Kris Orlowski, Aaron Beam: Songwriting & Videos In The YouTube Era

Four distinct Northwest artists gathered at the headquarters of Marmoset Music in Portland, Ore., to discuss songwriting and making music videos in the YouTube age, sharing thoughts on what it takes to reach listeners and stand out in the era of viral video.

Seattle, Wash. singer/songwriter Kris Orlowski, who is currently preparing his second full-length album; Eugene, Ore.-based a cappella artist Peter Hollens, whose music videos regularly receive millions of views; Aaron Beam, singer and bassist for Portland hard rock band Red Fang; and Catherine Harris-White, one-half of Seattle’s genre-bending THEESatisfaction and a burgeoning solo artist who goes by the name SassyBlack. The discussion was moderated by Party Damage Records co-founder and Believer magazine contributing editor Casey Jarman.

Four Videos

Beam shared his band Red Fang’s breakthrough video from 2009, "Prehistoric Dog," a hilarious and outlandish short film that finds the band guzzling cheap beer, then battling local Live-Action Role Playing teenagers. Portland-based director Whitey McConnaughy was the force behind the video. “He wrote it, edited it, shot it for the most part, and he paid for everything,” Beam said. “So it was a pretty good business decision on our part.” The video was the first in a series of collaborations with McConnaughy, most of which are similarly absurdist and fun. “Everything that happened to our band, and the whole reason I’m sitting on this panel, was because of that video,” Beam said.

Orlowski shared his video for "Believer," from his debut album of the same name. He plays a small role in the video, but its primary stars are kids from Friday Harbor, Wash., where the video was shot. “The whole community got involved in the movie,” Orlowski said. “At the end of it all the kids felt like celebrities, so we hosted a sold-out showing at a local theater. The kids got up and took a bow. It was awesome.”

Hollens shared the video for "Mary, Did You Know?" which features the singer sitting in a church pew, where he is eventually joined by five cloned versions of himself singing harmonies. His substantial online following requested that Hollens cover the song (made popular by the a cappella group Pentatonix in 2014) over 1,000 times in comments and messages to the artist. “I wanted people to visually see what they were hearing aurally,” he said. “And that went over really well with people.” Hollens said the video received over 30 million views, on various platforms, after being released last holiday season.

Harris-White shared the minimalist and futuristic video for "Thriller (Game Healer," from her 2015 EP, Personal Sunlight. The black and white video was shot “in 30 or 45 minutes on an extremely cold day in Brooklyn. I wanted something really strong and I wanted it to have kind of a Blaxploitation feel to it.” Tiona McClodden, a friend of Harris-White’s, directed the video. It was an important step in presenting herself to the world as a solo artist, she said. “It established that I was serious about it.”

What Videos Accomplish That Songs Alone Cannot

While the four artists on the panel take vastly different approaches to making and promoting their music videos, they agree that one of video’s primary benefits is establishing artists as living, breathing people who exist outside of the aural realm. It’s also a creative journey worth taking.

“The hope is that you can get some points across that you can’t get across with your music,” Orlowski said. “Some people don’t get things by hearing it; they get things by seeing it. So hopefully you’re reaching a whole new audience.”

“Nobody really gives a damn about your music if they can’t see you,” Harris-White said, adding that she did not just mean fans. “Music videos are key, because that’s one of the biggest thing bookers ask you: ‘Do you have a video? Do you have something I could see?’ It proves you have some sort of budget and that you have some creativity.”

Trusting A Director Versus Making It Yourself

The panelists had wide-ranging ideas about how much control to take over one’s own videos. Orlowski said he has taken an active role in selecting the creatives behind his videos, and he has worn both organizational and creative hats during shoots and in post-production, but the thought of finding time to fully direct sounds a bit daunting. All of the artists expressed an interest in playing a large creative role in the video-making process.

