Kevin Maistros
“Don’t make a cowboy outta me—
I’m leavin’ Texas for Tennessee.
Still got the same umbrella (████).
Aye, aye, aye.”
Somewhere at CIA headquarters, someone will laugh at that.
See, I’ve never been especially good at ordinary. Boring is worse. There’s usually something running through my head. Sometimes it flies. Apparently, now, it gallops.
You may have followed a song here. A photograph. An inconveniently familiar phrase. Someone may have sent you a link without explaining why.
You could also have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.
I’d guess you’re probably not on tour, looking for lunch before you finish signing a record deal. But certainty is an interesting condition. People get attached to it, especially when they’ve only seen the trailer.
Some of you have met me before. You might be wondering where I’ve been.
The longer answer attracts additional clipboard energy. The useful answer is that I’m still here, and I’ve been working.
A surprising amount of that work has found its way back to music. Or music has found its way into everything else.
The distinction is getting harder to hear.
What the light does
I wrote a line recently that keeps finding new work:
Light can make a rumor breathe.
Put two shadows on a curtain and someone will write the scene. Change the lighting and they’ll rewrite the relationship. Give them a place name, a familiar melody, and a few missing words, and suddenly the room has a complete history.
Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” does something I love about songwriting: it makes geography carry the weight of a person. Someone can be beside you and still have their heart somewhere else. A place becomes an attachment. A departure becomes a verdict.
Then the listeners arrive with their own lives, their own associations, and some exceptionally confident casting decisions.
Sometimes the silence between two lines has a better publicist than either of them.
I like that moment before an explanation takes over, when something reaches you and you haven’t quite decided what to call it. You get to feel it before you file it.
Music leaves room for that. It also gives people a way to find each other without first agreeing on a description of themselves.
Someone hears what you made and has an idea. You hear theirs and get another one. Before anybody has worked out whose meeting this is, something exists that didn’t exist before.
I have a soft spot for that kind of administrative failure.
A tiny story, several people
In 2013, a story called Life’s Too Short found its way into my life through HITRECORD.
Matt Reilly had written it on his phone during a bus journey. Giles Crawford and Mick Schubert turned it into a comic as a birthday gift for him.
I added color and texture. Then I decided the comic could also be a storyboard.
Apparently, some people stop after color correction. I admire their restraint from a distance.
Chat Renard expanded the story into a screenplay. We filmed it in Westlake, Ohio, with Lynette Maistros and Christi Russell. Then I put the footage back into the community so other people could make their own edits.
A thumb on a phone became a story. A birthday gift became a comic. A comic became a film.
Those names belong in the telling. They are how it happened.
What stayed with me was the feeling of an idea being welcomed by people who could do something different with it. Each contribution made another contribution possible.
Someone else might see a future in your work that you couldn’t have reached alone. Give them room to explore it. Remember what they brought. Make sure the people remain visible as the result gets bigger.
That experience gave a practical shape to something I’d already been learning around music.
I didn’t arrive at these questions through business theory.
I arrived through people.
Before anyone knew what to call it
Long before I had language for the kind of community I wanted to build, I was around bands, crews, and people making things with more enthusiasm than resources. A lot could happen between loading something in and trying to remember who had the van keys.
You met people before their names became shorthand for a whole career. You saw the work while it was still becoming work. Sometimes an ordinary conversation left you with a possibility you kept thinking about long after everybody packed up.
Hayley Williams and I first crossed paths a little over twenty-one years ago, during that part of my life.
That beginning stayed with me. It belongs in this conversation because some of the questions I’m asking now began with what felt possible then: making things together, following an idea somewhere unexpected, and finding out what could happen with enough room to try.
For an ocean of reasons, some possibilities take a while to come back into view.
In between, life happens. Other collaborations happen. You build things, lose things, learn things, and occasionally discover that something you considered a detour taught you exactly what you needed.
I have a different set of tools now. There’s considerably more life in the person holding them.
Seeing Hayley make work with greater freedom brings those older questions into the present. What becomes possible when an artist can choose the shape of her own work? What changes when she has room to explore, invite other people in, and surprise herself?
I care about what she gets to make. I also care about how it feels to be the person making it.
That is more personal to me than an argument about the record business. It is also one reason I care about building something better around the work.
Some of that history can keep its privacy. Distance has taught me to be careful about confusing an empty space with an answer.
Twenty-one years is a fairly persuasive argument for patience. It is also long enough that I should probably stop describing everything as an early idea.
The question now is what we make room for next.
A label should make more possible
That’s the part of the future that interests me: the conditions around the music.
An artist arrives with a melody on their phone. A filmmaker has half a scene. Someone who doesn’t consider themselves either has a skill the rest of us need.
What happens next?
Can they find help? Can they afford to try? Does the person who helps finish it receive credit, compensation, and a reason to come back?
Can they disagree with a direction and still belong?
A different name on the same arrangement won’t do much. Neither will a friendlier gatekeeper who still keeps all the keys.
I want practical support strong enough to give people room for creative risk: useful tools, shared resources, clear terms, and a way to carry an idea into a finished release without losing the people who helped it get there.
There should also be room to leave. Belonging means more when staying is a choice.
And there should be pleasure in the making. Enough trust to try the strange version. Enough time to discover that the bass player’s supposedly terrible suggestion is the best part of the song.
Ideally, the bass player will be gracious about this. We should budget for other outcomes.
Technology can help with the things that exhaust people before they reach the work: scattered files, missing introductions, repeated explanations, and the translation between what somebody imagines and what they know how to make.
But sometimes the missing piece is simply a person.
Sometimes the most valuable thing you can build is the condition under which two people finally meet.
“A more connected team” starts to sound like an understatement.
I want to work with people who bring their own judgment. Make something I wouldn’t have imagined. Tell me where I’m wrong. Notice the quiet person whose contribution changes everything.
The records should be worth hearing without a guided tour through the intentions behind them. They can also be the first place people find each other.
A community needs something to gather around.
It deserves something to look forward to, too.
Something worth keeping open
There may be a reckoning involved.
I hope it leaves us with something worth keeping open.
Someone left a seed where an ending was supposed to be.
Some of the music ahead will carry the name at the top of this page. There’s room there for memory, affection, ridiculous observations, and whatever happens when I pick up a guitar without assigning it a larger responsibility.
I’m interested in the future. I would also like to enjoy some of it.
Get outside. Make music. Have a meal that doesn’t become a meeting. Lose an afternoon to a conversation nobody remembered to record.
If a song introduces us, I’d like the next step to be something we can make.
Twenty-one years is a long time.
It can also turn out to be the beginning.
After an ocean, I’d like to see what grows.
— Kevin
P.S. I’m still bringing the umbrella.