Music Citizens Episode 5 goes inside the highest stakes job in the industry – A&R. Through the lens and life of A&R lifer Kim Buie, we get to see that this glamorous job is mostly about losing. Missing out on artists who become superstars (her near-miss tale of N.W.A. is amazing), knowing that the majority of albums you help shepherd into the world will flop and being the person who has to say no to a musician’s lifelong dream.
Buie explains what’s kept her going through all that, what shaped her tastes and how her approach differs from the way most major labels are approaching talent acquisition in the TikTok era.
Transcript
Kim Buie: I cried so hard when I wasn’t able to sign NWA.
Justin Barney: That is Kim Buie an A&R representative.
Jason Moon Wilkins: It’s so surprising to hear her say the letters N.W.A. because Kim Buie is known primarily as someone who has helped shape Americana for the last, at least, two decades.
Justin Barney: Yeah. Lost highway, New West, 30 Tigers — yeah, N.W.A completely outta left field.
Kim Buie: I remember in those early days when I was courting them, in my little green Subaru. It was Dre, Eazy, Yella and MC Ren.
I said, “Well, let’s say this doesn’t work out for you. What do you wanna do?” And they’re like,”This is gonna work.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. But if you could choose what path you would choose for yourself, what would it be?”
Easy said he wanted to be a record label mogul. Dre said, “Well, I wanna produce.” And I’m like, “Okay, good. Yeah, you’d be great.”
Justin Barney: What?! Dr. Dre, casually in the back of the car thinking about, at some point in the future, becoming a producer. Saying it to Kim Buie, who’s sitting in the front seat.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I mean… it’s insane.
She was convicted about them, but wasn’t able to get the artist to actually sign.
Kim Buie: It was a good deal. The biggest proposed deal that I had been involved with. But Jerry (Heller) wanted, like $50,000 more. And our lawyer said, “No.” And the deal went away.
That was the first real heartache I experienced about not being able to work with somebody that I had developed a friendship with. And yeah, it broke my heart.
Justin Barney: I think the NWA story shows us that the job of A&R… it’s mostly losing. You don’t get the big artists that you want to sign. And then when you do sign the artists that you want to sign, most of the time they don’t work out.
And so, I mean, I think that this job is about the highest stakes that there are in the music industry because the A&R person is responsible for if a label survives or not.
Jason Moon Wilkins: They are the frontline and the bottom line. It all comes down to the artists you sign or don’t sign. People are fired. People’s legacies are made or not made by the decisions that A&R people make.
Justin Barney: I don’t know how you do that.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I certainly don’t know how you do it for decades.
This is Music Citizens. a podcast about the people who make music work.
I’m Jason Moon Wilkins host.
Justin Barney: I’m Justin Barney, reporter.
This is episode five.
Kim Buie…
Justin Barney and Jason Moon Wilkins: The Tastemaker.
Justin Barney: Wow, a little unison action. Didn’t even plan that.
Can I just say that I learned so much about A&R doing this. One thing I learned about A&R is that it stands for Artist & Repertoire. Jason, in your vast experience, what does an A&R person do?
Jason Moon Wilkins: For most people, when they think of A&R at all, they’re thinking of the person who is finding the next band, the next big thing and trying to get ’em to sign on the dotted line for a record label.
Kim Buie: A lot of people think, “Well, I love music. I have good taste. I love going to clubs.” Well, okay, great. It’s a lot more than that.
Jason Moon Wilkins: You’re also signing legacy artists. You are renegotiating deals.
Kim Buie: I worked with Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg, this guy named Dwight Yoakum.
Justin Barney: I think like a really easy, good, succinct way that a couple people explained it was an A&R person is the liaison between the label and the artist.
Kim Buie: What happens between being signed and a record actually coming out… my job is to nurture them or give them advice or help them build their team.
Tom Waits, if he called me, he’d be like, “ah, I’m doing some recordings and I needed somebody that can play like a Spanish guitar style. Do you know anybody? I said, “Well, I think I might.”
It’s finding that right match somebody who’s going to bring out all those good qualities that you believe an artist has.
Jason Moon Wilkins: You’re helping pick the single, you are helping go through and sequence an album.
You know, one of my memories of working with an A&R person, a major label, when I was managing bands, was this very heated back and forth about sequencing. What the artist wanted, what we thought was a good idea, what the A&R person thought was a good idea. It was like, knock down drag outs about which song should be number seven? Or which song should be 10? But that shows the detail of the creative process that they’re in.
And it starts with finding that artist , believing in them and thinking, yes, it is worth my company’s money and time and it is worth my reputation to sign this artist.
Justin Barney: And like…most everything in the music industry fails.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Oh yeah. I mean, who knows what the number is now, but for most major labels, nine out of ten things they sign will not make money.
