Marcus Hummon: Songs,Stories, and his journey from L.A. to Nashville

Marcus Hummon's Musical Journey: From Nashville Honky Tonks to Grammy Wins
In this episode of Almost Live Nashville, Tony Mantor interviews Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Marcus Hummon.
Hummon shares insights from his extensive career, which includes songwriting, theater compositions, and scoring operas.
Discussing his experience from his early days performing at Nashville's iconic Bluebird Cafe to crafting hits for major artists, Marcus reveals the dynamic evolution of the music industry.
They delve into his new projects, including collaborating with his son’s label and creating an album inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poetry
Hummon also provides thoughtful commentary on the challenges faced by modern artists and the impact of streaming on the music business.
Introduction to the Podcast
Meet Marcus Hummon: Grammy-Winning Singer-Songwriter
Marcus Hummon's Current Projects and Collaborations
The Evolution of the Music Industry
Theater and Family: Marcus Hummonn's Diverse Talents
Challenges and Triumphs in the Music Business
Marcus Hummonn's Personal Journey and Reflections
Staying Relevant in a Changing Industry
Collaborations and Future Endeavors
Closing Remarks and Contact Information

INTRO/OUTRO : T. Wild
Mantor Music BMI

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

My career in the entertainment industry has enabled me to work with a diverse range of talent. Through my years of experience, I've recognized two essential aspects. Industry professionals, whether famous stars or behind-the-scenes staff, have fascinating stories to tell. Secondly, audiences are eager to listen to these stories, which offer a glimpse into their lives and the evolution of their life stories. This podcast aims to share these narratives, providing information on how they evolved into their chosen career. We will delve into their journey to stardom, discuss their struggles and successes, and hear from people who help them achieve their goals. Get ready for intriguing behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the fascinating world of entertainment. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Almost Live Nashville. Joining us today is Marcus Human, a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter whose words and melodies have shaped the soul of country music for decades. He's chased his dreams from the stages of LA to the honky talks of Music City. In the mid-80s, he traded the West Coast lights of LA to the stages of Nashville. There he honed his craft at iconic spots like the Bluebird Cafe, eventually landing a songwriting deal that launched a career of chart-breaking songs. He has gifted the world songs that capture love, wanderlust, and the unbreakable human spirit. He's not just a hitmaker, he's a multi-instrumentalist, composer, storyteller, scoring films, penning operas, and even weaving musicals that have graced off-Broadway stages. His journey here in Nashville has been nothing short of fantastic. So before we dive into our episode, we'll be right back with an uninterrupted show right after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure. Let's kick it off this way. What are you working on now? What's your current project? Ash, what am I doing now?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Well, I'm still writing for a small company. You know, I'm still doing some of that work. A couple times a week I'll work with artists, and kind of my main thing with this group that I'm with now, Salinger Entertainment, is I just ask them, you know, after all these years, I mean, I I still like to write in the kind of conventional Nashville culture of co-writing, but pretty much only with artists or writers who are kind of nerdy. There's a different thing because I can play a few different instruments and have a few different influences, at least the way that I approach music, I can't sit in every room, but I can sit in quite a few. I just want the artists or the writers andor writers to be sort of all about it. So, like recently, some folks that I've had, you know, nowadays you'll have streaming singles. It's a very different world than, of course, when I got there in 1986. And a lot of the artists that I work with, even major label acts, they're not even that concerned with terrestrial radio. Their feelings aren't hurt if they put out four singles in a year and then none of them go to radio.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Yeah, I know. I hear that a lot. They don't care about radio any longer. Give me a good example.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

One of the more talented groups that I work with is the band Lula. You know, they're on Warner Brothers and they're tremendous singers, and they've been out on the road with Dirk Spanley and, you know, Big Rooms and played Carnegie Hall. And I had a couple of songs co-written with them that were singles and did videos. And, you know, that would be an example of how things have changed. You know, they're like going to trust your radio. So it's harder to make money in that kind of world, but it's still the same world of want to try to write great and kind of groovy music. Yeah, so I've got that going on. That's fun. You know, I do a lot of work in theater. I have the last 25 years. I kind of branched out into theater, writing musical theater, but also writing some opera, technically operates. Ben produced a couple of pieces at Nashville Opera. And then last year I had a show. It was developed at the Welsh Academy of the Arts with Belmont. And then we did a production, and then PBS picked it up. PBS locally, NPR television, but nonetheless, that's you know, great fun.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Yeah, the world of theater can be great fun.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

You know, the world of theater is so prohibitive because it's so expensive. You know, regional theater now is is in the millions.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Yeah, that's tough. Everything right now in the production costs is just getting so very expensive.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

