The Healthier Home Studio Podcast

"If You Build It, They WILL Come" with Multi-Platinum Producer Paul Trust.

• Chris Graham • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Chris3.:

I've been thinking about you a lot in our last conversation. this is the second time we've done an interview. I didn't ever publish the first one. That was when my last podcast was starting to fall apart and I was on to new things Paul, so why I wanted to have you on is, you were really outspoken, a few years ago when I was doing the six figure on studio podcast about one of these central ideas of that podcast, which was if you build it, they will not come. A lot of people in the recording industry think I'll just do great work and that'll be enough. I disagreed. I'm a marketing guy. you reached out to me and you said, man, I think you totally got that wrong. if you build it, they will come. I've been thinking about it a ton I just moved to the country. I bought a cabin. And as I've been hanging out in the country and getting to know folks out here, I overheard a conversation at a local pizza shop the other day, and it was a conversation that immediately made me think of you because the conversation was about an artist that you've produced. This lady says to this guy, what kind of music do you listen to? And he, without missing a beat, said, Morgan Wallen, and so this lady says back oh, so you listen to country music and he says, Nope, morgan Wallen, so apparently this guy only listens to Morgan Wallen Morgan Wallen is his own John WRA. Morgan Wallen, is his own island of fans. I've, I've never seen anything like that before. That fascinates me.

Paul:

He was still on the voice when we started working with him. blown away by his just tone his vocal sound. and I knew we needed to work with him. And then even on the voice, they were pushing him to be a pop artist. they didn't think his voice sounded country. go look back on the voice videos, he was singing the song collide. he's singing pop stuff. They had him dressed like a pop guy. There was a conversation. this was hilarious. the first time we met, there was a conversation. He really didn't know what kind of artist he was

Chris3.:

Huh.

Paul:

I had already been, prepped on this conversation going in there and I met him and the people I work with, we're not sure, should he be more pop, should he be country? And he opened his mouth to talk with his southern, with his Tennessee twang. And I'm like, damn man, you're, no, you're definitely a country guy. So that, that's not even a question. And I grew up, I'm a rocker. dabbled in country, I grew up listening to the Eagles to that kind of stuff. So raspier voices always sound great to me, and he had that voice and I'm like, why can't that be a country voice? Of course it is. at the time period, it was still you sign an artist, record a bunch of stuff, and then go shop it to the majors. That was my old business model. That's the way we used to do things, and it was still like that. For the first set of songs recorded, We, did the rounds, got it sent out, and across the board. Everybody in Nashville would say, he doesn't have a country voice. So all the geniuses in Nashville who probably had taken credit for working with Morgan, none of them thought he had a country sounding voice. And I thought that was dead wrong. And now you see a trend in country where you got a bunch of people now trying to sound like Morgan wallen, you know? so it's interesting to have been personally a part of the change of vocal sound in country

Chris3.:

Yeah. That's amazing, obviously I have some feelings about talking to you today because the point of this episode is for me to say, you're right. I think if you build it, they will come. And the operative piece of that sentence, the operative word there, is it. What is it? And I think what you did with Morgan and, like I listened to Morgan, especially his, second to latest record I listened to a lot and even his earlier stuff. and realizing holy shit, I really like this. I don't consider myself like a country fan. I think what you did, what it sounds like you're doing, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, is that you helped him navigate a pivot.

Paul:

Yeah, you took

Chris3.:

You took what he had, his raw talent, and you said, I hear something in you. I hear something that is authentically part of who you are, and I think that if we incorporate that into what we're building, that will resonate more, be more yourself. Stop pretending to be a pop star and lean into to your roots as obviously a person from the south.

Paul:

you got it. you nailed my niche of the music business and it's been that way since 1991, my thing that I'm good at is taking something where nobody's sure what it is yet and creating it into a thing. You know, um, I've always been artist development. I love working with people. at The beginning it's fresh and it's raw and it's fun and you don't know where it's going, right? but I love, seeing a person, hearing them sing. And knowing where to go with them.

