10 Questions with ... Midland

BRIEF CAREER SYNOPSIS:

Website: www.MidlandOfficial.com; Facebook: www.Facebook.com/MidlandOfficial; Twitter: www.Twitter.com/MidlandOfficial; Instagram: www.Instagram.com/MidlandOfficial; YouTube: www.YouTube.com/User/MidlandVEVO; Meet Midland: www.YouTube.com/watch?v=NHOk23zUwJ0

After forging independent careers with “day jobs” and working on music individually, Midland came together when friends Mark Wystrach and Jess Carson took part in Cameron Duddy’s wedding. The trio spent some time before the nuptials “jamming” and found a common voice. The harmonies and sound that developed with the formation of the band produced a mix of George Strait meets the Eagles meets Dwight Yoakam with a throwback to 70s and 80s California Rock meets Traditional Country. The group decided to pursue their musical path full-time and headed to Austin, TX to hone their crafts of songwriting and performing, hitting honky tonks and clubs all across Texas along the way. After signing with Big Machine Label Group last year and releasing their self-titled “Midland” EP in October, the band now has its first single at radio with “Drinkin’ Problem.” Following their Country Radio Seminar (CRS) 2017 debut and an impressive add date, Mark, Jess, and Cameron sat down with All Access to discuss their unique sound, their origins, and their hopes for 2017 and beyond.

1. Thank you for taking time to talk to us today, guys! I know you're coming off of a big week, having just wrapped your first Country Radio Seminar (CRS) experience. Can you tell us your overall takeaways from the week, and can you share some of your personal highlights from CRS 2017?

Mark: It was really special for us to be at CRS the week our video dropped and to see the response from everyone in Nashville and to see how they’re responding to the single and the EP. I think getting to meet guys like Bob Kingsley, who we grew up listening to, and having Bob take extra time for us and get to connect to him through his love of the same kind of music that we love was a highlight. And we got to go do an after-hours – Jack Purcell and his beautiful wife Lisa got us in to the Country Music Hall Of Fame and Museum – and we went with Bob and Nan Kingsley at like 10:00p after having a few drinks. That was a really magical evening. To be on the road and just be working with our heads down for the last three and half years like we have, to get that kind of positive response to our music just really refills our tank. I think we are, for the first time as a band, able to see that the music is starting to impact people. And that’s the greatest thing you can ask for as an artist, I think. You feel like Bob is the father or the grandfather that you never had, and getting to spend time with him is really special. I would say that the CRS performance that we got to do for the Big Machine luncheon, too, was a highlight. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten a standing ovation!

Cameron: People were standing up! For us! Usually when people stand up for us, it’s so they can leave!

Mark: That was incredible. It was a pretty magical week.

2. You have already started making friends at radio on your current radio tour, but CRS is another way to connect, and it looks like that is paying off already with some post-CRS buzz and a big add day today for "Drinkin' Problem." What have you learned about radio so far, and have there been any surprises for you during the learning experience of radio tour?

Cameron: I think I can speak for everybody when I say that we knew going in to it that it was probably going to be the most challenging thing for our stamina that we’ve ever done. It has definitely not let us down. It is a great challenge for our stamina, and for our strength as a band, but the fact that there’s three of us – and often times one, if not two, of our reps – all out together on tour with us…yeah, it can be exhausting, but at the end of the day, we are still having a good time. It doesn’t matter how vanilla the room is that we’re playing in, it always ends up becoming a festive event. We’ve converted a lot of first time listeners, and dare I say, even skeptics. And we’ve had those people become Midland friends and fans. We know for sure every weekend when we go home, we say, “Man, we are spoiled rotten!” This really couldn’t be going any better. Knock on wood, it’ll keep going the way it is. We just have to say a special thanks to our team at Big Machine, who have all been like big brothers to us.

Mark: [Big Machine Records Dir./Southwest Central Regional Promotion] Alex [Valentine] is holding a gun to Cameron’s head right now. That’s the only reason he’s saying that. Haha!