Justin Barney: As an A&R person, you have to be so confident in your artists. Then you fail most of the time. And you still have to be really confident in your taste. What accounts for taste?
Kim Buie: I grew up in a really tiny little town. Population 5,000 people. Wamego, Kansas.
Justin Barney: Everybody’s taste is based on what they were watching, what they were listening to, their background and story and the parts of their own life .
Kim Buie: I remember these things. I was standing in front of our local IGA grocery store. They had a little speaker outside and then “Light My Fire” comes over on the radio. I’m just like, “Ah! What’s this?” You know? That’s when you know something has just hit you over the head and you’re like, “What is that?” I remember I was in high school this time when I saw, Kate Bush on Saturday Night Live.
And then, my mom and I, we were in the only local record store there and I walked in and I said, “Do you have Kate Bush?” And they’re like. “Who’s that?” They had no idea. They were guessing that I had the name wrong. And I’m like, “No, I don’t have the name wrong.”
I went to college and I started working at the college radio station. They had her record. It was like, “I found her! She does exist!”
Justin Barney: She went to KU.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yep. Kansas University.
Justin Barney: You think of Kansas… you don’t think the center of music. But then you have a college town where all these bands pass through. It is the “Gateway to the West.”
Kim Buie: Iggy Pop referred to Lawrence, Kansas as, “An oasis in the middle of nowhere.”
I saw The Go-Go’s before they exploded and the Buzzcocks came through town and played at the Opera House. I was also bartending at a local club. So, how many hours a day did I work? All of them, except when I was eating.
Justin Barney: She was a Music Director at her college radio station. Shout out to Music Directors at their college radio stations.
Kim Buie: All these things combined, really, it was my early formation. And when you start to realize how music can impact you.. you know… it’s like you can hear a song and you can know that it is just reaching inside to your deepest depth.
Or you can hear something that is just of-the-moment and it is just awesome and makes you wanna dance. You come to this conclusion that it’s emotion. Emotion is everything that drives music. And it’s a shared experience as well.
Justin Barney: I think that gets down to Kim’s real understanding of what’s at the core. That’s kind of her specialty, knowing what’s at the core of an artist.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I think it gets down to her philosophy too, on what she’s looking for in music. That emotional connection.
Justin Barney: Her first job at a label was with Enigma Records in California.
They had signed this little scrappy, weird alternative funk group called The Red Hot Chili Peppers. She sat in on an early recording session as they made their very first album.
You know what she did? She bought ’em a six pack of beer.
Jason Moon Wilkins: That’s right. Because they were stuck creatively.
Kim Buie: They were in the studio and Flee was getting frustrated. I brought a six pack of Budweiser ’cause I knew that’s what they liked and I could afford it.
Justin Barney: That shows instinct. That’s not going in and being like, “You need to turn the bass up here.” or “You need to do this or you need to do that.” She bought them a six pack of beer. Said, “Figure it out.” Very Kim.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I think this points out something really, really important in every single music industry story ever. There’s a level of serendipity that is crucial. Sometimes you really do end up in the right place at the right time.
So after Enigma Records, she goes to Nashville. And it’s a really different turn.
She goes into the world of major label country music. Very different.
Kim Buie: Getting to watch these really legendary session musicians, artists and country stars like Steve Earle, Roger Miller, Loretta Lynn…
Jason Moon Wilkins: I think you can consider all of the time from growing up in Kansas to being at the college radio station to the early days with Enigma to the formative days with MCA as the building of taste and instinct. And then Island Records is where the tools and the experience and all of it seem to come together.
Kim Buie: Chris Blackwell was the owner of Island Records, you know, Bob Marley, U2, Robert Plant. I mean, just an amazing guy.
My first week on the job, Chris comes to the office. He has a meeting to see these two women. They are singing their soul songs and it was great. After a couple songs, Chris looks at me and he is like, “What do you think?”
My God, I was being put on the spot. And I’m like, “Well, I think, you know, they have really great voices and wonderful personalities… I’m not sure these songs are developed enough for us to jump into this. But if you have more songs and wanna send them to us, we’d be happy to listen.”
And Chris turns, looks at them and says, “I agree with her.”
Jason Moon Wilkins: And that’s the job.That is it. It is awkward, difficult conversations with people who have put their lives into their music and they’re offering it up to you in this vulnerable way. And most of the time you have to tell them it’s not good enough.
Pete Ganbarg: I think the most important thing when you’re looking. To hire an A&R person, and I did a lot of hiring of A&R people, it’s always what is your taste? What is your opinion? Why do you believe in what you believe?
Justin Barney: That’s Peter Ganbarg, former head of Atlantic Records. I talked to him when I was in New York.
