Featured Artist - Silver Trees

After watching one of my favorite artists, Landon Pigg on youtube, I had the pleasure of stumbling across "She" by Silver Trees.

Silver Trees combines the pure acoustic freshness and vocal smoothness of Landon Pigg's "Falling in love at a coffee shop" with the artsy sounds and engaging lyrics of Bon Iver.

I had to know more about this new group, so I convinced them to let me feature them on Indie Folk-Pop. 

Silver Trees is an indie-folk band from Nashville, TN, founded by Paul Johnson and Chase Coy in 2013. After working together on some independent projects, Paul (singer/songwriter) had some close-to-the-chest songs stored away that Chase (producer & singer/songwriter) caught wind of and had the idea to collaborate on what would eventually become the debut EP, “Paper Hearts."

Paul Johnson

Heather Renee:  I see from your bio that Paul is a singer/songwriter and Chase is a singer/songwriter and producer.  What types of projects did you release before your collaboration? How did you and Chase meet?  

Silver Trees:  Both of us have released solo albums, but what initially got Chase and I working together was when we met for a cowrite a couple years back.  I had heard Chase’s music before and decided to reach out to him to work together on a few things, which luckily worked out!  After that, I had Chase produce a demo for one of my songs, then he asked me to help him track and write for a song called “All We Are” by one of his side-projects ‘Speakeasier’. It wasn’t too long after that project that Chase proposed we do collaboration with some of my songs and his production.

Chase Coy

Heather Renee: Is Silver Trees a one-time collaboration?

Silver Trees: We both definitely want to continue to work together on Silver Trees music.  Chase will occasionally bring me in to write and do guitar work for some of the other artists he works with too, but I think the reception to the Paper Hearts EP so far has been really encouraging and will lead nicely into the next Silver Trees project.

Heather Renee: What instruments do you play?

Silver Trees:  I sing and play anything guitar, we brought in some Nashville friends for bass, keys and drums, and Chase does everything else.  A lot of the layers and interesting accents are all Chase.

Heather Renee:  How long have you each been involved in music?

Silver Trees:  I’ve been playing since I was 8 and writing since I was about 14.  Chase has actually had, and still has, a very successful career as a solo artist that started taking off when he was in high school.

Heather Renee: Does it run in the family for each of you?

Silver Trees:  I can’t speak for Chase, but in my family it absolutely does.  Both my parents were in a folk trio in college and taught my sister and I to sing and play music at a very early age.  For me it’s definitely a family tradition.  My parents, sister, cousins and grandfather are all great musicians.

Heather Renee:  How did you come up with the name Silver Trees?

Silver Trees: Chase actually came up with the name after hearing a folk-rock song he really loves that incorporates Silver Trees in the lyrics.  I loved it and jumped on board right away.

Heather Renee:  Your sound is so polished and radio ready, who does your engineering?

Silver Trees: Chase both produced and engineered the EP in his home studio.  It’s definitely been a blessing to work with such a talented guy in both fields.

Heather Renee:  I love your video for "She."  How did you find Electric Peak Creative?  Tell us about what it was like creating your video.

Silver Trees:  I’m really glad you like it!  Electric Peak Creative was started by a good friend of mine, Thomas Gentry, who I met in college at Belmont University and stayed close to over the years.  To this day he and the two other people in his team are the best video crew I know.  To shoot the video they went on location to all those places, I think it was Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, and California, which makes me really jealous.

Heather Renee:  Wow!  That is really cool.  I'm jealous too.  Do you perform to support your new EP?  If so, when, where, and how often.  (I want to know if you are coming  my way to Washington, DC :)

Silver Trees: We don’t have tour dates set yet, but that’s one of my highest priorities for this band.  I think we’ll have the opportunity to play out more in early 2014, but we’re still nailing down the details.

Heather Renee:  Which top three artists would you love to open for?

Silver Trees:  A few on top of our dream list are Dawes, Coldplay and Macklemore.  Even though I don’t think we’d fit in sonically with any of them haha. 

Heather Renee:  Well, I checked out Speakeasier and it reminds me a lot of Macklemore.  I am impressed by the diversity in your writing.  Macklemore is one of my all time favorites and I think you definitely have the potential to open up for him considering the diversity in your music.

Heather Renee: What is your genre and who are your musical influences?

Silver Trees:  We call ourselves indie-folk, but I think it’s a lot like “singer/songwriter” with more out-of-the box production.  For this record Bon Iver was a big influence, as was Lord Huron and William Fitzsimmons.

Heather Renee:  What is your measure of success?

Silver Trees:  For me being able to tour consistently and sustainably is a huge goal.  I love getting in front of people and sharing the music in the moment, and the opportunity to spend most of my time doing that would be incredible.

Heather Renee: Where do you see Silver Trees in the next 5 years?

Silver Trees:  It’s hard to say because the band is so new, but I see it growing personnel-wise beyond Chase and I and into more of a 4-5 person group.  I’d hope 5 years from now to have a few full length records under our belt, and a schedule full of writing and sharing this music with the groups of people that are excited about it.  I have a pretty simple equation: make the best music I can, share it with anyone that’ll listen, hope to pay rent.