3. Let's take it back a minute and discuss each of your backgrounds. Mark, you grew up in Arizona and went on to have a successful career in modeling and acting. Jess, you hail from the Pacific Northwest and ran a men's and women's fashion retail store. Cameron, you were raised in California and have earned accolades as a director of music videos. When did you each discover music, individually, and how did you transition from your "day jobs" to full-time musicians?

Jess: I started playing music with my family when I was young. I guess it was somewhat of a musical family, because we had an upright piano, and my dad played guitar, and my sister played piano. We’d all kind of sing songs and sit around the piano in the evenings. We didn’t have a television. So, that was kind of the genesis for me, personally. Then, I started playing Rock guitar when I was about 13. I wanted to play Nirvana, and stuff like that. And I’ll let Cam and Mark tell their own beginnings, but we all met in Los Angeles.

Cameron: Music was always very important. I have a big family, and we grew up sort of distant and separated from my father. My mom and dad got divorced when I was a little kid; we moved upstate, and my dad stayed in Southern California. So, the arrangement was kind of like a once every month or every two months type of thing with my dad. And since it’s hard to cram in so much catching up – it was the era before FaceTime and email –

Mark: Before electricity, really.

Cameron: Yes, the era before electricity. We are old. Carrier pigeons were just getting cool! No, but seriously, it was all you could do to just start catching up and try to cram it all in to one weekend with dad. So, instead of the arbitrary, “So, what are you learning in school?” type of conversations, my dad connected with us through music. He would be driving around in his car, and we’d listen to cassette tapes. Then, we’d go back to his apartment and each get a makeshift instrument out. My dad would have a guitar, and we’d sit and play songs from his favorite Rock bands. So, that was my crash-course in music and becoming a mini musical historian through my dad’s efforts to stay in contact. It was a way to connect and communicate with the man who I didn’t see except for maybe a few times a year. That was the genesis of where music comes from for me. But, of course, like the other guys, I started playing in bands when I was young. I was really young, maybe fifth or sixth grade, and I was organizing groups and putting shows on, making flyers, raising money to record demos. I was doing the whole thing. Then, that brought me back down to Los Angeles, and the rest is sort of history.

Mark: Yeah, I think the common bond for all of us is that music was a really important part of life from the very early beginnings. For me, it was no different. Growing up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, I was fortunate enough that my parents also owned the little honky tonk saloon, which was the only live music that was around for 60 or 70 miles. Back then, that was – on a Friday or a Saturday – the only place to be. In turn, my parents were able to get a lot of really great talent there. I grew up there every Friday and Saturday, my whole life, with me and my five other siblings. We all worked and were around the family place all the time. We grew up with these live musicians, watching them play a lot of the music that would go on to influence Midland and our sound. On any given Friday night, the bands were playing Bruce Springsteen, Eagles, Gary Stewart, George Strait, Alabama, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings. And I got to see it all live. I was there, singing along. And when I wasn’t there, we were driving, because we lived in the middle of nowhere. So, we were always listening to the radio. My mom was all Country, all the time. My mom was the one who gave me my Country education. And my dad was in to Soul and Rhythm and Blues, so he gave me that education. From a very young age, I was always singing along, and I think that’s probably where I got my first start. Then, I got really serious about music around 19. That’s when I first sat down with a guitar and started to teach myself chords so I could sing along while playing. I just started with “three chords and the truth,” as they say. From there, I started writing my first songs, and at that point I was hooked. That led to busking in the streets and getting little bands together until I found myself in L.A.

4. So, the story goes that the three of you met up in Los Angeles, but really came together as a band during Cameron’s wedding in Jackson Hole. How did you end up moving from Los Angeles to Texas?

Jess: I had moved to L.A. from the tiny little town in rural Oregon to go there and try to do something with music. I met Mark through Cameron. And we all played, but Cameron was kind of the common link. He played in a band with me, and then he played in a separate band with Mark. So, we all go back 10 to 15 years of knowing each other back on the L.A. music scene. As far as getting to Texas, I had been in Texas. After L.A., I moved back to Oregon briefly, and then I moved out to Texas. I was living there at the time that Cameron got married. I was on a road trip with my dad and my grandpa from Kansas City and drove to Jackson Hole for the wedding. I ended up getting there early for the wedding, and that’s when we all jammed. I was living in Texas, and I was able to talk those guys in to moving out there. Cameron’s got a place about 15 minutes from my house, and we have a little rehearsal room there. That’s kind of the headquarters. We do the rehearsals and writing and stuff there.

