Cover Story
by Karissa Clark
"It takes a lot of friends and family who really believe in you to get started."
--Amanda Richards
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Local Portland Musicians Seek Financial Independence
Ryan Hohman and Paul Monk play at the Tribe Theater and Art Gallery, one of Portland's smaller venues.
--Ryan Hohman, photo
Amanda Richards showed up carrying only her guitar. She seemed calm as she moved through the rituals. Tuning and positioning in front of the crowd, her long red hair glinted in the dim light. As she sang her ballads, the crowd stilled and her passionate folk style, influenced by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman, filled the room.
For Richards, life as a musician means music is business.
Attending Mount Hood Community College with an emphasis in jazz performance, she lives music all day and all night.
She rents an apartment with a twist -- the entire complex is made up of musicians, and sound-proofed practice rooms are in the building.
"You have to think as a musician and as a businessman," she said. "It was a conscious decision to stay independent -- you have to work really hard, and it's very expensive when you start up."
Max wore checkered Converse and his T-shirt was black. Curly hair hung down into his face. But when he found a spot on the bar stool, he let loose a voice older than his 19 years. Lamenting a lost childhood, words fell like a pillow avalanche. His voice contrasted sharply against rapid-fire Spanish guitar styling.
Driving downtown to meet a group of independent musicians, I wanted to find out what Portland artists looked like in their element, what drove them to write and perform. It wasn't hard to find musicians willing to talk, but finding musicians with steady performances proved difficult.
Ryan Hohman, a local Portland artist, organizes showcases of local artists. I found myself at one of his events held at Old Town Pizza, tucked into a corner of Chinatown. A building straight out of the Wild West, the two-story wooden structure holds more room for pizza enthusiasts than the local Chuck E. Cheese.
Upstairs on Monday nights, Hohman and Paul Monk play acoustic-driven folk after the end of sets by other singer-songwriters. Tonight Max played first. Max said his songwriting vents the angst of his childhood into something beautiful -- and that's all he wants. "If I can't ever make money off it, I don't care," he said.
People drifted in and out of the upstairs area as Max played, except for a small core of friends who obviously were familiar with his music. They called out suggestions and favorites. Other musicians came by themselves.
Richards has already made her way down this path, however. Releasing her record under an independent record label, she now is promoting her album and continuing live performances, hoping to gather a larger following.
She has been pursuing a career as a professional musician since she was 18, and now, at age 25, has received national air play on Air America Radio. She also has played on Portland's KINK-FM, and opened for Oscar-winning Bill Conti at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. "You don't get a lot of money from record sales right away," Richards said. "It takes a lot of friends and family who really believe in you to get started."
Hohman said, "Most indie artists have to have a serious following before they can start making records."
Start-up costs include the recording, the copyright and the cover art. "I had to pay for everything," Richards said. "But I have complete control over the quality of what goes out." "Independent" or "indie" record labels allow artists to sign on, and then the labels help the artist with the production. Unlike a major label, independents have nothing to do with touring, endorsement or promotion.
"The big pay-off," Richards said, "is that all your royalties come home." She compared her record, "Not Always Sexy," made with a $3,000 budget, to a Norah Jones album made under a major record label. "A Norah Jones album is going to have something like a $50,000 budget," Richards said, "but the sound quality difference isn't huge. You wouldn't be able to tell unless you played the two right next to each other."
The problem for local Portland artists has been finding the $3,000 to produce an album.
"For some artists," Hohman said, "the trick is to make enough money within a company with a contract. Then you can break off and produce your own music without being a [slave] to the music industry."
Independent artists and labels are trying to hold onto their copyrights by refusing to sign a contract with the major labels. "As a songwriter," Richards said, "it's impossible to write and think in a business sense at the same time. You have to take a break. You have to forget it and go back to being a free spirit."
The words from her headline song proclaim, "[My love's] not always sexy, but it's always real," and for her, music always has to be real. Max thinks so, too.
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