Chris3.:

I wanna point out something that you said earlier, that really has me thinking most people that would hear this idea of if you build it, they will come in the recording studio. If you make this production, it will explode and go viral. when you helped Morgan pivot from pop to country. That was a major decision. That was a small rudder steering, a humongous ship. And I think when most people hear, if you build a table come, or this idea of how do you make something, that's undeniably great, I think that they focus on smaller choices, that they think it's the smaller choices that have the biggest impact. But here's the thing, all of the effort that you put into Morgan. It would've gone differently, I believe, if you guys had gone down the pop star route. If you guys had tried to make pop songs with him, I'm sure it would've been great, but I don't think it would've been a cultural phenomenon the way it is because it would've been inauthentic to him. And so I think one of the things that you do so well, and I think why you rankled at this idea of if you build a day will come as a lie. Is that you excel at focusing on these bigger questions, these branding questions The big choices, the direction of we're going to the moon versus we're making a teeny, tiny decision in the hopes that all of our work together will make something great. I think you see where I'm going with that.

Paul:

it does come down to, all of this is a thousand. Little decisions, right? When you make a record, when you work with an artist, when you decide on pictures, when you develop somebody you can't let up the striving for greatness at any one of those thousand decisions, and that's the only way that I found to break out from the crowd, I don't put out as much stuff, but when I do, I know it's had everything

Chris3.:

Mm.

Paul:

and I've been doing that since got my first record deal in 90, when I was, 22 right outta college I just made sure that our stuff sounded better than everybody else's and we gotta a deal with Sony, it got on the radio and so I've kept that up. people down here, I. In, in my South Florida music scene, know that about me.

Chris3.:

Wait a minute. Where in South Florida are you?

Paul:

Delray

Chris3.:

Are you

Paul:

kidding me?

Chris3.:

That's one town north of Boca Raton, where my dad lived. I spent so much time. those were formative years for me, man. I'll tell you what, that's actually a pretty good segue'cause there is something I wanna share with you about What you taught me about. Man, if you build it, they will come. Totally works if you're good at building it and you build the right thing. and so when I was a kid, spending a lot of time in Delray Beach, that's one town north of Boca Raton, where my dad lived. before my dad moved there, we didn't have a relationship. My parents had gotten divorced. My dad moved to Boca and I remember he called me up one day and he said, Chris, I know we don't get along anymore. I know you don't come and see me. I know we don't hang out, but I wanted you to know that I just moved to Boca Raton, Florida, and I'm two miles from the beach. And if you come down and see me, I've got a bike for you here. You can ride your bike to the beach whenever you want. And so I came down there and I would go to the beach by myself and just kinda work through, the crazy childhood trauma that I was trying to process at the time. And so I would sit on that beach, and, process what had happened to me as a child. And let me catch you up to date on some of the things that have happened since the last time we talked About a year ago, I took a step back from mastering records and from the last to focus on advocacy work, here at the State House in Ohio. And my goal was I wanted to change the laws around sexual abuse, rape, The biggest issues of injustice in the state of Ohio and Ohio actually has the worst laws in the entire country. I was a part of. Authoring this bill called the Scouts Honor Law. And it was strange because I had learned in the studio how to produce, how to wrangle a bunch of people together around a creative vision to do something dope. And so I took what I learned in the studio, and I did that at the Ohio State House with this thing called the Scouts Honor Law. there's 2000 guys that were part of the bankruptcy settlement, with boy Scouts here in Ohio. But because our statute of limitation is one of the worst in the country, these dudes were gonna lose up to 70% of their bankruptcy settlement just because of where their childhood trauma happened within the borders of the state of Ohio. And man, I started just really processing and thinking and spending a lot of time trying to be creative about how to solve this problem. And I came up with this idea called the Scouts Honor Law. I pitched it, I got the right people on my team. I produced this legislation that eventually passed into law, and then Indiana copied it and Alabama copied it too. So thousands of these guys

Paul:

that's incredible. And you see what you're doing. you're reinforcing our previous topic.

Chris3.:

exactly.

Paul:

What you're doing is you're extremely passionate. About this topic, right? It means a lot to you personally. You are pouring everything. You got into this cause and you're making change. You're achieving things. the problem I have, tying it into music is there's too many people out there that are turning it into a click funnel. Crank'em in, crank'em out. Business, you can do that. I know where you're gonna end up. it's not gonna be greatness.

