So, I decided to apply for the annual
singer/songwriter contest hosted by Guitar Center and of course, I had to check out the competition.
I began looking at the top ten artists and that's when I stumbled upon
Regina Zaremba. Like a sailor at sea, I was lured in by her Siren-like vocals in the song "
Where you Want me to be" posted above. I was also captivated by the incredible video quality and I began scouring the internet for clues about her video producer. What I found was something so unique I had to share.
This week I proudly present to you...
Steamy in the City. A true music collective and unique production company, I relentlessly hounded them for an interview to find out more.
We are a diverse collection of artists collaborating and supporting each other in any way that we can in the pursuit of a common dream, to do what we love for the rest of our lives. Simply put, we have a lot of fun, we make music, we make videos, and we get weird.
Apart from the 15+ Collective Members, there are 4 "Founders" of SteamyintheCity: Scott Tolleson and myself (Kristina Tolleson) we produce all of the videos, and run most of the collective stuff. Then there is Tony Hundtoft and Brandon Gass and they oversee all the music that we create.
But what's sort of unique is that we work with all of the artists in our collective to teach them different aspects of music video production and all sorts of other stuff. So it used to be just Tony and Brandon producing all of the music, but now on a lot of our videos the artists are working together to produce the song with Tony and Brandon there to answer any questions. Scott and I still produce all of the videos on SteamyintheCity since it's tricky to learn, but a few of our artists like:
Justine Dorsey,
Regina Zaremba,
Chanele Mc Guinness and
Tommy Miller have all produced a few edited videos themselves now and soon one of them is going to step up to the plate and knock one out of the park that we'll feature on
Steamy in the City's channel.
Lastly, it's probably also worth noting that we don't just do music videos on youtube. We just recently started doing live streaming concerts on
Stageit.com with all of our artists, and we are going to be doing hundreds of those in the next year, and really there are million other little things we all work on together other than youtube.... the simplest way to put it is that we are a collective of artists collaborating and supporting each other anyway that we can in the pursuit of a common dream to do what we love for the rest of our lives.
Do artists have to pay to be part of Steamy in the City?
Artists in our collective don't pay for concerts, videos, or other stuff we do for them, because our collective is invitation only and we fully believe in the people we work with and we like their personalities... we don't work with jerks.
How can an artist join Steamy in the City?
The easiest way for new artists to join up with us is to hit us up about doing a
Stageit concert at our studio, it's a great way for us to audition new artists, and we schedule non-collective member shows along side member shows so that we can all get a chance to interact... if they seem like a good fit for our crew, then we'll probably try a video or two and see how that goes... eventually we'll invite the person to join officially.
The reason for this is we put a lot of time an energy into our videos, so it's important that we are on the same page with new artists so that it's a positive experience. However, the stageit concerts are super easy and we get a chance to see how an Artist really sounds.
Right now we are really trying to find new artists to perform stageit concerts, and we are working on launching 2 original EP's over the next couple of months.... one we produced the music for, and the other artist we helped get signed with
Johnny Depp's music label Unison who produced the music.
Steamy in the City did all the videos though.
We are always interested in meeting new creative people! The first step is just to contact us on our website
http://steamyinthecity.com, or reach out via social networks and tell us about yourself and your art. Whether it’s music, filmmaking, producing, set design, painting, dance, or really any other type of art, we want to hear about it. The coolest thing about making music videos is that there is a place for all things creative under the sun.
How did you get your name?
My husband, Scott Tolleson, actually chose the name when we started our
YouTube channel and it’s simply a combination of his nickname for me, “Steamy” (long story, and not at all what you might expect) and the fact that we had just moved back to Los Angeles where all our musical friends were living “intheCity”. For a while I sort of wished we had a more creative story involving secret ninja clans and monks living on the top of an extremely high mountain, but now I like our simple name. It makes me think of “Family” which is really what our rag tag group of musicians and filmmakers has become.
Where are you located?
Our studio is located in Long Beach, California, but we work with artists from all over the world.
What equipment do you use?
We film all of our videos with Canon DSLR’s either 5D’s or 7D’s. We also have a jib, track and dolly, steady cam, all sorts of stuff to play with. On the music production side, we have too much to list, but it’s all professional level stuff.
What is SITC’s measure of success? (Define what "making it in the music
industry" means)
Truthfully, the only measure we have for success is whether or not our collective members are able to make a living doing what they love for the rest of their lives.
Where do you see SITC in 5 years?
So many things could happen in 5 years, but I’m pretty sure that a bunch of us will be on the road filming on tour with our artists, and maybe even setting up another SteamyintheCity Collective in say Austin or Nashville. That would be pretty amazing, so fingers crossed!
What advice would you give to other singer/songwriters?
Work really hard, stay really positive, and avoid hanging around
hipsters!
Any new live stream concerts you’d like to promote?
We don’t have any specific concerts coming up, but we did finish our new website! It’s awesome because it has a cool events page where we can put all of our concerts, in addition to our videos, and pretty much everything else we do in one convenient location! http://www.steamyinthecity.com
Anything else you would like us to know about you?
We are really proud of the fact that we’ve started producing original music and videos. Three of our collective members have released or are about to release EP’s this fall. Here’s a couple links to original music video’s we’ve produced for…
Chanele McGuinness is also releasing a new EP that comes out on Halloween, and it’s actually the first original EP our collective produced all of the music and the videos.
The videos will be coming out this week on both our YouTube channel and on Chanele McGuinness’ channel, and the EP is currently available for pre-order on
iTunes here.
Is there a link to iTunes or any other place that viewers can purchase stuff to support SITC?
We love Chanele McGuinness and are super proud of her EP, so the best way to support our collective is probably by pre-ordering or purchasing that EP on iTunes! All of the profits from the album will go to our collective members that were a part of it’s production!
Which video would you like us to use as an example of your work?
There are so many different types of videos we’ve created over the past couple years, but currently our cover of Alt-J - Breezeblocks with Poppy is a video we are particularly proud of. Two of our collective members, Poppy and Kurt Hunter, collaborated on the music and my husband, Scott, and I created the video.
