I once read a quote from a up-and-coming movie starlet about being on the David Letterman Show for the first time. “You’re sitting there talking to Dave, but your mind says, ‘That can’t be Dave Letterman, because Dave Letterman lives inside my TV.”
A movie star’s cognitive functions may not be the best point of reference for something like this, but we can all certainly identify with our minds having to work overtime when first seeing something/someone in person that we’ve previously only seen on TV. It’s a pretty heady experience.
Imagine then how Connecticut-based music co-op Northern League must have felt when they looked online and heard their track being used for this movie trailer promoting Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family:
It actually wasn’t a complete shock. Weeks earlier the group (consisting of rapper “AB”, a producer/tech whiz named “FS” and two vocalists) had submitted a track to the movie studio at the request of Tyler Perry’s camp.
“They knew our track record was excellent as far as turnaround time goes”, explained AB. “So they asked us to submit a song for the trailer. We didn’t hear anything for 2 to 3 weeks and just started working on different projects.”
“Then one day FS reminded me to look for any new reviews of our music on iTunes. And there we were being advertised with the movie! Tyler’s people got so busy they just used our track and decided to let us know after the fact which was totally cool with us. They loved the track.”
When asked about the creative process behind conjuring up such a great hook, AB laughed and said, “We were actually in the process of moving our studio from New Haven to Brooklyn so our gear was scattered all over. FS had to email me the basic music track so I could set up a small recording rig at my mom’s house and track vocals.”
“It gets worse. Perry’s people came back to us with changes to make in the lyrics. On the night we were recording the changes there was a huge snow storm and the power went out. We had to move everything super-fast from my laptop to a flash drive, get into the car and drive to the nearest place we could use email and send off the track.”
Taking obstacles in stride like that has served Northern League well.
“We’ve been pushing at this for a couple years now. We’ve all known each other since we were kids and now we’re seeing our music getting used on CSI, Entourage and movie trailers like this. It’s been awesome.”
We’ve asked the guys at Northern League to upload some of the catalog to MusicRevolution.com so that other video producers looking to license hip hop beats for video can have access to this incredibly talented group. Fingers crossed on that.
In my original blog (Part I) about this trailer I basically said, “Would someone at Northean League please contact me for an interview? This track is amazing.” Special thanks to AB for responding and of course, huge props to Northern League for such a great song placement. Well done.
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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace with over 15,000 tracks online where media producers, video producers, filmmakers, game developers, businesses and other music buyers can license high-quality, affordable royalty-free music from an online community of musicians mbielenberg@musicrevolution.com.
