louis, Missouri, 40 miles from Wentzville, home of Chuck Berry.
Q. What is your background as a music publisher / record producer?
A. Well, I had been writing songs a long time, and I was flying for Eastern Airlines as a flight attendant out of Atlanta, when I met my second ex-husband, a very nice guy named Steve Buckingham. “Buck” (That’s what I called him.) told me early on that if I was serious about the music business, I’d get a book called “This Business of Music,” published every year by Billboard Magazine. I got it and I read it. Actually, I went right to the back and read all the generic legal contracts, which are really quite simple to understand... Once I figured out that “heretofore” meant “from now on,” a few things like that... I figured out the language and as I read the contracts, a light bulb went off in my head... and once I understood the business side of songwriting, I went back to writing for the love of writing. Then people began to approach me to produce them, because I’d been producing demos for so long that they were starting to sound like records... and that led to me producing records. I produced a lot of stuff on Pam (Tillis) while she was still a demo singer. Back then, Pam got paid twelve bucks to sing a song, so I used to pay her fifteen dollars, to be sure she always would always come to me first. I used to pay James Stroud (now head of Dreamworks in Nashville) twelve bucks to play drums, and Paul Worley (now head of A&R at Warner Brothers in Nashville) twelve bucks to play bass. Those were the days... and that’s how far back that goes. We all grew up together.
Q. How has the business changed over the past 15 years, with the advent of technology?
A. The playing field has been leveled. If you’re good and you can get yourself a tiny, little home studio in an extra bedroom, you can make a record. And if you get the right little bits of software, you can make a record that sounds as good as having a full string section and a great big 48 channel, automated board. Everything has changed. Everybody has an equal chance now. Your big record companies surf the web, looking for the artists on your big sites like CD Baby.com and Amazon.com, to name two of many.
Q. We understand that you have a web site that industry professionals use to gather their material?
A. Yeah, it’s slowly being loaded up, as quickly as I can, but there’s not enough hours in the day.
Q. What’s the name of the site?
A. www.janbuckingham.com.
Q. And how does it work if someone’s is interested in auditioning material?
A. They go online and type in my address www.janbuckingham.com, and they’ll go to my home page, and there they can click on the tab to the left that says “SONGS,” which will take them to the SONGS page, and at the bottom of this page, they can click on “click here to listen,” and a dialogue box will pop up with all the different genres of music I write. A listener can then click on a particular genre, say “Rock-Alternative” or “Dance,” or “Pop-R&B” and another dialogue box will pop up with a list of song titles. If the listener clicks on a title, the song will come up and they can listen to 2 minutes of it. If they click to the right of the title, a lyric sheet for the song will pop up.
Q. So this has replaced business people requesting you to send in a compilation tape or CD of a dozen things, correct?
A. Not completely, but it’s a lot faster to refer an artist or producer to specific songs on the site.
Q. And what happens if a manager or producer wants to hear more than the 2 minutes of the song?
A. They contact me via the email address on my website. It starts with an email because I have to have a way to filter through everything. Once I establish a dialogue with someone, we exchange phone numbers and they can call me directly.
Q. What words of advice would you have for up and coming writer-producers?
A. The same advice that the Young Rascals’ drummer, Dino Vanelli gave to me, I’m not going to say how many years ago. Dino was playing conga drums and I was sitting there watching the band rehearse and I asked him how he ever got to be that good. This is what he told me: “Well, ya just do it, and then you do it again, and then you do it some more, and you just keep doing it, and then you do it some more after that, and then do it again!” That was his advice, and that’s my advice. Just keep doing it. The only guarantee you’re going to fail is if you quit.
Q. Who are your business influences, as a woman in the business?
A. Ah, well... The first person that popped into my head was not a woman. It was Clive Davis. And then, there’s Dolly Parton... She’s a good one, who just talks like this (raises her voice to match Dolly’s high-pitched Southern accent) ‘til she’s ready to pull the rug out from under ‘em. And Oprah Winfrey, who’s from Nashville, has done okay too. Then there’s Steve Allen and Goldie Hawn, and several other people in the movie industry... but Dolly Parton pretty much hits the nail on the head.
Q. Has your way of doing business changed over the last ten to twenty years?
A. No. I’m a nice person... just a little blonde woman, raised in the Donna Reed era, back when you made everyone around you feel comfortable, and I still try to do that. The only difference now is that if someone’s not straight-up with me, I simply go, “Excuse me,” and that’s the last they’ll see of me. But I use the same business ethics I used twenty years ago, which is to be open and honest with everyone... and if we get along, we work together. Like attracts like... If they’re like me, we’ll do business, and if they’re not, they’ll turn away from me, (and I wouldn’t want to do business with people that don’t want to do business with me anyway). I’m good at what I do and I’m from Missouri, where you word is your bond. It’s all you got - your reputation - and that’s what I take pride in.
Q. We thank you for your time and look forward to speaking with you in the future.
A. Thanks. I’ll be here.
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