The show I've had for about a decade called American Profit, Frederick Douglass in his own words, and was co-written with Motown director Charles Randolph Wright, who also directed it. You know, we did it at the arena stage in DC, which is one of the really large regional theaters nationally. And gosh, I mean, that was so expensive. You know, to move on to Broadway, as New York Times says it averages anywhere from 15 to 20 million dollars is how you capitalize. You know, well, that's that's rough.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

You might as well be running, you know, for a political office. You know, I mean, it it's really tough uh on intellectual property writers.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Yeah, you're right. It is very tough. The production costs, the advertising costs, just everything is so expensive. It's very good for those that have the big name and the big draw. For those that are trying to learn the business, learn their craft, develop themselves. It is a lot tougher than what people think.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Yeah, it's tougher. You know, I have three sons and they're all artists, different kinds of artists. A gallery painter and just has that open in Clarksville at the uh Custom House Museum. It's just extraordinary. Of course, I'm his dad, but he's an extraordinary OL painter. And the youngest is a digital, really fine digital artist who works with my wife's Center for Contemplative Justice and does all kinds of designs. And then the eldest is Levi Human, who is a recording artist, writer, touring artist, also now kind of hosting a show on TikTok. You know, his generation, the last 10 years, his coming up was the advent of streaming and the sort of the and it was just such a different model because when I got to town in Nashville in the uh in 86 and into that era of the late 80s and then the the big tsunami that became country music in the late 80s and 90s, you know, there was enough money floating around that if you had some talent, people would they'd lap you up. You'd get a publishing deal, and it would be plenty of money if you're a young guy just getting started. You know, you could get a small twenty, thirty thousand dollar deal, you know, which in 1986 would be you could, you know, get a little place and you start your life. You know. Now, boy, I tell you, it is really tough to get a publishing deal, and the nature of those publishing deals is it is, you know, you have things like 12 for 12s and you know, it's like poverty line stuff.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, the music business has changed so drastically over the last several years. Streaming has been a double-edged sword. It's helped on one side and hurt on the other. It has given the ability for people to listen to new music that they would not have heard on terrestrial radio. The other side of that sword is that it's hurt the songwriter because now the streaming only pays fractions of pennies. So it's been good and it's been bad.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

That's exactly right. That's my exact perspective is that the uh yeah, we've taken there's no money in publishing and the intellectual property of the writer itself, but by virtue of the sort of democratization of the process, you have things that emerge that are not part of your corporate five-year plan. You know, they'll just suddenly there's a guy and he's like, Billy Strings. And you're like, well, where the hell did he come from? He's selling out the Ryman for four nights in a row. And that's exciting. That's the positive side.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

It is. The only unfortunate part of that is now you have the major labels that have dried up as far as development goes. They don't put the money into it, they want everything brought to them completely 100% finished. That way they don't have to do any development. Whereas in the past, you had development deals and it took time and they would build it, and then all of a sudden, you could get a star out of that development process.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

That's right. Well, they want the they want to see the evidence in your socials.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

And those aren't always correct. I have friends of mine that have thousands and thousands of people that follow them. If they were to put out a post that says, hey, I'll be at Belmont tomorrow at six o'clock, you might only have 25 people there.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Well, that's true. Um, the other thing that I ended up doing, just to keep myself interested, is I took I went ahead and did a record this year. My son uh started a label with the producer writer, a very successful producer writer named Eric Arges. And the two of them started a label called 3686 Records, and they signed a TikTok kind of sensation out of LA named Kira Leese, and then a young gal at Belmont, who's very talented folk singer, uh Ava Clare. I decided to, again, you know, I do a lot of wacky stuff. I do theater, I do choral work, I do different kinds of things. And I decided to do a record taking my favorite Emily Dickinson poems and setting them to music in my own fashion, and also to use my just technique on guitar and piano, particularly piano, and this record. And so that was really great. So I did an album called Songs for Emily, and we uh got some love and you know, a little bit of Spotify love, but we got you know, quite a few people wrote about it. And I got to do a duet with Mary Chapin Carpenter, such a joy, and Daryl Scott, who's my longtime musical buddy, and uh Sarah Evans as well. So I really had fun, and I hadn't really done a record. I mean, in a sense, if you rec if you do recordings for a theater piece, you're doing a double album. Say two shows ago at Nashville Opera, I did a show called Favorite Sun, and that was about an 85-minute through compose, so technically opera, all music. That took me, you know, a year or two to not only write it, but also to record all the pieces so I could get it transcribed and onto scores. Well, you've done albums and albums and albums, and it's also obviously very expressive, but honestly, there is something about setting out to do a record as a singer, songwriter, and you know, instrumentalist.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Yeah, I have to agree with you. There is nothing better than working on a new record that's your own.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