Heather Renee:  What advice would you give to other singer/songwriters?

Silver Trees:  Focus on your unique strengths and voice in the writing process.  It’s really easy to look at our influences and wish we could sound like them, but if you tried to be them at best you can only be a 2^nd rate version of them.  Instead draw inspiration and lessons from those people and your peers and be the 1^st rate version of yourself.  That and write constantly.

Heather Renee: What do you feel is unique about Silver Trees and/or your Paper Hearts EP?

Silver Trees:   We'd like to think that one thing that makes us unique is that all the songs can be played on an acoustic guitar in a living room and still sound right, yet we take a very intentional and out-of-the box approach to the production that makes pretty cleanly structured songs sound interesting and kind of “indie." It’s a nice balance of accessibility and artistic risk.

Heather Renee: How can we find out more about you?

Silver Trees:  Our website is:  http://silvertreesmusic.com.  You can also follow us at facebook.com/silvertreesmusic or twitter.com/silvertreesband

Heather Renee: Anything else you'd like to share or promote with us?

Silver Trees:  I’d say just stay tuned with us on social media since we’ll have some shows coming up I the near future.  Also, Chase is releasing another record for his solo career this Tues. (26^th), so definitely watch out for that!

Heather Renee: Thank you for your time.  I can't wait to hear more and hopefully catch a show in 2014!

Featured Artist - Steamy in the City

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.

What is the Steamy in the City Music Collective?

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…

Justine Dorsey

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!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/untold...-ep/id726558814

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.

Rebecca Jimenez - Fate

This is my beautiful and talented little Sister. You can find her at www.rebeccajimenez.com

Antonique Smith - Hold up Wait a Minute

If you like this artist, be sure to check out Heather Renee @ www.heather-renee.com

Featured Artist - Jake Down

“It started out as a passion for the written word - Communicating beauty, heartache, and hope through song... With time, skill developed and music evolved.” Jake Down

Heather Renee:  Are you a writer first?

Jake Down:  Yeah I started writing in grade school, long before i did anything with music.

Heather Renee:  When did you realize that music was going to be something you wanted to pursue?

Jake Down:  I always enjoyed music, but didn't get my start until late college actually.

Heather Renee:  Does it run in your family?

Jake Down:  My mom sings, but that's about the extent of it.

Heather Renee:  I saw on Facebook that you like: Rusty and Kelsey Vining, The Koh Koh's, Stavesacre, Mike Mains & the Branches, Rocky Votolato, Audrey, Uncommon Road, Nathan Gafford, who do you feel you sound like?

Jake Down:  I don't know who I sound like really, but some of my biggest influences are Rocky Votolato, Frank Turner and Dustin Kensrue.

Heather Renee:  What is your genre?

Jake Down: Folk Rock

Heather Renee:  If you could open for someone who would it be and why?

Jake Down:  Probably Rocky Votolato, he's an awesome down to earth guy and I really look up to him as a musician.

Heather Renee:  Which instruments do you play?

Jake Down:  Acoustic Guitar, Harmonica, a little drums.

Heather Renee: Tell us about your independent artist grind?

Jake Down:  Just keep moving. Pursuing your passion means being patient. It's hard work, but easy things aren't worth living for.

Heather Renee: What is your measure of success?

Jake Down:  Any time I get to share my music and my experience with people it's a success. I'd love to break out of Michigan and tour more extensively, play some major venues and festivals, but I am just as in love with small intimate house shows for the neighbors.

Heather Renee:  Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Jake Down:  Touring outside of Michigan regularly, with a few more releases under my belt.

Heather Renee:  What advice would you give to other singer/songwriters?

Jake Down:  Write music that you like and be honest.

Heather Renee:  I see that you just released a new EP called Shipwreck where did you record it?

Jake Down:  The Foxboro in Grand Rapids MI.

Heather Renee:  Who produced it?

Jake Down:  Mike Cervantes produced and mixed it.

Heather Renee:  How can we find out more about you?

Jake Down:  www.jakedown.com

Mapei - Don't Wait

If you like this artist, be sure to check out Heather Renee @ www.heather-renee.com

Featured Artist - Blue Eyed Sun

After stumbling across Rocco's Song on YouTube, I had to find out more about Blue Eyed Sun. 

Blue Eyed Sun is a band of three musicians; Casey, Brennan, and Kenneth, who met deep in the woods of Northern Michigan and came together to create the music they love.  In late 2012 and into 2013, they recorded their debut album Tidal Sound at Halohorn Studios in Traverse City. It was then mixed at Blackbird Studios in Nashville by two time Grammy winning engineer, David Hall (Gavin Degraw, Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Fall Out Boy), and Mastered by Benny Quinn (Lady Antebellum, Marshall Tucker Band).  The three boys come from different cities and backgrounds, but they met at Interlochen Arts Academy (one of the top high schools for music performance in the world) outside Traverse City, Michigan in 2012.

Heather Renee:  How did you come up with your band name?