Chris3.:

Yeah, undifferentiated to put it in business terms.

Paul:

same thing I did with Morgan. I've done with 40 other artists. He's the one that just happened to click to that level.

Chris3.:

One of those artists is, Star

Paul:

Star Star set I've worked with since the beginning. I can't take development credit on that one though. I'll give credit to the singer Dustin. he's a genius friend of mine. He is from Ohio, by the way.

Chris3.:

Yeah, I need to befriend this guy'cause they're apparently from Columbus and I'm, in central Ohio,

Paul:

He's the genius behind the whole development and, concept of star set.

Chris3.:

That's awesome. So I have a thought here that I wanna share with you. one of the things, That I'm fascinated by. is this idea of golden dominoes. when I'm talking about change and growth with people, if I'm doing it face to face, I'll bring satchel with me, and inside that satchel, I've got seven dominoes, but they're weird dominoes. The first one's normal size. Second one's 50% bigger than normal size. Third one's 50% bigger than the second one, and the seventh domino is about 16 inches tall. And so what I'll do is I'll set them up in order and I'll push over that first small, normal sized domino and that'll knock over the bigger one and the bigger one and the bigger one. it's really loud when the 16 inch domino hits the table. But I think that concept, this idea of golden Dominoes, I think applies, to our conversation about if you build it, they will come. Because I think that what makes you great. At what you do, Paul I, I think that you are naturally good at getting those individual small choices and stacking them up in order like golden dominoes. your work with Morgan Wallen, as I understand it, really came down to you put the dominoes in the right order. Is that you looked at Morgan and you got to know him and who he was and who he was authentically, and you helped To get the right dominoes in the right order. And so I think a lot of that success is that you have great instincts about prioritizing which decisions you're making first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. And I'd love to hear you talk about the importance of that.'cause I think one of the biggest problems that I've run into as I've worked with people in recording studios is that they get stuck. On one of the things they get stuck obsessing versus making the hard decision to spend the time to go deep and to decide what is the most important thing that we need to do next. That will determine the next important thing that we need to do. I think that you're incredible at that, and I think you might even be better at that than you realize.

Paul:

you realize. the one thing that I think helps with making decisions and not getting stuck being able to really look at yourself, your work, your project, where things are at. Objectively, people delude themselves all the time and in the music business especially, let me give you an example. Recently, um, one of the Morgan, songs I, co-wrote, produced, engineered mixed, the whole thing. it's like triple platinum now. But, I decided I, and I do this from time to time with different aspects of what I do. I was like, you know what? My mixes are not competing with the top. The top guys, I'm looking at CLA and Serbian and those guys and I'm gonna just take this next song that I'm mixing and I'm gonna go through my whole process and see what I think is working, what I can improve. do a lot of research. See, what is everyone else using, what are they doing, what works for me? How do I incorporate that? And I reworked my whole mix. Yeah. I ended up keeping 70% of what I already did and, I got amazing results. the last two mixes since I decided to do that, have gone up tremendously. now I could have sat back and gone I got a triple platinum record. Something's working. Let's just go with that. I respect, Tiger Woods being at a certain point in his career and going, you know what? I've maxed out where I am. I'm going to change my swing. Or if you're familiar with the band Rush, Neil Pert at, albums in.

Paul2:

Decided to change his grip. Going from match grip to traditional grip 20 years into his career, right? Because he knew he hit a plateau and the only way to go further was to change things up. And I think it's important to be able to really look at yourself and go. What can I do to make this better? What can I do to be better? I do that all the time. I'm always doing songwriting production. This was my time to do it with mixing, and the results were great. I'm I'm actually shocked at the

Chris2.:

That, Is awesome, man. That's a great story. About, Pivoting about having the maturity to recognize I've gone as far as I can, I need to do something to raise the ceiling. And man, that's the theme of this podcast when I came back and decided the time has come, like I have a lot of these thoughts about, what I've learned in the State House that applies to the recording studio and also this realization that man for all the change I've been a part of all the things I've seen come to fruition, that I built it and they came. one of the big things I've been shocked to find is that one thing I am certain about in my life moving forward is I wanna make records until the day I die. It's non-negotiable. I wanna make records and as I'm, learning more about how you stimulate change how you make an impact, and not only just that, but how you do it with art. It's really, changed my perspective I slight plug here for our sponsor bounce Butler and Studio Time Tracker. my two apps. Studio time Tracker she's an AI business coach for people who work in the recording industry and she times automatically how long you're working on each session. each folder that session is in, and then each folder that folder is in, and so you can look at, how much time have I spent? each project, each client, each session, And if you're charging flat rates, you can put your flat rates in for each project. She'll actually ask you to do that when the sessions are opening up. And then she'll tell you what your effective hourly rate works out to for each one of these projects. But then she also asks you. To rate on a scale of one to 10, how much each one of your projects resonates with your mission. Is this the type of project that you want more of? you can download that@studiotimetracker.com, that's how you can support this podcast, and the work that I'm doing in my free time at the State House

Paul3:

the next paradigm shift was, the nineties change from, hair metal to grunge. Now I was in a band and we started in 89, right at the end of it working really hard my time was spent thinking about how to sound like Mott Lang and not keeping up with what was really going on in music. So we got signed to Sony and within six months, grunge popped up.

Chris:

And for those of you that that don't know this part of music history. All hair metal bands died within like several month period.

Paul3:

yeah, we died. it was almost a movement against hair metal. It's like if people knew you were attached to hair metal bands in the next genre, you were cast out. So you had to quickly hide your metal past. it was really, bad. you know, I'm only 23, got my first record deal. Within six months, I'm dropped. I have no idea. Music's changing. Like everything I worked for was already just gone And where this ties into AI is music got so glossy, so fake. The guys were all pretty perfect hair, perfect makeup. People got tired of it. what's the refreshing thing after all of that? the raw of grunge, right? Real passion, rogue.'cause music had forgotten that. So we're going to, in my opinion, go through a similar thing where. AI is gonna be tons of just regurgitated sounding stuff. Eventually, what will break through, is the human being right, raw, the stuff that AI just can't do. Raw, good performances, passionate, not overcorrected. I think people might like to hear

Chris:

Yeah.

Paul3:

what everybody in the music business might think are UNE vocals, right. but they're real, you know? and I think we're going to have a snap back to, to, that. And I can't predict when, but I would tell everybody to start really preparing to give passionate, raw, live performances. I think for one of the next artists I'm gonna sign is be something really, really raw and live in the room again. You have to accept the paradigm shift and figure out how to use it to your advantage and keep going forward.

Chris:

dude, that's so brilliant. you are, squarely hitting the nail on the head if you look back at music history, you do see, a pendulum that swings back and forth between polished and raw. and as we see these, transitions, throughout music history the draw to something raw or the draw to something, polished AI is inevitably going to drive polished music out of business.

Paul3:

Yeah.

Chris:

We can't compete with it.

Paul3:

it's really just the next step from completely melaine autotune, perfectly beat detective corrected music. I heard Rick Pieto say this. He he, he was right. That's it. And at that point, where do you go? it's gonna snap back I can't predict the time. All you can do is continue to do great work, watch it, put out stuff that is unique.

Chris:

I think when we create art. That acknowledges the human experience and creates connection versus creates this false idea we're perfect. We can sing in falsetto and do the splits in midair when we're jumping off the amps. This sort of superman version of music versus this, natural human, oh my God, I feel like I'm with a friend when I listen to these songs. I think that's gonna continue to do well. the way to build a career in music, is to, first recognize You got into this business because there was some magical connection that you felt when you work in the studio. as I'm processing, I didn't know it, but had an enormous amount of work I needed to do in therapy. But I looked back at that experience and I look at the lenses that I saw the world through. that I have this different perspective. I'm reprocessing all of these things and I'm having such a richer, more satisfying, healthier life, and the studio has become really central to that. it's become a major part of what life looks like for me. It's, I'm gonna go to the studio and make a record with my buddies this weekend. I'm gonna play Witz, sir, for an hour and write songs as I'm trying to figure out, what does life look like at its very healthiest.

Paul3:

Yeah.

Chris:

How do you go full blast into being the healthiest that you can be? when you're trying to make something that if you build it, they will come. If you're trying to do that, you can do it much easier if you're healthy and if you're seeing the world through clear eyes,