In this episode, there are two Rachels, three Zachs, and three songs by country artists who eschew Nashville. Rachel Hurley is my co-pilot on this one! Rachel is the headmistress of Sweetheart PR and co-hosts the Music Rookie podcast. She talks about her impressive journey through the music industry before we gush about the music we love this week.
Rachel Cholst: Hi everybody. And welcome to Adobe and Teardrops episode 167. I have with me another Rachel, Rachel Hurley. And in this episode, we’re going to experiment with a sort of new for this podcast format that Rachel suggested.
So she is going to be the guinea pig. And since there are two Rachels, I thought that the songs I would play today would all be by Zachs. So it’s two Rachel’s, three Zach’s and then songs with a theme that Rachel has picked.
Rachel Hurley: Oh my God. You didn’t tell me that! I could have totally played that game.
Rachel Cholst: Oh, I’m sorry. It must’ve gotten lost in all the emails. Basically, two of the albums that are out this week that I wanted to cover are both by people named Zach, so I figured my third song would also be by somebody named Zach.
Rachel Hurley: Perfect. I have my own theme, but I’ll talk about that later. Thank you for having me on.
Rachel Cholst: Yeah. And Rachel is the headmistress of Sweetheart PR, and one of my longest running friends through music.
And as far as I can tell you’ve done pretty much everything in the music industry, other than playing music, but I might be wrong.
Rachel Hurley: I have not played music and I am old as sh — dirt.
Rachel Cholst: You can curse if you want to!
Rachel Hurley: Okay. Good.
Rachel Cholst: I could see you think about it. You also have a good, awesome like photography account of all the many concerts you’ve been to in Memphis. So I’m just going to let you go ahead and talk all that.
Rachel Hurley: Run down on Rachel Hurley. Well, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in music and I wanted to work around musicians and I went to a lot of shows and hung out with a lot of musicians. And I ended up ‘99, when I was in college, I got an internship at MTV.
And that kind of led me to working in television more than music. And I ended up not coming back to Memphis because I was like, “Oh, well, you know, why do I need to get my college degree?” I got offered a job at MTV doing production in their commercials division and ended up staying there for like, not just at MTV, but in New York, for five years, working in television.
And on to a few different music oriented jobs, but, you know, television production isn’t really working creatively. You know, it’s more logistical. It’s kind of like working in insurance, you know? It’s just kind of like filling out forms and making calls and, you know, I just got so deep into it. I was like, this is not what I wanted to do at all.
How did I get here? Everybody above me always seemed angry and would blow up and those jobs are not that glamorous! Being like a line producer, you know, or a producer on TV show. It’s nothing to like. Go off on somebody about or whatever. I always just felt like that doesn’t look like a job that I want. Then 9/11 happened and I won’t go too deep into that. Cause that’s a long story, but I did live two blocks from the World Trade Center.
Rachel Cholst: Oh, wow.
Rachel Hurley: Yeah, that’s another story. But I ended up leaving New York.
Rachel Cholst: That makes sense.
Rachel Hurley: So I left New York and came back to Memphis and got a job working in television. Cause that’s what my resume had. But I started a music blog in 2004 called Scene Stars and you know, for a while there, it was pretty lucrative and I ended up getting sponsored by Yahoo! and I think it was the first music blog that had multiple writers. You know, there were a whole bunch of us that were like individuals, but then I ended up getting like five other people to write with me and ended up doing a lot of cool stuff. Like Microsoft flew me out to Seattle to like test the Zune, whoever remembers what that is.
Rachel Cholst: I sure do.
Rachel Hurley: And then I was hired by Ardent Studios to be their new media consultant because social media manager did not exist yet. That wasn’t a thing in like 2007, but I set up all their online presences and then started doing a little PR for Big Star while I was there.
But I left Ardent in 2012 to go back to school. Remember when I left Memphis I was like, “I don’t need this shit?” I went back to school and finished my degree in graphic design and communications just because I was working with so many artists that needed people to make them album covers and show posters. I was trying to teach myself and I wasn’t very good. So I went back and did that and then graduated in 2017 and my old friend Steve from Paste Magazine, Stephen Labate, he had a PR company called Baby Robot Media, and he asked me if I wanted to work for him and get back into the music business, because along the way, I went to work in advertising and marketing because I thought, “Oh, there’s more money in that.”
