Kier:
Hello! I'm Kier Lehman, class of 2003, University of Miami, Frost School of Music. I'm now a Music Supervisor for film and TV, where I oversee the music for TV shows and movies and put together soundtracks. I've been doing that for about almost 15 years now. I got started pretty quickly after I graduated. I'm happy to be here today, talking with Gerard.
Gerard:
Thank you, Kier. I'm Gerard Schwarz. This is only my second year here at Frost. It's hard to imagine. I feel like I've been here my whole life. I'm a distinguished professor of conducting. I conduct the Frost Symphony Orchestra. It's a joy for me to be here at Frost with such great colleagues, such great graduates, and to be... Shelly Berg, my dear friend, our dean. My background really was first as an instrumentalist. I played the trumpet in the New York Philharmonic. Then I became a conductor and I conducted and continue to conduct all over the world. My home now is here, I'm in Coral Gables actually as we're speaking. Kier, you're in Los Angeles I assume?
Kier:
That's right, yes, I'm in Los Angeles.
Gerard:
May I begin because I'm very curious. Obviously, I've done my research. But before doing my research, we live in such isolated worlds in a way. My isolated world, my big world, is classical music. The small world is all custom classical music. Even though to me, orchestral classical music is this huge world, it's a small world. Then reading about you, before reading about you, and I apologize for this, I didn't even know what a music supervisor was.
Kier:
Sure.
Gerard:
Now I realize that you control the world. To educate me and hopefully people watching, to tell us... What do you go to school for? Well, I go to school, I'm going to be a trumpet player, so I go to school. Or a conductor. You go to school to be a music supervisor. I know you graduated in media writing and production, so in a sense, being a music supervisor, obviously, is the high point of media writing and film and TV and so forth. Could you tell us?
Kier:
Yeah. I don't know that it's the high point because I think the composers are very important. There are a lot of people. I'm a part of the team, an important part of the team, but I'm a part of a music team and work with a lot of people to help put together the music for a film. Let's take a film for example, and how I'm involved. Usually, I would come in pretty early on the process, and the director or a producer of a movie might hire me to put together the music for their film. I might help them find a composer to do the underscore, so I would pitch them ideas and we'd talk about who would be right for this project and what their goals are. Then I will also start sending them maybe ideas about songs. A script might have some songs written into the script or some moments where some music plays. They may be, sometimes it would be within a scene. So we would go to a club and a bar and you would hear music in the background and people are talking, so I help figure out, what's that song in the background going to be?
Kier:
Sometimes you would have a montage maybe, where a song is featured and you see action portrayed on the scene without sound and the song plays over that moment and tells the story of what's going on. I'll work with the director and producer to figure out, what is that song going to be? Is it something that they maybe had in mind already and I just need to help them get the rights to use it. I'm responsible for making sure we get clearances and get the actual rights to use the song in our film.
Kier:
Or they may have no idea what they want and I have to help them figure out, okay this is what's going on in the story, these are the characters, maybe this is the genre of music that would be appropriate here. Let's find some songs that maybe speak lyrically to what's happening in the scene or in the film. I start pitching ideas to them of songs, and we may go through a hundred songs or a thousand songs really, trying to find the right thing. I work closely with the director, going back and forth, having a conversation about what their goals are, what they're looking for, and what we can do for them.
Kier:
Sometimes I have to deliver bad news. You can't afford this, or the artist won't clear it for this project because they don't like what it's connected to or associated with. So a lot of what I do is problem-solving too. If they want something but we can't have it, how do we figure that out? I help with alternatives and walk them through, we can't have that but here's what we can do.
Kier:
Then all the way to the end when we come and have all the songs in and everything is finished, I have to make sure we have all the rights signed off on and do a lot of paperwork and research for licensing and oversee all that. There's a lot to do. I work with, usually, there will be a music department at a studio and I work with the executives there who are overseeing all the movies that the studio is doing. They may be working with a few different music supervisors on different films. I work with them, work with the composer and I work with a music editor who is the one who works in Pro Tools and cuts the music in to fit the picture, works with the picture editor.
Kier:
These are some jobs that are maybe not the typical thing that you would first think of when you're thinking of working in music as a musician or in the music industry that is really still creative jobs and can be really fulfilling careers with creativity and all of that.