I have to say, I I just I was telling Oliva the other day, because we'd gotten on the first ballot of the Grammys, you know, and I was told I said, listen, brother, if we actually get nominated, you know, she you should be knighted because no freaking way, and I don't want you feeling bad because I have had a blast and working with you, my son, full circle, having my you know, 34-year-old son be my effectively my label boss. Yeah. Shooting videos and doing I went to, you know, I I went on a uh a hodge, a pilgrimage to Amherst, Massachusetts. I wanted to be, you know, where Emily was. And I wanted to sit in her room, walk in those gardens, you know. Mostly in the neighborhood thought she was a gardener. They thought she was a botanist. Virtually no one knew she was a literary figure. And it was great, like the whole journey of it. And the journey is kind of continuing. I'm working with Belmont with their orchestral department. We're gonna kind of develop an evening of transcribing this work. I've got the work that scored the way I recorded it, but then they have a uh a PhD for orchestration, and so it'll be fun to work with some younger people who will just have you know free reign, you know, be as creative as possible. I was. It'll be fun. I saw that. I think the journey continues. Whenever you have good work, the journey continues.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Absolutely, I agree. Now, for those that don't know, you were inducted into the National Songwriters Hall of Fame, correct?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Yeah, 2019.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Yeah, I think that's just great. Now, for people that don't know, they just need to Google your name because that's the beauty of Google now. You can find out so much about things that you might not have ever known about. So what people need to do, they need to Google your name. You've had many songs that you've either written or co-written that have hit charts and done so well. Your journey here in Nashville has really been outstanding. Yeah, no, I've been I've been fortunate.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

You know, it it's funny too because, and this is kind of a good thing, I think, for young uh writer artist types to consider is that, you know, when I got to town, I had a real specific vision of what I thought was gonna happen for me and what I would be who I thought I was. Well, I was who I thought I was, but what I wasn't, as it turns out, gonna be was a big star. Different reasons for that. And I had several record deals. It was always about writing my own stuff, singing my own stuff was always about playing instruments, you know, that my instruments on records. The the way that I was brought up, you know, brought up a child of the 70s where people's writing was intrinsically tied to how they played an instrument, and these are my heroes, you know. And I figured I'd have a sort of a country version of that, and it didn't really work out.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

That's not uncommon for a lot of singers, songwriters that come here to Nashville. How did that affect you?

SPEAKER_01 13:05

I remember pretty early in my 30s thinking I was sort of a failure, and and I'd had a number one record at that point. My first number one was Only Love by Winona, but to play guitar on because you know I used an open tuning and they weren't sure what the chords were exactly because they could they could shape the chords, but they weren't ringing because I was using a a D major with a you know major third D A D F sharp A D. And it was also written in kind of two, it's two harmonic signatures. It's a little different, you know. The lyric was co-written with Roger Murrow. I did have a hit, but I felt like such a dismal failure. You did get on a major label right after that, didn't you? I got on a major label, you know, and I think a bit like that was a record that had Bless the Broken Road, the first actual really piano version, the way it was written. And it also had the song One of These Days, which both of those songs would go on to be, you know, big hits. There were other songs, it was like the most expensive demo session ever, because but like more than half that record eventually got caught and released. But honestly, at right when it was all going down and Sony Records was dropping me, I remember having a, you know, I had to have a real kind of come to Jesus moment because I was like, man, I, you know, what have I done?

SPEAKER_00 14:16

It's easy to question yourself after something like that.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

My parents were State Department people. We lived overseas. I got to see the world. I got to go to this wonderful college, I had a great experience, you know, everything kind of going for me. And here I am. I just thought, man, you know, it's it's all going to hell in a handbasket. But it was kind of my friend Daryl Scott was a great help in that time because uh he too had been through a lot of upheaval as an artist, and he had started to do what was Americana before there was Americana, where he was self-producing and just sort of defining his own world. And that album's called Aloha from Nashville, which is a masterpiece, in my opinion. He he said, you know, this is a great time, Marcus. You get to find out. Now you get to find out. You get to find out how much you love this thing. You're gonna find out now what you really are about.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yeah, he had the right attitude, perfect advice.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