But he pulled me back in.
I worked for them for almost three years until it got to the point where all of my clients were kind of return customers. They weren’t really getting me clients. They just had return clients and I’d kind of built my own little family. And Frank Keith was my assistant.
He’s the bass player in Great Peacock. But now he’s my partner in Sweetheart Pub. He’s the one that kind of came to me and said, “Hey, let’s just do our own thing. You know? We can just do it ourselves.” And I was like, “if you take care of all the money, then let’s do it.”
Well, I was like, “I don’t want to pay any bills and I don’t want to talk about any money.”
One thing I’ve learned over the years is you don’t have to be good at everything. You just really don’t. As long as you can say, “I’m not good at this, I don’t like doing it” and find someone else who does like doing it or is good at it and put it on them, you can focus on the shit that you’re good at and then your job is actually fun every day. So long story short, there is no short story.
Rachel Cholst: Yeah. I mean, I should have said that if you liked any of the music you’ve heard since about 2012, 2013, it’s because I got it from Baby Robot and now Sweetheart Pub. I probably get like 50 emails a day, mostly music pitches, but I always go to Rachel’s first and Frank’s.
So since Rachel has a theme and my theme is names, we’re gonna keep the play lists kind of separate. So the first is Zach up will be Zach Joseph who grew up as a cello prodigy in upstate New York. He toured nationally off of his country, pop album All In Time, back in 2014. But unsurprisingly Nashville in 2014 was really not an easy place to be an up-and-coming queer would-be country star.
So it took it a while for a Zach Joseph to make this next one, but with the album, Keeping Me Sane, he is living and writing and singing his truth as a queer man in country music. The first one, the title track “Keeping Me Sane” is kind of like that more traditional country music sound, but then “High,” which I wrote up for Country Queer is a really fun pop song.
So Patreon subscribers will get to listen to that in their version of the podcast.
“Keeping Me Sane” plays
(11:25) And then we’ll move on to Zach Schmidt. I will talk about him after this three or six song set, depending on how much you write paying to listen to this podcast.
Rachel Hurley: And you should subscribing to our Patreon. Come on, do it guys! I’m a subscriber!
Rachel Cholst: Yeah, that’s true. I’ve lost track of who is and who isn’t. Zach Schmidt, his new album, Raise a Banner, also out on April 16th, was produced by Sadler Vaden.
Rachel Hurley: He produced the new Great Peacock record.
Rachel Cholst: That’s true! Yeah. He’s all over the place, and Morgan Wade.
Rachel Hurley: He’s in Jason Isbell’s band.
Rachel Cholst: Yep, the 400 Unit. So all three of those albums definitely have like a kind of signature wall of guitar kind of sound, even though the music itself is really different. As you heard, Schmidt is kind of more into Heartland rock. Sort of more mellow than I thought it was going to be, especially after listening to the Morgan Wade album. So you listened to “I Can’t Dance,” Patreon subscribers heard “Lost All Company.”
“I Can’t Dance” plays
(15:26) We’re gonna listen to Zachary Lucky from his 2018 album Midwestern Zachary Lucky is a Canadian country singer. And we all know that I have a weird affinity for people from Saskatchewan singing about how sad they are. I played this album back in 2018. So I figured he was the third Zack to round my list out.
We listened to “No Shame in Working Hard” and Patreon subscribers listened to “Moments of Time.” Rachel, you’re up.
“No Shame in Working Hard” plays
Rachel Hurley: When I was going through what I wanted to play today, I was thinking I don’t want to play anyone from Nashville. They get all the love. And I want to play a bunch of different stuff. So I wanted to start with Twinnie, who is a musician slash actress from England.
She was actually on one of their television shows over there called Doctors, but she has a new album that comes out on April 17th. I heard her in a playlist, like a new music playlist. I’ve never heard of her before. It’s very, Maren Morris, very country pop, everybody loves a country pop song every now and then.
I’m not a huge country radio listener. But you know, sometimes I hear something in the car, like, you know, I like Marin Morris. She’s much bigger over in England than is here, but I have a feeling you can check it off the list. She’s going to be big here. Just wait.
And she’s got a new song called “Chasing.”