Gerard:
There are so many questions that come up of course in my mind, thinking about them. You actually worked for Sony for a while, Sony Pictures? You were the person who the music supervisor would go to when you worked for Sony for those years.
Kier:
Yeah.
Gerard:
You were with Sony, now you're independent once again.
Kier:
Correct, yeah. I started my career working as an independent music supervisor. I started as an intern and then as an assistant and then worked my way up, working with that person who was a mentor to me. Then I left and was able to get this job at Sony Pictures where I was a music executive, so I would oversee some films, where I would be responsible for hiring a music supervisor and the composer and putting together, overseeing the whole thing. I was also an in-house music supervisor for some of the other films where my boss was the overseeing executive. The president of the department would be overseeing the biggest movies, so I would work with her sometimes on some of those movies as a music supervisor, pitching ideas and getting more in the trenches with the directors and stuff like that.
Gerard:
I have, as I said, a lot of questions to ask you because I'm curious. If we go back to the beginning, what was your instrument? You must have been a pianist or a guitarist or drummer?
Kier:
As a kid, I started playing guitar and played in bands and stuff when I was in high school. I got really into the choir in high school and I had an amazing music teacher in high school who was very supportive. He really, I think, helped me feel confident that it was something that I could do. I ended up applying to music school as a singer and auditioned and went through that whole process. One of the reasons that I went to the University of Miami was the choir, at the time, the director was Jo-Michael Scheibe, who was incredible, is an incredible choir director. He took a liking to me and was really supportive of me and wanted me to join the group there. I was a part of the chorale there for all the years I was there and did tours and all that and had an amazing time as part of that group. I also was part of the jazz vocal ensemble. I've always been interested in a lot of different music, so for me, it was like, classical music and chorales and singing in choirs was something that I really liked. I also like jazz. I also liked pop music. I liked all these other things too. That was one of the cool things about being in school there, was I was able to dip into all the different things that were available. Dr. Scheibe also was the one that helped guide me towards the media writing program because I had started as a music engineering major. I loved a lot of that but it wasn't everything that I wanted.
Gerard:
Where did you actually grow up, in Florida?
Kier:
I grew up in Los Angeles.
Gerard:
Oh, you grew up in Los Angeles.
Kier:
Yeah, and I was a music fan. My father is a record collector. I would always have a lot of different music around. He was into a lot of jazz and film scores and electronic music. I would look at records that we would play in the house. The musicians, a lot of the musicians that I became fans of, were alumni of the University of Miami. That was how I realized that was a great music school. That's what led me there.
Gerard:
Something that we pride ourselves on... It's interesting. We all have a dream. What do you want to do? What's your dream? My dream was, of course, to play in the New York Philharmonic, which I actually got to do. But I may not have, so I studied composition. I studied everything. I played jazz. I was interested in everything, even though I was able to achieve, in the early stages, my dream. The thing that I'm so impressed with, with Frost, there are so many avenues that we can find creatively in the world of music. You come in and you want to be a concert pianist and you end up being a recording engineer, or you end up being a music supervisor or an educator. The great thing about this school, more than any other school in the country, is that you have the fluidity between the departments. People from all different backgrounds and all different desires can learn so much and actually end up being a part of this world rather than, after you graduate, having to go into some other field because you can't.
Kier:
Right.
Gerard:
It seems like that's very much, in your case because you developed then, as a musician and an intellect, through the writing. Did you ever write film scores yourself?
Kier:
I had not before UM, and I did there. As part of the program, we scored a few scenes and got to have the orchestra record them and that was an incredible experience. That class was really foundational for me in that it was probably my first experience of being in a room and presenting your music and having everybody critique it and watching one scene with 15 pieces of music put to it from each different person and discussing why each one worked or what didn't work about it. It was something that I was doing for fun with my friends. We would put a movie on and we would put some other album on and see what happened. Then getting to be in that class and getting to actually do it and be in a group of people that could communicate and talk about it, that's basically what I do in my job now, is put up music ideas to a scene. I'll put five ideas up to a scene in a room with a director and an editor and a producer and we talk about what they like and why certain things are better than others. It was really, not only for the actual musical part of that job but also the idea of being in a room with creative people discussing something creative and having an opinion about it and being able to share your opinion and accept critiques from other people and understand how that communication feels.