And I remember him when he said that, I was like, you know, that's the damn truth. I did want to be famous. You know, there was that drive, you know. What I did realize was it wasn't number one. And I can honestly say that. I mean, you know, I'm just as ego-driven as the next person, but I realized it wasn't the number one thing. The number one thing was I wanted to make great music. Just redirected. I decided, okay, all right, well, people are cutting my songs. Instead of why don't I accept that as being a really fortunate thing and be grateful? And then if I want to make whatever my wacky shit is, it wasn't long after that. I'm like, you know what else I'm gonna do? I'm gonna try uh I'm gonna try writing a musical about the painting of Guernica by Picasso. Why? Because I want to.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Yeah, perfect attitude.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

That has been my journey, is that I think it's a lot of it is about learning to be, obviously, uh in reality, I'm very, very lucky. And a lot of people, I've seen a lot of really talented people, things go wrong and they bail. And I'm not even saying they're wrong for doing it, but if you've survived this industry as I have, who, you know, own a house, you know, it's not like as I say, it's not like baseball money, but it's like I can live and I can write. And if I want to do a record on Emily Dickinson, I do it.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Yeah, you're right. There's been a lot of people that have done very well here in Nashville. Then there's a lot of people that are very talented that have given up and gone away, or they did not look at it the proper way. Like just like you, you figured it out. You wanted to be this singer-songwriter, you know, known as an artist, and then it wasn't happening the way you wanted to, but then all of a sudden the songwriting worked out. Other people are cutting your songs, you're making money that way. You got the best of both worlds in the fact that you get to be an artist that you want to be, but you get to make the money off the music from others that are liking what you're doing. So I think um, I think it's the right, right way. But you're right, there's a lot of people that's given up. Sometimes I'll see people that I think they're right on the cusp of doing something big and they'll leave. And it's kind of like I give that analogy of the guy that has this broken down car, he fixes it, and every month he fixes something new, and then he finally gets to the point of where he's put so much money in that car, one other thing goes, he sells it. That was the one last thing that's gonna make that car last for 10 years. I've seen so many people here in Nashville do that same thing. They'll get to that point where they're so close, and then that stumbling block or that last bump in the road will hit, and then they leave. So you've uh you've gritted it out. I mean, that's uh that's you know, kudos to you. And not only that, but you've had a lot of hit records that done really well, you know. So um nothing wrong with that at all.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Well, I I'm very like I say, I'm I'm grateful. Uh it's also an interesting the perspective of being 64. Uh it's such an interesting industry with regards to your skill set grow if unless you're not pushing yourself. And I'm definitely a person, I can honestly say that I push myself instrumentally. And but you get to a certain point and you're, you know, you're 64 years old. And the reality is that the industry, the popular music industry, be it country, urban, top, whatever, it's directed towards roughly 15 to 25, six, seven-year-old. And it's so it has, it's always been. And there are adjustments that have to be made. And I I've also noticed that a writer, artists, and writers of my generation, some of them have kind of bailed, you know, they've kind of it's sort of over, like you retire. People retire from various businesses that they do, but for me, it's not a business. It's you know, it's a lifestyle.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yeah, absolutely. As long as you keep writing, you keep working. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, you know Bobby Braddock. Yeah, of course. I mean, Bobby's in his 80s, he's still writing. So it doesn't matter how old you are, you can still write a great song.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Yeah, I I've heard Bobby, by the way, is one of the greatest icons for anybody who's listening. And he's also for a lot of us too, there's almost a taintly quality to his existence. You know, he's reached a level of he's like the bodhisattva out there.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Yeah, he's a great guy. I've known him for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

I also feel though, I don't want to be judgmental because I also know that there are some really, really I won't say names specifically, but really, really famous older writers who have said to me, more than one, have said to me, you know, I don't write anymore because people don't want what I have to say.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

It's just kind of too painful. In my life, one of the things which has made this this kind of pain, if you will, to put it may have probably too dramatically, but it's part of the fun of when you have the theater. Not to tell everyone to go into theater because it's you know, it's like a terrible business. It's a great art form, but it's the worst business in the world. But as a writer, I have to tell you what is great is that you know, I have so many characters, characters, historical characters, but also characters I've created. They're of any number of age, they have all kinds of impediments and tragedies and great triumphs in their lives. And there's so much to write about. There's so many different kinds of things to write about that I wouldn't ordinarily get to write about. That has been a great help to me in just keeping my mind in it. Like if you do that kind of work, then if you know, if you're lucky enough to sit down with some new group of 20-something-year-olds who have got their thing going on and they're very expressive, and for whatever reason they want you there, you know, whatever your age is, they want you there, then it becomes this very exciting thing. I don't do it as much as I used to, and I love it, you know. But it's because I'm being fed elsewhere, too. If I had to completely commit myself to like as a writer, I still got to keep talking about what I was thinking about as a 17-year-old.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah, I get that 100%. Yet a lot of that is mindset. You've been willing to compromise on things that you want to do and you've done them, and that's allowed you to be creative to do other things. Whereas some people are so rigid that they're only gonna do this, but they're not willing to open up to do something else. And those are the ones sometimes that will find themselves falling away because when a younger person comes up and says, Hey, I like this, this is kind of cool, but can we do it this way? And if you go, no, it's my way or the highway, then of course they're gonna leave. You know, but if you go, oh, hey, you know, let's look at what it can be, then it's opened up to collaboration, and then you never know what can happen from there.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