Mark: I was in a band with Cameron, and I’d go to Jess and Cameron’s shows. Then, as serendipity goes, the three of us got together and started the greatest project of my life, so far. Jess was already living out in Texas when we started. And, we saved up for about four or five months, and then Midland was completely formed in Texas. We took the money we had and went out to the Sonic Ranch out in El Paso, Texas. We recorded out there, and then within two months of that, Cameron and I followed suit and moved out there full time. Austin is a really great mecca for live music. Texas is jam packed with honky tonks that really appreciate our brand of music, and we thought it was the ideal setting to go and create our live show, which is the real focus for us, along with our songwriting. We really worked on our chops out there, which is something we really hang our hats on. And, all of us have gone all in, because we believe so deeply in the music that we are making. It has been a long and tough journey, but it has been amazing. And now, circling back, we are here on our Add Day, which is pretty surreal.

5. So, you come together, and you land in Texas as a band. You’re gigging around Texas and cutting your teeth as a group in the honky tonks. What were the steps that led you to Nashville? How did you catch the attention of Big Machine Label Group?

Mark: It was years later, after pounding the pavement and continuing to write and record. We took our Sonic Ranch demos that we had recorded, and we went and cut a music video that Cameron and his wife directed. We all starred in it, and everybody chipped in, and a bunch of favors were called in from friends. We cut that, and we used it as kind of a tool to show what the band was all about and explain the direction we were going. We linked up with our manager, Matt Graham, who was the first guy to see what we were all about. He immediately loved it, and he had a Country background, so he reached out to his contact. Jason Owen, of Sandbox Entertainment, helped us get our foot in the door in Nashville. Then Ben Vaughn over at Warner/Chappell signed us to a publishing deal before anybody, and he saw the potential in Midland as songwriters. So, we were out there writing and writing, taking meetings, and doing all of the showcases. As luck would have it, we finally did a showcase with a bunch of the “big wigs” in Nashville over at The Basement. [Big Machine Label Group SVP/A&R] Allison Jones walked up to us before the show, and she said, “If you can play half as good as you look in those Wranglers, then I want to take y’all to dinner.”

Cameron: That’s a true story!

Mark: We had a great show that night, and everybody thought it was a really special night. From that point on, there was a lot of interest in town. We were fortunate enough to wind up with Scott Borchetta and the entire Big Machine family, who really understand what Midland is about and what we are doing and where we want to be going. They’ve been incredible partners for us.

6. So, you were approached by BMLG, but you alluded to the fact that there were offers from several people on the table. How did you know BMLG was the right label home for you?

Mark: Because they flat-out gave us exactly what we were looking for.

Cameron: One million, billion dollars! HA!

Mark: It was twenty-billion-dollar deal. We’ve never seen anything like it. Haha! No, but they were just the ones that – as we’ve been building our case, starting with our manager, Matt Graham, and our other manager, Jason Owen at Sandbox, and then Ben Vaughn over at Warner/Chappell. This is the team that you’re going to be spending a lot of time with and really being in the trenches with. So, it’s important to have those relationships first and work with the kind of people who you’d want to go on vacation with or want to sit down and have dinner with 250 times a year.

Jess: It’s really important, when it comes to creativity, to be able to have that kind of trust in the relationship first. And Big Machine – Scott Borchetta, Allison Jones, the entire team – these are people who get it and are able to really communicate with us in a positive way. And, Big Machine was the one who came through with the best deal, hands down, meaning that they fully saw what we wanted to do, creatively, and they’ve given us all the tools and all the support to do it.