Gerard:
Do the directors or producers come to you with a scene and they give you a piece of music that's a background for that scene, whether it's a piece of classical, pop music, whatever, and obviously they're not going to use. They have dead music as the background. They want something in that vein and then your job is to find a composer to write something in that vein. Does that happen?
Kier:
That's right. That happens all the time. That's a lot of my role because as they shoot the movie, and as they shoot, the editor is putting together the scenes that they're shooting in the order of the script. He's assembling all the pieces together. While he's doing that, he's going to add some music to help make the scene feel more real or highlight the emotion. Whatever he needs, he's going to add some music and some sound effects and he's going to put it all together. Then, once the director and producers get more involved in the cutting process after they finish shooting, they're going to decide, "Oh yeah, this piece that you put in there, we don't like that. We need something else." Or, "Kier, hey we have this thing in there. We don't like it. We want something that does this or does this. Can you help us?" Sometimes it would be finding a composer or a songwriter to write something original that will achieve what we're looking for, or I may have to go look in existing music and find something existing that does what they're looking for. There's a lot of different places that I might go to find that.
Gerard:
It seems like the easy part, if there's such a thing that from your job, there's probably no easy part, but the easier of the possibilities is if there's a film, it's a wonderful film, you know the director, you know the producer, and you want to hire one of the great film composers. As you know, I'm a great fan of film music and boy, do we have great film composers. We have a history of great film composers in Los Angeles, from the 30s. It was extraordinary. In a way, you hire the composer, you work with the composer, okay that's fine.
Gerard:
The harder thing, it seems to me, is what you do with so many of the TV series. Maybe running now that a lot of people will know that I find very impressive is Insecure. It's just full of music and I must say, really good music and really well-done music.
Kier:
Thank you.
Gerard:
It's a real challenge. Could you give us a little bit of a background of that? From the beginning, because that series has got to be what, four or five years old now?
Kier:
We're at season four, we just finished. We're about to start season five, so yeah, that's about right.
Gerard:
How did that... I remember reading something. You actually read all the scripts. I think it was season four was starting and you were wondering where they're going to go with this and then boom, it was something exciting and innovative and your creative juices were really running. Tell us about the beginning of it and how you were able to bring all these groups. In fact you have a platform for groups that have no platform.
Kier:
Basically yeah. Over time, I've been doing this for a little while, I build up relationships with different people. I was really lucky early on, through my mentor, to work on a show with HBO. Over time, I worked on that show for a while and got to know the people at HBO. After I'd been at Sony for a while and I left that and went back to independent supervision and I kept in touch with those people. They had this new show coming and they were excited about it and they thought that I'd be a good fit. I got to meet the creators of the show and the producers and they brought me in as part of a team. That show, we had a few people involved in the music. I get to work with an amazing composer and producer, Raphael Saadiq, who has an incredible catalog of music. Solange Knowles was also involved in that early on, as a consultant musically.
Kier:
I came into the middle of it and helped bring in all the ideas, bring them together in a manageable way. All the ideas are really exciting but we have a TV show, it's 30 minutes long. We have a budget. It's this much money. How are we going to be able to put all this music in the show that you want and have it work with our budget and work creatively and address this direction from Issa, the creator. We want to highlight independent artists, female artists, black artists, and people from this specific location where the show takes place, which is Inglewood and South LA.
Kier:
That was the conversation at the beginning, “This is our dream. This is what we would like to do. How do we execute this?” My first step in that process is, I start gathering music. I start going through playlists that I've made before and pulling things together and doing research and reaching out to contacts and bringing together a little library for myself music that could possibly work in the show. Then I start sending that to the creators and to the editors and we start a little bit of a conversation of, "Do you like this? You don't like this? Let me give you some more of the things you like." As we started feeding the editors and things started making their way into the episodes and we started establishing the sound and really trying to become a place of discovery. We wanted to expose people to new music. We wanted to give a platform for these independent artists that they wouldn't have. Radio doesn't play a lot of independent artists.
Kier:
Access to music is amazing and that there's access to a lot, but that also makes it hard to find things because there's just so much out there. How do you find the things that you like? One of the things that TV shows have become known for is a place to discover music because they're curated in a specific way. Insecure is curated to be this modern R&B and hip-hop, independent artists. Maybe there's another show that's curated to be singer-songwriters and pop-rock artists, and another show that's a different genre. People have found that, oh great, I really love this show and I love music. Let me go to this playlist from the music from this show where I can discover all this great music that's in a genre or a sound that I really like already. This is an easy way for me to find a bunch of this music.