Pete Ganbarg: You want somebody to have the courage to say, “yes” when the room says, “no.” And the courage to say, “no” when the room says, “yes.” That’s not easy to do.
Justin Barney: Steam is rising on the street…guy on a bike smoking a joint…it’s New York City, baby! Should we just take the taxi? It’s right there.
TAXI! We’re going to Brooklyn.
Jason Moon Wilkins: One of the things Kim Buie is doing right now is working with Ben Folds.
Ben Folds: Prior to working with Kim, I’d made sure that that I didn’t really have that much to do with the A&R people.I lean on her because she knows music.
Justin Barney: That’s Ben Folds. I went to New York to follow Kim as she set up a show for Ben Folds at the Grammy museum.
Kim Buie: I have a friend who works at the Grammy Museum and I said, “Hey, Ben Folds is putting out a record on July 4th. Would you be interested in having him for the Grammy Museum?” She’s like, “We love Ben, and yes we would.”
Justin Barney: Did you know that Kim’s first interaction with Ben Folds was sending him a rejection letter?
Jason Moon Wilkins: What? I had no clue.
Ben Folds: It was in the middle of going to different semesters of college. So it was sort of a college band. We were called Majosha. And I sent her a demo tape. I think she was the only one that wrote back. Probably on Island Records stationary.
It wasn’t like, “You guys are great. You need to be making records.” It was like, “Yeah, keep going.”
Jason Moon Wilkins: The fact that she responded. And anyone who has sent, these days it would be an email or maybe a DM, anyone who sent the proverbial cassette tape. It is such a vulnerable and painful process, and you’re going out there and you’re knowing you’re gonna get rejected and no one’s gonna send anything back to you. Wow, that shows heart.
Kim Buie: I think I always had this in me that I was more interested in the complete artist. The artist that comes in and they know who they are and that my job is to not F it up.
Justin Barney: That’s what’s gonna translate to the fans.
Okay, you are first in line for Ben Folds. What do you like about Ben Folds?
Deb Wan: I like the way he writes songs. They’re emotional and they mean stuff to me.
Mark Steele: Last time we saw him, the audience all threw songs in on paper airplanes. He spent the evening opening them up and playing whatever we threw at him.
Allison Struthers: I’ve got friends on four different continents ’cause of this dude,
I have a binder at home of every set list, of every show I’ve seen.
Justin Barney: What number is this?
Allison Struthers: This will be 86.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Ben Folds has had the kind of long term artist’s career that has gone in lots of different directions.
He’s an artist who has developed. And artist development is the kind of thing these days that so many major labels seem to just completely ignore.
So where does that leave major label A&R?
Justin Barney: We will hear about that right after the break.
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Jason Moon Wilkins: There are different ways to approach A&R. And Kim’s way is really to invest in capital A artists who work over long periods of time. I’m thinking of folks she’s worked with like Grace Jones, Willie Nelson, Etta James.
Aaron Lee Tasjan: Kim Buie becomes a trusted ally for a musician like that. Mainly because you can tell when you walk into her office that she’s not just a music business person.
Justin Barney: That’s Aaron Lee Tasjan, an artist she worked with at New West Records.
Aaron Lee Tasjan: Like, there’s a letter on her wall from William Burroughs thanking her for helping him. You know what I mean? You’re immediately just like, “I kind of wanna hang out with this lady.”
Justin Barney: That’s the way that Kim does A&R. I think largely because she’s worked at independent record labels and with independent artists. But there is a whole different way to do A&R.
I talked to Pete Ganbarg, who we heard from before. He’s worked at a major label for 30 years and he sees the whole thing differently.
Pete Ganbarg: There’s no better feeling in the world of high fiving your artists when they’re about to headline Madison Square Garden for the first time.
Justin Barney: So he worked at Arista with Clive Davis.
Jason Moon Wilkins: One of the most legendary music industry personalities of all time. Whitney Houston, Patty Smith, and all points in between.
Justin Barney: And so they signed Santana when he was late in his career, 1999.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yeah.
Pete Ganbarg: I had the idea of what if we put Carlos Santana with a bunch of younger artists who grew up listening to his music.
Justin Barney: And Peter was really hands-on. He’s doing the arrangements, he’s picking the songs, he’s picking the artists.
Pete Ganbarg: A friend of mine sends up this songwriter’s name is Itaal Shur. Al came up and he played me a song called “Room 17.” And I listened to it and I’m like, huh, I think the music is great, but I don’t like the lyric. I don’t like the melody.
At that point, Rob Thomas wasn’t known for anything other than being the singer of this band called Matchbox 20. Rob had just come off tour, he was home for a while. He was living with his fiance who was Spanish. He heard this track and he decided to write a love letter to his fiance, Marisol. And that’s how we got “Smooth.”