That's right. No, you put a your finger right on it, and there was a time when, as a songwriter, this is probably true. I don't want to act like I've got all this wisdom, but I have been at it for a while. A lot of writers who have success they kind of have a season of it.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

And the thing is that season comes and then you know, you do as much as you can, and then the season passes too.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

And so you have to be willing to kind of accept that.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Yeah, absolutely. Just because the season's ended doesn't mean that you can't still practice and still work around and do a few things that can still be very productive.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Oh, absolutely. I'll give you an example too, like that things that the sort of the blessings of the process. I think it was, was it last year? God, so this is how I am now.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

I know the feeling.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

You know, I got a call from I think it was maybe a year and a half ago. I got a call from Rihanna. Rihanna Giddens reached out to me. And she, do you know who that is?

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

Yeah. So, you know, Carolina chopped the brow drops and then Yeah. Yeah. Now has a TV show. And such a such an interesting woman, such an interesting writer and musician. And years a few years back, like I don't know, five or six years, we wrote a couple songs together, and then we became friends. And she was uh keeping an eye too on this American prophet Frederick Douglass project. And I noted that she was writing uh music for a librettist and she won a Pulixer for an opera, right? And so she says, Do you remember this song we we wrote called Yet to Be? I did, and I I but I hadn't thought of it in a while. She said, Well, you know, I've got this new band, I've got this great guitar player from the Cameroon who's he's kind of riffing on what you something you did on our when we did our little audio. And anyway, I got Jason Isbell to sing on it. And anyway, we're gonna put out as a single. Of course, it's you know, a streaming single, and she's in Americana and not gonna be some massive nothing wrong with that.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

A cut's a cut.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

She said, I've done a cartoon, you know, just like the gift they kept giving. She said, I've done a cartoon style uh animated video of it. And the premise of the song is a story song about a sharecropper's daughter, uh, an African-American black girl who is like the 40s, 30s, and 40s, and she's grown up in Chim Crow and she wants out and she wants to go north and she wants a job. You know, she's gotta be in the third class, you know, part of the bus. She's it's about her. And the second verse comes in, and it's this Irish kid, and this young Irish guy is on the farm and he wants to leave. He wants to go to the United States, and he wants to expand his horizon. So he ends up, I don't know what this is, Chicago or whatever, and they in the song, they fall in love. Okay. And we went from, and this is all, and of course, she and Jason are singing. In the end, we went out of the 4-4 time. We moved into this kind of freaky soundscape 6-8 thing. She's talking about kind of bringing an Irish blessing, you know, the sort of language of may the road rise to meet you, may the wind be at your back, that kind of stuff. And talking about this baby they have, you know, and and with Rihanna, part of her thing is that she's of mixed-race parentage, and she's partly Native American as well. And part of what she's done in her life is helped to teach, you know, Americans like the story of the banjo, and that it really transitions as a quote unquote white instrument because of blackface, which is of course awful, but at the same time, it brings about, you know, she's just a fascinating person. I thought, you know, just by virtue of still staying with songwriting as I do, I got that experience. And then that album went on to be nominated for, I don't know, album of the year. Yeah, that's great. Well, you know, she didn't win, but that's an example of if you stay with it and you kind of keep doing the kinds of things that you believe in and that you want to do, then you just get like a blessing happens.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Yeah, absolutely. So how do people find you?

SPEAKER_01 25:21

I'm on um Instagram. I don't really do Facebook. Yeah, Instagram, just Marcus Human. I'm actually on TikTok. You know, I part of the funny thing with my son's label is that he, you know, young guy. So he's like, You better believe you're gonna do TikTok. He's got me out there, you know, putting out things. And also you can find me on Instagram. That's where I really stay pretty active, maybe more than I should, but I do.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

Well, this has been great. I really appreciate taking the time to come on with us. Well, man, I'm glad to talk to a manner. Yeah, yeah, that's right. You don't get that very often.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, and I sure appreciate it. And good luck with your uh ongoing with your podcasts and all your work.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Absolutely. I really appreciate it. Thanks again. Thanks for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the show. This has been a Tony Mantor production. For more information, contact media at plateau music.com.