Kier:
TV shows, especially Insecure, have become a really great place for people to discover music.
Gerard:
That's what was very interesting to me, because I grew up in a period where, especially with rock groups, they would make an LP, and then it was a CD, and then they would go on tour selling their CD. The CD was made and then they would go on tour singing or playing the songs from the CD to increase record sales. Then, of course, the media would play those popular pieces, and boy, careers were made like that. Now it seems to me, that doesn't work anymore. In fact, CDs aren't as popular. I have trouble finding people that own CD players anymore. Of course, that's going to change. It used to be you couldn't buy a car without a CD player and now you have to request a CD player in a car.
Kier:
Right, you can't find one.
Gerard:
People must be beating your door down. Here is a way to promote artists in an important way and really make their careers. It must be great.
Kier:
Yes, that is a big part of my email inbox. It is full of people submitting music. It's all day long. I used to get a mail bin of CDs every day. Now, people don't send CDs anymore so we get links to download in our email and we get them all day long. It's part of my job to filter through that and week through it. Especially on a show where we want to foster independent artists and help to build a platform, I pay attention to a lot of those things that come in because I want to, of course, give people opportunities. Also, it helps me because I get to find people and bring those things to my show. We do get submitted a lot of music. I understand. If I was an artist I would be doing the same thing. You never know. Sometimes that's how things end up in the show. Sometimes I reach out to artists to have them create things for us. I might think of an artist that would be really great for a project and I reach out to them directly and ask them, "Hey I'm working on this project. Is it something you'd be interested in? We have a little bit of money. I can pay you to create something." Sometimes the artist will be really excited about that, of course.
Gerard:
I find that very interesting because I'm a great believer in what you're just saying. So many people, especially in your position, say, "I don't have time to listen to all of that. Just throw that in the garbage."
Gerard:
I have two stories. One is, there was a man I knew who is no longer with us, who was very wealthy and he wanted to save the world. He figured out how to save the world. He was going to invest $100 million dollars in saving the world. He said to me, "You know Bill Gates right?" I said, "Sure." He said, "Can you get me a 15-minute meeting with him? I will go anywhere, Seattle. We can meet in Washington, meet anywhere you want. I'll fly there." I said, "No I probably couldn't do that, but I can probably get a meeting with his father." So he said, "Great." I see his father at the airport one day in Seattle and I said, "Bill," I tell him the story. I said, "He wants 15 minutes." Bill said to me, "I have 15 minutes for anyone." That's right. We do. He did, and he did meet with him. It didn't amount to anything.
Gerard:
I had a manager once who is no longer with us also, Ron Wilford, one of the great managers of conductors ever that lived. He said the same thing, "I tell my staff that if a conductor says I want you to manage me, we have 15 minutes to talk to anyone." It's hard to find people like that anymore. Everybody is too busy. You're not too busy and that's why we stay on top of the world, to see what's going on. We try to keep our pulse there, especially you, because you are a pathfinder. You're creating paths. That's really quite extraordinary. I commend you so much for that.
Kier:
Thank you. I try, I try. I can't promise to listen to everything but I try as much as I can. I have to be honest. I have staff that helps me, that work with me, that get submissions too, that help weed through it, and bring things to me that they know are going to be good. It's part of my systems that I've developed to how am I going to do the job to serve my producers but also do the job to serve the music industry and bring things to the table that are going to be right for my project.
Gerard:
You mentioned in your introduction that you get rights. You get rights. There's a song you want, you try to get the rights. You go the lyricist. You go to the composer and so forth. I was reading about Sunflower, one of your great hits. There were 10 writers, is that right? How does one song have 10 writers? How do you get rights on a song with 10 writers?
Kier:
It's definitely a function of modern songwriting that so many people get involved. It's something where, over time, the way that people... There's a couple of sides to it. Over time, the way that people are listed and involved in songs change because, at one time, there was a producer, there was an arranger, there was a lyricist, there was a composer. There are all these different roles that were involved, but an arranger wouldn't be listed as a writer. They would just be orchestrating the parts. Nowadays, the person that is doing the job of the arranger is considered a producer and a songwriter.