Blue Eyed Sun:  Our band name is a play on the Bob Dylan lyric in Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall.  In the verse, the song      says “where have you gone my blue eyed son?”.  Bob Dylan is probably my biggest musical influence.  You can hear it in the folkier tracks on the record like Fidelity Melody and Johnny Boy and Tidal Sound.  We also like three, three syllables, three words and then throughout the ages the Sun has had importance to so many societies and literally spawned entire religions so we knew we wanted to use that word and we liked the word eye (after all it’s the window to the soul) and Blue is logical because its by far the most popular color for anything plus it has musical overtones.

Heather Renee:  Who do you compare your sound to?  

Blue Eyed Sun:  I’d say we sound like Fleet Foxes mixed with Maroon Five, if you can imagine that. 

Heather Renee: What is your genre?  

Blue Eyed Sun: Folk Rock / Singer Songwriter.

Heather Renee:  If you could open for any band, who would it be and why?  

Blue Eyed Sun: Dead or Alive, it would be the Beatles of course.  Living, it would be Bob Dylan.

Heather Renee: How long have you been doing music? 

Blue Eyed Sun:  Brennan, I’ve been playing music live since I was ten.  I really love live performance and connecting with an audience.  Its my favorite part of all of it. 

Heather Renee: Does it run in the family or are the band members anomalies?  

Blue Eyed Sun:  Some of both.  My dad is in a classic rock cover band that plays corporate events, private parties and casino gigs.  We grew up singing in church being from Arkansas. Kenneth’s mom was a singer and his dad was a musician he taught himself piano and guitar in 7th grade. 

Heather Renee: What is Blue Eyed Sun's measure of success.  Define "Making it in the music industry" for the band.  

Blue Eyed Sun: I think we’ve had a nice start toward success.  We have an album that we’re proud of and we’ve had a small successful tour this past summer, lots of bands will never experience that.  Making it for us would be, being successful enough to eat and pay the rent and do what we love.  If we could pay our living expenses and write and perform our own material for our living, that would be success.

Heather Renee: Do you feel that the music industry today is better or worse for musicians trying to make it?  

Blue Eyed Sun: Neither.  Its just going through more growing pains.  Its better in that more people have access to our music, but its worse that we work so hard and pay for our recordings only to have them streamed for free.

Heather Renee: What are the short term 1-2 year goals for the band?  

Blue Eyed Sun: Get more training and education.  We are all on a bit of a hiatus now at college and post grad programs.

Heather Renee: Where do you see the band in 10 years?  Headlining the pyramid at Glastonbury or playing a set of exclusively progressive rock on the moon.  Who knows that’s part of the fun of this is the mystery…

Heather Renee: What is the craziest thing the band has experienced either at a show or in the studio? 

Blue Eyed Sun: Getting to record in Nashville.  I got to play a 1975 Epiphone Casino that was hand made for George Harrison (Epiphone made 12 of them for George) and given to one of our producer friends, Rob Feaster, in the same room at Quad Studios where Neil Young recorded Heart of Gold in the early 1970s.  Now that’s crazy…crazy fun.

Heather Renee: What is the most challenging part about your goal to "make it in the music industry."  

Blue Eyed Sun: Easy one here…being taken seriously in spite of our age.  We don’t write bubble gum pop.  Our lyrics and melodies are thoughtful and complex but simple enough for anyone to enjoy and find meaning.

Heather Renee: If you could get three wishes to help your band, what would they be?  

Blue Eyed Sun: Find great management who believed in us and wants to partner with us, get signed to a major label, and start booking Scandinavia and Europe.  

...Or that someone wise and knowledgable would appear out of nowhere and become our mentor/producer, and help us produce some great recordings as well as give us insightful advice. That someone would give us magical instruments that would fill us with inspiration every time we picked them up and allow us to write some crazy catchy songs, and that 4 years down the road we'd find out that they aren't actually magical and the magic was inside of us the whole time.

Heather Renee: What advice would you give to other musicians pursuing this dream?  

Blue Eyed Sun: Use the internet to your advantage. That's where the music industry exists now, find a creative way to engage people. And also, don't forget the importance of revising songs. You can take a crappy song, spend several days woodshedding it and polishing it and turn it into something good. You can do the same with good songs and make them great songs.

Keep creating art, always.  Don’t be afraid of hard work (practice, practice, practice).  My dad always reminds me of this phrase.. "Overnight success takes about 15 years."

Heather Renee:  Where can we buy your ablum?

Blue Eyed Sun:   Our album, Tidal Sound is available for sale on iTunes.

Heather Renee:  Where can we find out more about you?

Blue Eyed Sun:  www.blueeyedsunmusic.com

Aaradhna - Wake Up

If you like this artist, be sure to check out Heather Renee @ www.heather-renee.com

Sarah Jaffe - Clementine

If you like this song, please be sure to check out Heather Renee @ www.heather-renee.com

Heather Renee - Table for Two

Sarah Blasko - We Won't Run

If you like this artist, be sure to check out Heather Renee @ www.heather-renee.com

Joy Ike - Everything you Have

If you like this artist, be sure to check out Heather Renee @ www.heather-renee.com