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24 illinoisentertainer.com november 2016
serious singing advice on The Voice every
week, helping relative strangers with their
fledgling careers. So why not put that
hard-won wisdom to good entrepreneur
use with their own artist-development
agency? MDDN, then, was founded on the
highest precepts. In the past, Joel himself
felt he’d been manipulated by labels,
forced into bad spur-of-the-moment career
decisions that he wound up regretting
later. “I look back on my life, and I don’t
claim to have been the smartest guy,” he
sighs, sadly. “But we worked really hard,
and we tried really hard, and we did some
things that worked, we did some things
that didn’t work. So we were always just
trying, but with not a lot of guidance – we
only had ourselves. But for me, I’ve tried to
learn from those times where I probably
should have waited, or I probably should
have been more careful or protective, or
really thought about everything instead of
just saying yes to everything.” He’s even
rationalized the psychology of it all, in retrospect. He was young and terribly afraid,
he now understands. Afraid of losing
whatever opportunities he and Benji had
been handed.
Entire college courses are probably based
on this exact same principle. But MDDN
offers much more than that – for the
novice, even a more experienced star like
Jessie J, it’s the whole recording-artist
package. “It’s kind of sad that A&R is a
new concept in the music business these
days,” he notes. “But hey – it happens. A
band needs resources. So where does it get
resources? It has to sign everything away
to a label, up front. But at MDDN, we give
them the time and space to develop, and
we have in-house video directors, an inhouse creative team, an in-house engineer
– everything you could possibly need for a
band to make music and develop at a real
meaningful level. A level where it can compete with everything else out there. We
invest in these artists to help them build
their own brand and value for themselves,
so they can go out and make appropriate
deals when the time is right. And they’ll
make a deal that will be beneficial to them
and the label.”
That’s the bottom line, the musician
stresses – it’s an open-door policy all the
way around at MDDN. Aspiring Trilbys
are free to schedule a meeting to consult
“Coming from poverty in rural
Maryland, coming from a place where I
didn’t have anything, and also dealing with
the upbringing and family life I had, and
on top of that, low self-esteem?” Madden
lets the question hang pendulous in the air
for a minute before continuing. “I was just
trying to do it all and please everyone,
because I was so afraid of failing and losing everything that I didn’t stop to go,
‘How does this feel? Do I like that look? Do
I really want to do that? And should I do
that? Or should I be a bit more of an artist
and find that middle ground, where you’re
not being too precious but still being true
to your art and vision?’ So in my older a ge,
that’s how I am with my company. We
don’t just sign everything, but we certainly
care about everyone that walks through
our door, we try to give them the best
advice we can, and we really, truly are like,
‘All people welcome.’”
It is certainly a strange “Kung Fu”-ish
role to have found himself him in, Madden
chuckles – playing Keye Luke master to a
dojo full of David Carradine grasshopper
disciples. But if you’ve learned a few trialby-fire things along the way in life, why
not share them with younger students?
with these good-hearted Svengalis any day
of the week, and they, in turn, are free to
give them some tough love, or even send
them packing if their work ethics aren’t
congruent. Madden remembers what it felt
like to be young, hungry, to want fame
now, not months or years in the future.
And nobody wants to be coldly informed
that it’s just too soon to flip the star switch.
It’s a dirty job, he agrees, but sometimes he
has to do it. “So we teach artists to always
search for the truth, no matter how hard it
is to hear,” he explains. “A lot of times,
when you’re young, you only hear what
you want to hear, and you want what you
want right now. But the best things that
last the longest are built one day at a time,
slowly, with real method and thought. And
for me, with a lot of the young guys, it’s
about walking before you run, making
sure that you’re carefully, diligently building your band. And when you have to
inform somebody that they’re just not
ready? That’s always the toughest. Like,
‘You’re not ready. Yet. Let’s keep building,
let’s keep growing. You don’t want to go
too soon, you don’t want the middle part
to be hollow – you’ve got to have subContinued on page 55