Gerard:
I didn't know that.
Kier:
Yes.
Gerard:
It's good to be an arranger.
Kier:
Yes, that's a very important job. People who can be commanding a lot of money to do that can also command to be a writer and to get a portion of publishing because people can see when you have a hit song, there's a lot of money that comes out of that so why shouldn't somebody who created a part of that song, even though it's not the melody or the chords even. There's something about what they did that's essential to why that song is a hit, they should be compensated. That's part of why there's a lot of writers listed. I think it's also that its collaboration is so easy and people can just send tracks back and forth over the internet and say, "Oh I know a guy who's really good at percussion. Let me send this to him," and then he does his part. "Great I know a great guitar player, let me send it to him," and that guitar player adds a part. Then those people become arrangers and get added to the songwriting list. I clear songs like that often. Sometimes you'll people with one percent of a song or a half a percent of a song but I still have to go get their approval and clearance and have them sign off on the rights of that one percent to be able to include it in a film or a TV show.
Gerard:
Wow, amazing. When I look back, a series that I also enjoyed of yours is Entourage. Entourage is the opposite of Insecure. I can't imagine... Maybe there are more opposites. What is it like then for you... People hire you and you do a job for them. In Entourage, you're doing a job for these inappropriate men. Insecure, you're doing a job for the progressive future of, especially black artists. Entourage has got to be what, 15 years ago or whatever it is?
Kier:
Something like that yeah.
Gerard:
Is it a question of when it happened or how much does it affect you and what the actual storylines are? Do you say, "No I'm not going to touch that because in Entourage they're all sexist."
Kier:
Yeah, yeah exactly. Nowadays you probably wouldn't get a show like Entourage made about five white guys, five rich white guys. It's definitely something that I consider. I'm a music fan and I of course have, certain genres or certain artists that I'm personally a fan of more than others. One of the things that I love about this job is that it can always be different, from one project to another or from one day to another. One project might need two or three different genres of music in it or one project might be just focused on one genre and very on point with that. For me, it keeps it interesting to work in a lot of different genres. Some things I'm more familiar with than others. Sometimes I might have to do a little bit more research when I start a project or before I start a project to make sure that I'm aware of what's going on with that genre of music or whether it's learning a catalog from a long time ago or making sure I'm up to date on the newest things in that genre.
Kier:
That's one of the things about the job that's really most exciting and interesting to me, is when I get to do research. That's pretty much what I would be doing anyway if I was just what I used to do as a kid, just look at record sleeves and read all the names and who did this record? They produced this other artist, let me go check that out, all that stuff. That's fun for me and that's definitely one of the parts of the job that is exciting for me.
Gerard:
Let me ask this. I'm thinking about Being Mary Jane and some of the other shows that you've done, which are just so wonderful. Am I wrong to say that there's not as much jazz as one would think, in that there's more pop music, more R&B, more rock, and jazz isn't part of that grouping as much?
Kier:
It's not. I feel fortunate that some of my shows do highlight jazz. One, in particular, is Black Lightning. There's a character in that show... There are a couple of characters in that show who are usually listening to jazz or who are playing it at home. In my experience, there's not a lot of projects that feature jazz. I was actually on a panel recently with Marcus Miller, whose a film composer of jazz, bass player who played with Miles Davis, and incredible musician. He was talking about that issue and how, as a film composer and a jazz musician, he has had to work on projects where you have to either... He was saying it works best when the director makes the jazz music an important part of the piece that they're presenting if it's a film or a documentary. The music has it's own character or is it's own character and has a place in the piece. He said he's had a harder time using jazz music in the background because jazz is so improvisational. It's very upfront. It's about performance. A lot of that can be distracting when you are trying to watch a character deliver dialogue or a story. When we're making films, that's the most important thing, is the dialogue and the story, most of the time.
Gerard:
Yeah. That's interesting because I find some film music is perfect background music. When you take that out of the background, it's not as successful. Others are just spectacular period because you get a minute of incredible imagination. You can steal from that all the time as a composer. It really is quite extraordinary.
Gerard:
I remember reading something that you said about reading the script. When you read scripts, do you have input? Are you just imagining what music would fit best? Or even, do you read a script and do you say, do I want to get involved in this project at all?