“Chasing” plays
(23:11) I also wanted to play Sir Canyon, who is just a guy named Noah Lamberth. He’s a singer-songwriter out of LA and he used to have a band called Hank Floyd, if that gives you any indication of what he kind of sounds like. It’s not like — what do they call it? — folktronica. But this is more like Americana-tronica sorta. It’s got Western vibes to it. Definitely like Laurel Canyon, but with an electronic beat a little bit. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to describe music, even though that’s my job. He just released this new song called “Drift on Down,” and I really love it.
He had a record a few years ago called Angeleno Daydream, which is definitely a mix of different styles. He’s kind of hard to place with what genre he fits in. And I know that everybody’s talking about how we live in like a generalist’s world now, you know, and people fit in all kinds of different categories that makes it much harder for my job. Anyway, I love this song by Sir Canyon: “Drift on Down.”
And finally I had to throw in a client. I really like it a lot. It’s Van Plating. This is a woman named Rachel van Plating, who was actually in an indie rock band in the nineties called Pemberley, which was like a big regional band down in the Florida area.
They toured and had a couple of records come out and she played violin and she is a vocalist. And then she did what a lot of women have to do, which is choose to take a break to have a family. She got married and ended up having four children and just basically had to stop doing music for, you know, the last 10 years. Now she’s trying to get back into it and she put out a record at the end of 2019 which did pretty well and, you know, got a lot of press – of course I was the publicist. But then the pandemic happened and she had all these. festivals booked and tour dates booked, and of course everything had to be canceled.
After you had such a long road to go down to come back into music and put out an album and have it favorably received and then have everything go to shit, you know, it took even more than like, “get it together” to like, “okay, let’s try again.” But she decided not to put out a record this year because she wants to wait now and see where everything lands because it takes a lot of money, effort, and time to put out a record and to do an album campaign and to get it out everywhere. Most of the time musicians that do that, they make the money to be able to do that by touring. So anyway, long story short, she’s putting out three singles this year.
She already had one earlier this year. This is her latest. It’s called “The Way Down.” She was in an indie band, but she’s definitely putting more twang into her music now. Part of the reason is because Americana is a much more inviting group to be in as a woman ages, right? You can age out of indie rock, you know, unless you’re huge. With Americana, you know, it’s kind of like the blues: the older you get, the more seasoned you are, you know, and you’re welcomed with open arms.
This is a song called “The Way Down.”
“The Way Down” plays
Rachel Cholst: (33:29) I’m realizing that we have like a missed opportunity for a topic where we should have just done songs by people named Rachel.
Rachel Hurley: Yeah, we can do another one!
Rachel Cholst: Next time! Is there anything you want to say before I sign off?
Rachel Hurley: You’ve just been a great partner over the years and I love your writing and you’re a great ally to a lot of my clients because, as you know, I represent a lot of queer country artists and it’s harder to get them coverage at major outlets because they’re still finding their way and it’s better now than it used to be, but early on, you know, you were one of the first people that covered a lot of my artists. So I appreciate it. Thank you.
Rachel Cholst: Well, thanks, Rachel. Thanks for pushing me in cheerleading me for sure.
Rachel Hurley: Of course.
Rachel Cholst: [Dogs barking] Wow. Oh, perfect! Yeah, this is staying in. All right. Well, while the poochies take us out, thanks Alma Contra for the podcast intro, the music is from Two Cow Garage’s “Stars and Gutters.” You can send me music through SubmitHub.
I’m reactivating that as we speak. Be like Rachel, and be cool! You can subscribe on Patreon, get extra songs, get songs early. I am going to start doing live streams over Zoom because it works better than it did at the beginning of the pandemic. All that good stuff. You can find Rachel Hurley online —
Rachel Hurley: All my handles are @rachelinthecity. You can reach out to me and like, ask me anything. Oh, you can tune into the Music Rookie podcast. If you’re a musician, we have a new episode every week where we tell you every facet of the music business that you need to learn because people are always asking me that stuff and I’m like, “I’m a publicist, I’m not your manager!” And we have a newsletter that goes out once a week which has a lot of good information for musicians do about how to handle different situations and you know, the latest news industry news, all that good stuff. You find that at www.sweetheartpub.subtack.com.
All right, now I’ve done everything.
Rachel Cholst: Awesome. In music we trust in music, we believe, take care of me, buddy, and be safe.