7. "Drinkin' Problem" is the first single from an EP that was released in October. Let's talk about your sound -- which is both very traditional and completely unique to the current radio landscape. Mark, you mentioned earlier that you had a very diverse set of influences growing up, and you each touched on your pasts with various genres contributing to your personal musical styles. So, coming together as a band to produce an EP, did you go in knowing how you wanted it to sound, and which influences you’d draw from, or did that happen on the spot, in the studio, as the production was being done? And how do you take those influences in to your writing sessions as your work toward your full-length album?

Cameron: It’s a combination of both. You go in with your influences, and you talk about it. And you sit down with the producers, Dann Huff and Shane McAnally, and you talk about it with the label. Hopefully they were catching our live shows and seeing how we sound in real life. But you go in with the ingredients, and you experiment and try stuff. And like with anything else creatively, you’re not painting by numbers. You’re coloring outside the lines and making some stuff up as you go. So, what came of it was a combination of all of our influences, while really making an effort not to make a pure throwback. We didn’t want to be derivatives of a sound or some sort of outlier. If they had the technology in the 70s to do what we are doing now, I think they would have done it! So, we wanted the production to be as rich and robust as we could make it, as long as it had the intangible Midland sweet spot. And all three of us know what that is, so that didn’t get lost.

Mark: Yeah, and as far as the writing, I think that you just write what you know. The three of us are not 19 years old singing about our first truck and an Instagram page that we’re excited about! We’ve been through some stuff, and each and every one of us have been working our asses off at our “day jobs” to earn money and pay bills while still working hard creatively on the side and never getting paid. This is the first time any of us has had a record deal and broken in to the professional side of it. So, there’s been a lot of wear and tear, a lot of heartbreak, and a lot of struggle. I think you’re going to hear some of that on your first EP, because we’re writing songs about what we know. But, I think when we sit down to write, it’s just about what’s on the tip of our tongue and what’s on our hearts at that moment. It always emanates from a mood and a spirit.

Jess: Yeah, we definitely have vintage influences, and songwriting is very, very important to us. We take that aspect of this very seriously, and we put a lot of time in to it. We just want to put out the best songs that we can. We definitely toil over that part of it, trying to make it the best that we can. We hope that there’s a timeless element to it, and that it stands the test of time. We hope that people will want to listen to it years from now.

Mark: I think that stems from just writing from an authentic place. The language in the songs comes from an authentic place. It’s not contrived; we never sit down and say, “We’re going to write this kind of song, and it needs to have this kind of feel.” You can do that, but it’s not going to be real. But if you sit and write a song the way you feel, it’ll come across genuinely.

Cameron: And you’re hoping that you write a song that appeals to those who are 19 or younger, too. But you’re not trying to target anyone or anything. It’s just what is real at that moment.

8. Another aspect to your overall branding is your look. With a vintage Western flair, the three of you certainly stand out next to today's mainstream Country artists. Is this look by design? And, which of you is the most stylish or takes the lead in styling the band?

Mark: I think they just go hand-in-hand. If you like and are inspired by music from the 70s and 80s like we are, chances are you’ll also be drawn to that aesthetic. There was never a moment where the three of us got together and said, “Well, how should we dress?” We just were wearing what we were wearing. Luckily, when we came to Nashville, nobody seemed to have a problem with it. They didn’t tell us we needed to change anything, so we just kept doing it! And, who is the most stylish? It’s a tie between Jess and Cameron, and then I just steal all of their ideas!

9. When you originally got together to record for the first time as a band, there were 15 songs that came out of that session, correct? But only five songs were released on the debut EP. Will the other 10 songs be a part of a larger forthcoming project, or are you working on brand new material for the full-length album?

Jess: We hope that some of those songs from the original session will wind up on the full-length album. Not every song on the EP is from that session, because we did some co-writes in Nashville with Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne and Jonathan Singleton and David Lee Murphy. We were very blessed to co-write with the best of the best.

Mark: So, the answer is yes? I think? We are writing. And we are rounding out the full-length album, which is a full thing in-and-of itself. We want to tell a story with that full-length album and have it be something you want to listen to from top to bottom. There’s a lot going in to the songs that are going to be on there, just like there was with the EP.

10. As a trio, you are heading in to 2017 with the pedal to the metal. What goals have you set as a band for the year to come?

Cameron: Survive!