Kier:
Yeah, sure. I think sometimes I'll start a script without having much context, just start reading and seeing where it takes me. I jot down notes as I got through and think about, oh this character and this reminds me of this song, or it reminds me of this artist or genre or something. I'm trying to maybe evaluate, is this something that feels the right fit for me. Or it's something like a new project from somebody I work with a lot so I'll want to be involved in it and I want to read the script to get my bearings and understand where they are. Usually, when I read a script I'll go back and talk to the director or the writer. They, of course, have their ideas of what they are conceiving when they are writing it. They, of course, want to know my ideas. Sometimes we're on the same page and sometimes we're not.
Kier:
Being able to read a script without a lot of context, I appreciate it because that lets me develop my own ideas without preconceived notions about who wrote it or the actors or something like that. Sometimes it's, what composer is going to be really good for this? Whose music comes to mind as I'm reading? Or it's like, this is more literal things like in the script they go to a concert or they go to a dance club or a bar, all these different locations that might have a certain sound to them that we need to define in the show and start talking about developing that. That's something that then, we'd have a conversation, "What's this club sounds like? What kind of people are there? I notice they go there a few times in the script. It feels like an important location," and they'd tell me, "This is the kind of clientele." Then we talk about, great, let me give you a bunch of music you can try at that moment.
Kier:
Usually, after I'm done reading a script, there will be a bunch of dog ears and at the end a bunch of scratch notes of different artist names and stuff.
Gerard:
In the classical music world, of course, we all want stars. We want stars because stars help sell tickets. If you have a star, Itzhak Perlman is a great violinist and he's a star. He's on the concert. The concert is going to sell out, which is great, which means you can do a lot of interesting things in that program because of Itzhak's playing.
Kier:
Right.
Gerard:
When he started out, of course, he got a very good manager. He had a good publicist. He had a good recording company behind him. He had a little exposure because he was on Ed Sullivan as a kid, so he had a little television. He had everything ready. I mean, nothing is easy but it was moving forward in a positive way. You can look at just about every important classical artist up until 10, 15 years ago, and that's what they did. There were exceptions, Van Cliburn, a great pianist, won a Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow and that catapulted him. Then he got the publicist and the record company.
Kier:
Label, right.
Gerard:
Nowadays, we're not creating as many stars as we used to. The stars are the same stars that were there 25 years ago. In the jazz world, I find that to be a little bit the same. You talk about the great stars. Let's say, Wynton Marsalis, a great star, was the last of the great stars. It's not true of course.
Kier:
Sure.
Gerard:
He was part of the end of that period. How does one, whether it's in pop music... If they're on your TV show, that's different. That's a new way. You can do that with a great pianist.
Kier:
Sure.
Gerard:
You could have Lang Lang on your program and of course, she's gotten to be a star now. It would catapult her to a different kind of thing. What does one do anymore, in any of these fields, to make yourself special, to make people notice you? It seems to me like it's a difficult time, not to say that there's not a lot of activity. There's some huge, wonderful activity.
Kier:
But how do you rise above a lot of good things, basically, to be great? I think it's hard right now because not only just with music. There's so much music coming out and there's so much access to it and it's being... Every day there's more and more. With media in general, there's so much going on, how do you cut through and get a piece of people's time and attention? I think, as far as jazz, I'm thinking of Kamasi Washington, whose probably the biggest current, young jazz star. He didn't really... Obviously, he came out of a jazz community, but his fan base grew into other areas because of, I think, because of associations with other artists that helped lift him up and helped bring him along. Whether it was other established jazz artists or hip hop artists who would have him on as an artist featured on their album, he was able to build a following that brought in also a lot of people who weren't necessarily jazz fans specifically. I think that's something that I'm sure many people would like to follow in that model, in those footsteps. Obviously, the music is incredible and everything involved in putting everything together is very meticulous and the artwork is amazing. The whole package is there. He has a team behind him, of course, helping to build that, and the community of musicians in Los Angeles that support him and have gotten behind him.
Kier:
I think there's something to learn from that.
Gerard:
You should be knocking on the door and say, "Please, please, let me be on Entourage."
Kier:
Right, yeah. I've been fortunate to work on projects that are open to those kinds of artists and people that have great taste too. Part of my job is to bring taste, but also I get to work with people who have great taste. I don't make the decisions in the end. The director or the producer is the one who makes the choice in the end. I'm fortunate when I get to work with someone who also has great taste so they appreciate what I'm giving to them and they make great selections or they may push me in a direction that is part of their concept that brings everything together. That's a part of it too.
