MOA - THANKS FOR SITTING DOWN WITH US LADIES.
AUBURN ROAD – Thanks!! (In unison) Laughing ensues...
MOA - WELL LET’S GET INTO IT AT THE DEEP END SHALL WE?
AUBURN ROAD – Ok!! (Again in unison – Impressive... This should be interesting.)
MOA - WHAT DO YOU THINK HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST LESSON THAT YOU’VE LEARNED SINCE THE BEGINNING OF YOUR STILL YOUNG SINGING CAREERS?
ALICIA PAULSON – I would have to say that three or four years ago, when we started, for me at least, I had absolutely no idea how many different steps that it took to make an artist. I thought it was just singing. I thought that once you had the singing part down that you were good to go. I didn’t know that there were so many things that shape an artist and what it took to develop all those different things.
KRISTEN BROWN – It’s not a 123, ‘A’ plus ‘B’ equals ‘C’ answer. It’s different for everybody. And no one is going to be exactly the same. We all had different things to grow through. When you’re recording you can’t just think of a feeling, you have to actually feel it. It has to come from inside of you, from your heart. It can’t be an equation that you’re solving.
PAXTON MARTIN – It is really hard. When we started we were 14 and 15 years old and when you go into music that young, like Alicia said, we just assumed you sing and that was it. But there is a bunch of levels and sometimes it’s not perfect when you record. When you try to sing a note or write a song. Or maybe you’re just not on point that day and then you have to go home and sit on it for what seems like forever only to come back to the studio the next day to try and push to get it again. When we were recording our album it’d sometimes take a week to get one vocal so it’s a lot harder than you would assume.
MOA - DID YOU THINK YOU SANG A PART ONCE AND THAT WAS IT?
AP – Maybe not just once but I thought you just sang it ‘in tune’ and that’s it. You sing it once ‘perfectly in tune’ and that’s it, but that’s really not it at all. We can sing ‘in tune’ but it’s really not only about that, it’s also about the feeling that you put into it - timing and all that stuff is a part of it too but it’s really about the feeling of it.
KB – You grow up seeing singers on TV and you think ‘oh, they just did that once. And that’s ‘all you need to do’. When you’re a kid you imagine a singer singing a song from top to bottom and that’s it - boom you’re done. But its really like, ‘Were going to get this one word of this one line and then we’re going to get this other part again...’ there is a lot of little pieces that go together. Not just one thing.
PM - A LOT of detail.
MOA - DO YOU THINK THAT OTHER YOUNG ARTIST MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE? THAT THEY UNDERVALUE THE PROCESS?
PM – I think so, but that shouldn’t be a bad thing. If you don’t know, you don’t know. And unless you have a good mentor or someone there to help guide you, you can be taught or assume wrong like we did until you meet with a person who say’s ‘THIS is the way it actually works.” So I am sure that there are kids just like us at that age that just assume and think it’s going to be easy. When there is a lot of work that goes into it.
KB – Yea, some young artists think you sing a song and you perform it and that’s it. They think that a singing career is only just what you see on stage and it’s not – that’s 10% of it – if even that much. A lot of it is the behind the scenes of the rehearsing and recording, the crying (they all laugh) it’s all of it all together and if you go into it thinking its just going to be easy and fun all the time it’s not. But, if it’s something that you really love, it will be worth it.