Mark: Survival, yes!

Cameron: Well, this is a new thing for us, all the way around. We’ve all been playing music for a long time, but never have we released professional music. On top of that, we’ve never released professional music that had the real chance to go to radio! And then, to get played at radio, and on top of that, to hopefully get good reactions from people who hear our professional music on the real radio! We’ve got show dates coming up on the “Soul2Soul Tour” with Tim [McGraw] and Faith [Hill], and we’re all really excited about that. We want to do our best at those shows to spread the Midland gospel. We’re super-thankful for the opportunity to do that anywhere, but especially with them – two of our heroes, and legends in the Country space. We’re going to put our album out, and the target date right now is the end of September. That’ll be for the full-length album. And, getting through that, doing the best we can to create a new sound – not new from the EP, but continuing that as something new and fresh. Putting out real, thoughtful, and hopefully timeless music is always a goal and objective. And, of course we’ve got our heads down working out on the road with radio tour. We want to meet as many people as we can out there, because these are the people responsible for spinning our records. These aren’t just guys pressing play, as you know. There’s politics involved, which we know, and there’s just a lot of responsibility and pressure these guys and gals have, so for them to even consider playing us is huge. And, that’s not just me blowing smoke, either. I really do get it. Every time you get an add it’s a minor victory, and we’re going to hope to keep doing what we’re doing out here – just making friends and winning fans. Oh, and we hope to avoid too many crazy PDs that want to challenge our drinking stamina! It has been full-force, at least five days a week. And I’m pleased to report that we have not been outdone by anyone yet! But, that is not a challenge! [Hubbard Broadcasting Country WUBE/Cincinnati PD] Grover [Collins] and [his wife] Holly in Cincinnati gave us a run for our money, though. I can’t say that we outlasted them, but toe-to-toe.

Mark: He called us at six in the morning to see if we got home safely.

1. Circling back to the single, "Drinkin' Problem," what do you each prefer as your go-to drink when you pull up a stool at the bar?

Cameron: Well, that’s an interesting question. And the setting is everything. But, on the radio tour, you’ve got to pace yourself. You are going to want to start with a beer, at least for me. Something light. So, I drink Heineken, and I love me some Miller Lite, I’ll tell you that. But, I go in for just about anything that isn’t an IPA. If it’s a special celebration – like, say, a Thursday night – and we can find it, Mark and I will drink Mezcal. We like Mezcal a lot. Jess does flaming shots of like Fireball. Or, something crazy like a Kamikaze dropped in to a glass of Chardonnay that you light on fire with Jager on the side. Crazy.

Jess: These guys introduced me to the Paloma, and that’s the one that stuck. It’s tequila and grapefruit juice with a little squirt of lime. But I’m not setting anything on fire. They were kidding. And, please don’t let anyone challenge us to something like that, because then it’ll be over for Midland. HA!

2. Cameron, you are an award-winning director with shelves full of accolades for your work on music videos for Bruno Mars and others. If you were casting actors to play each of you in a movie or music video, who would you pick -- besides yourselves? What actor do you think best represents each of you?

Cameron: Haha! That is a great question! Okay. I’m going to start with myself. I’m for sure being played by Casey Affleck. Jess is played by Jason Schwartzman. And Mark is played by –

Mark: What’s that guy from…

Cameron: Mark is played by Elijah Wood from “The Hobbit.”

Mark: No! The Rock!

Cameron: No, Mark is Tom Cruise, 1991.

Mark: Yes! Or Burt Reynolds…!

Cameron: Who’s casting this movie? I am! Mark is “Days Of Thunder” Tom Cruise. Mark is way more early-90s Tom Cruise in personality than he is Burt Reynolds.

Mark: What about Viggo Mortensen?

Cameron: Geez, there’s so many that Mark thinks he is!

3. Is there anything else you want to make sure to tell the guys and gals in radioland reading this?

Cameron: Just send us some prayers.

Mark: We just want everybody that has supported this band to know that that is the fuel we have in our tank right now, so thank you.

Jess: Yes, just thank you!

Mark: And we have a lot of merch available online that will help us, too!