For Beam of Red Fang, the positives of outsourcing to a great director outweigh the negatives, but the band can feel limited by the videos’ trajectory. “The characters that we established in our first video have necessarily needed to live throughout all of the videos, and most of us aren’t like that anymore,” he said, referencing the beer-chugging renegades of “Prehistoric Dog.” “So I have to act, and I can’t act.”

Hollens has worked in both independent and major-label environments and for him, learning multiple skills (including video directing) is a must. “I taught myself audio engineering when my group wanted to record their first CD — ruining many CDs along the way — and I thought if I could figure that out, I could figure out [the video editing platform] Final Cut,” he said. “I think it’s so important to learn how to do all your own video, all your own audio, all these facets of the business so that you can communicate about them to your team members — or, more importantly, if somebody else isn’t getting the job done you can step in and do it.”

Harris-White — who said that the panel left her feeling newly motivated to direct a video herself — talked about being both intrigued and intimidated by the process. “I’ve had ideas for music videos, but it’s really hard to create a treatment and communicate that. To say, ‘ok, now I’m going to direct it’ — I don’t know how to direct. It turns it into a whole ‘nother project that is plausible but complicated. I’m scared to do it, but I’m going to do it. I’m going to start drawing stick figures!”

Writing (And Shooting) For The Fans

In the era of social media, when audience response to a song or video can be measured immediately, musicians no longer have the option to simply “ignore the critics.” Everyone, literally, is a critic. So is it best to grow thicker skin and forge ahead with one’s vision in the face of rejection and indifference? Or is it okay to let your audience help steer the ship? Is it more artistically acceptable to let the fans determine the artistic direction of a video than it is to let fans alter the kinds of music one writes?

For Harris-White, every day is an opportunity to learn something new — she went to school for music, and considers her career thus far a master’s program — and her fans are some of her favorite teachers. “I pay attention to how my audience interacts with me. When they liked [THEESatisfaction’s] disco song, ‘Queens,’ it made me think ‘okay, maybe it’s alright for me to get in touch with my pop side and write more songs like that.’ And then I’ll just throw myself into that, because I like challenges. Some artists are just like ‘I hate that,’ and they become a different kind of artist who is special and beautiful in their own way. But for me, I pay attention to what people think.”

For Beam, the audience’s reaction to songs and videos on the internet may not have a huge direct influence on Red Fang’s sound, but what happens in concert shapes their approach to writing. “No one writes music inside a vacuum, except maybe John Cage,” he said. “We thrive off of the way our songs are received by an audience, and it affects the way we write them, and the way we feel about the songs.”

In part because fan comments and messages determine which song he will cover next, Hollens sees his fans as an integral part of the creative process. “I truly, with all of my heart, believe that the future lies within this direct artist-fan relationship,” he said. “We’re creating these real genuine interactions with our audience. I am always trying to make my supporters happy. I don’t see them as fans; I view them as my family. And I want them to know that I’m just this 35-year-old father in my garage in my underwear making weird sounds in front of my microphone.”

The Importance Of Being Yourself

For Orlowski, low-budget videos that present an artist playing their music can be just as important as larger productions. “The great thing about doing a live video, even in that setting where it’s not a real show, is that people can really get a sense of who you are,” he said. “I think that’s really important. When you can see how real someone is when they’re singing, it can make all the difference on whether you become a fan or not.”

To that end, Hollens added, “I think it’s so important for people to fall in love with you as a person. I think it’s more important for your fan base to like you as a person more than they like you as a musician. If they like you as a person first, you’ll never lose them. If they love you — whoever you are — as a person who has a kind heart and loving soul and you’ve been through X, Y, and Z and you write about that. It doesn’t matter where your music goes: They will follow you to the end of the earth, they will follow you to another platform, they will support you. It’s vital for you to speak at the end of your videos and let them in on your life as much as you feel comfortable with that.”

Being open-hearted and receptive is just as important as a business person, Harris-White said. “You know, if you’re nice to people, they’ll work with you. A lot of the things that you need as a DIY artist will happen if you’re kind. That’s kind of how the world works. You’d think that being a dick would get you far, but not really. It’s so much better to be kind and genuine.”

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