Justin Barney: So you did that as an A&R person?
Pete Ganbarg: Did what?
Justin Barney: You got that song, you got the melody, you put the pieces together?
Pete Ganbarg: Yeah.
That’s the A&R’s job. It’s to do such a good job that nobody knows who you are. The invisible fingerprints. You know, I used to joke that Santana record, the album Supernatural, my fingerprints were on every note, but nobody would know.
Justin Barney: His philosophy and what he was telling me the philosophy of the label is, it’s like —we know how to make hits. It’s telling the artist, “Trust us. We know how to do this.” And Kim is like, trust the artist. They know how to do it.
Jason Moon Wilkins: And major labels really did function more the way that Kim functions when they began.
If you look at the history of major labels in the seventies and even through the eighties, it was developing an artist for long term because catalog, so older records were really how you made your money. So it was important for you to have an artist. It may take them a few albums to get there, but then you’ve got several records. People go back and buy them. You have this sort of legacy hit that you can, that people are gonna buy every single year.
Justin Barney: You have repertoire.
Jason Moon Wilkins: But Major labels are driven now more than ever by hits. By truly a single song or single album of hits.
Pete Ganbarg: Now it’s private equity money and hedge funds and major labels are swinging for the Grand Slam.
Justin Barney: And he was like, “By the end, I was hiring coders to find artists that went viral before other labels.”
Pete Ganbarg: They would build programs that would say, “Okay, if something gets a thousand plays on SoundCloud over the course of 60 minutes in the Northeast corner of the United States, you know, I wanna know about it, ping me. And they would find this stuff and then they would tee it up to us and if there was a compelling story, we would sign it.
Justin Barney: One of these people that he signed was a guy named Alex Warren. Who has the song that has the most plays in the world right now.
And I have never heard of this guy.
Justin Barney: Does that mean as major label, you’re looking for TikTok stars?
Pete Ganbarg: No. No, what we’re looking for is we’re looking for great music that could translate to, you know, a digital home where everyone lives.
Justin Barney: What, what if the audience really loves an AI artist?
Pete Ganbarg: Great. The audience is undefeated. God bless the audience.
Justin Barney: Just seeing your gears turn, what are you thinking?
Jason Moon Wilkins: Part of it makes me sad.
Justin Barney: Yeah? What part?
Jason Moon Wilkins: I mean, we all are just statistics after all. And if anything, the digital age has shown us that. But I think about some of the best A&R stories, some of my favorite artists, how they arrived, who they became. Does this process just leave them out entirely? Does it completely remove the romantic notion of finding the diamond in the rough?
Justin Barney: mm-hmm.
Pete Ganbarg: When you’re dealing with corporations that are beholden to stockholders, nobody wants to be patient.
Patience is a dirty word. But great art takes time.
You know, it takes time to find its people and those who are doing A&R in the future who understand that, who can be patient, who can cut off all the noise.
They’re the ones, it’s, it’s like “The Tortoise and the Hare.” You know? They’re gonna be the tortoises who are gonna win.
Kim Buie: I can’t think in terms of whether they’re a hit making artist or not. That’s just not the way my brain goes. First I just evaluate the talent for its own merits.
Justin Barney: Why isn’t that the way you think?
Kim Buie: Um, because…
Justin Barney: I would think that, as a label, they want hits.
Kim Buie: Yeah. Um, that’s never really been my thing.
Justin Barney: She’s not trying to develop a song as a hit, she’s trying to develop an artist over their career.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Look at who headlines festivals. It is very rare that it’s a one hit wonder.
And we see some of the same names year over years because they have developed fan bases. They have developed careers and that does take patience.
Kim Buie: I have always placed a very high value on artists who live maybe in the middle. I mean, working with Lucinda Williams, she has a fantastic career. She can sell half a million records on any given release. Those are the ones that stick around. They have staying power. They’re not the here and now.
And believe me, there is room for all of it. It’s just, you know, if somebody said, oh, go find me another, you know, pick one… Christina Aguilera, I wouldn’t know. That’s not my expertise. That’s not my forte. To me that’s just like, shooting at a barrel and hoping you hit a pop star. Maybe not the best analogy, but, it’s really that simple.
It’s just, you know, I know what I am good at. I know what my skill sets are. I know talent when I see it.
Jason Moon Wilkins: If we go back to the original concept that an A&R person is that conduit between the artist and the label, it is that A&R person’s confidence and belief and vision alongside the artist that is crucial for Peter Ganbarg’s dirty word of “patience” on the money side. Someone’s funding it. They gotta be patient and the person who’s gonna help that patient, who’s gonna help shepherd this concept until it reaches its apex, so they can be more them. That is the role of, of at least the really good A&R people.
Justin Barney: And that’s what Kim does.