Gerard:
I've listened to a lot of songs that you were instrumental and I liked them all. That's a hard-nosed classical musician.
Kier:
I appreciate that very much, coming from you.
Gerard:
There was a Baroque composer named Frescobaldi and he wrote a big treatise on the ornamentation of how you ornament this, the rules. In the end, he said, "After all is said and done, have a good musical taste and that will be fine."
Gerard:
My last question is, of course, you've done a lot of films even though we focused a lot on TV shows. Which do you prefer? What do you find different? What's more gratifying? It's got to be harder to do half-hour TV shows than it is to do a film, it would seem to me.
Kier:
They both have their challenges. I think the thing with TV is it's on a much tighter, usually, much tighter time schedule. When I started, I was working on a lot of TV shows on CBS. We would finish an episode almost every week and it would air three days after we finished mixing it.
Gerard:
Wow.
Kier:
By the time it airs, we're on to the next one and we're almost done with that. It's like a machine and they're just going, going, going. There's a train and it's not stopping. When we're pitching music, we want to make sure it's things we can get the rights to in time to have it done by when we deliver this episode. If we're not going to, we have to replace it really quickly and find something else. It's a challenge but it's also something I appreciate because I get to use a lot of music. Every week, I'm putting five more songs in a TV show. I'm working with a lot of artists and publishing companies and record labels. I'm very active and I'm always talking to people. Relationships come out of that and you're spending money and people want to come back. So I appreciate that about working on TV.
Kier:
Also, especially recently, there are so much great TV shows and a lot of stories that might have been independent films or low-budget film are becoming eight-episode TV shows. There's a lot of really great stories being told on TV right now. It's something where I definitely appreciate being connected to that side of it.
Kier:
On a film, and this has maybe changed a little bit, but I think there was a time where TV was a little bit more disposable, in that a TV show would air and then you wouldn't see it again necessarily unless it went in reruns or syndication or something. Whereas a film is maybe made more to last and stand the test of time. You have more time for it. We might spend a year or more working on a film and developing songs over that time and writing original. You have more time to create original songs and to focus on details and maybe things that would be more difficult or time-consuming. We can do that in a film. There's less day in, day out pressure to have a song cleared, have all the songs cleared, send options for something that needs to be replaced. There's less of that. But, I think, there's maybe a little bit more pressure to deliver something that's going to be great and stand the test of time and create a great film.
Kier:
I appreciate both and sometimes I think, oh I'm done with this TV. It's too stressful every week, having to clear all these songs. I just want to work on movies. But then, I wouldn't have a show like Insecure. I wouldn't have a project like Becoming. There's things that are projects that I'm really proud to be a part of and love working on and are very rewarding.
Gerard:
With all of the work you do, and it sounds like you are pretty darn busy, you do have children too don't you?
Kier:
I do, yes. Family is important.
Gerard:
How many children do you have?
Kier:
I have two children. I have a 15 year old daughter and a 3 year old son.
Gerard:
Wow, congratulations, isn't that great?
Kier:
Thank you. I'm definitely, I'm very proud of that.
Gerard:
Family, as you say, is really important to all of us. Kier, this has been such a great joy to talk to you. I can't wait until we can spend time together here at the Frost School in Miami or when I'm out in Los Angeles.
Kier:
I'll look forward to that.
Gerard:
This is the end of our Frost Session and we're so grateful to the School of Music... I'm so grateful for them putting us together.
Kier:
Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure to talk to you. I look forward to visiting Frost someday when we can and shaking your hand.
Gerard:
I can't say you have to come here for the weather because LA has nice weather too.
Kier:
No, but I miss the weather there and never having to wear pants or a jacket. It's been a little while so I know the campus is even more beautiful now and some nice new buildings there.
Gerard:
It's full of interesting things now with tents everywhere. They've done such an incredible job taking care of us so that we can have in-person classes and no one is getting sick.
Kier:
That's great.
Gerard:
We're pretty darn lucky.
Kier:
Yeah, wonderful.
Gerard:
Great to talk to you. All the best.
Kier:
You too, thank you.
Gerard:
Til the next time, thank you.
Kier:
Bye.
Gerard:
Bye.
