Creativity Jijiji

Tradition Meets Technology in Lance Massey's Musical Odyssey

• Chris Mchale • Season 1 • Episode 7

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Renowned sound designer and composer Lance Massey's journey from Manchester, Tennessee, to the vibrant soundscape of New York City is nothing short of extraordinary. This episode of Creativity Jijiji gets into the serendipitous twists that led Lance to become a key figure in the dynamic NYC commercial music scene. From his unexpected acceptance to Oberlin College, where he discovered a passion for electronic music and pioneering computer systems, to his exploration of his Appalachian musical roots, Lance shares personal stories that weave a rich tapestry of tradition and innovation.

Lance and I discuss the delicate balance between technology and emotion in music creation, reflecting on the diverse genres that influence our work, from old-time music to EDM. We highlight a significant project that marked our transition into advanced sonic montage techniques, showcasing the ever-changing landscape of music technology and the importance of early sound integration in the creative process.

Our conversation crescendos with exploring the collaborative spirit that fuels innovation. We share insights from the now-renowned T-Mobile global branding campaign, which was launched in partnership with branding agency Interbrand. This campaign ingeniously combined world vocals, digital pulses, music, sound design, and algorithmic composition to create a unifying global sonic experience. 

With contributions from talented artists Tim Leitner and Mike Harvey, we present the T-Mobile musical track that evolved into the world music masterpiece, 'Hello Hola,' underlining the essence of creativity that transcends borders and genres.

Thanks for listening.

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Chris Mchale:

Welcome to Creativity DigiDigi, where we dive deep into the heart of creative innovation. My name is Chris McHale and today, today, we have a genuinely compelling guest and a good friend, someone who I've known for years and I just love, lance Massey. Lance Massey, lance is going to take us through his journey at the intersection of music and technology, and this dude lives at the intersection of music and technology. We're going to trace his Appalachian roots and his family legacy that go back generations, and when I say generations, I mean like four or five hundred years. We're also going to discuss one of our proudest collaborations the creation of the iconic ringtone for telecommunications giant T-Mobile, d-d-d-d-d. Remember that? I'm sure you do. I heard it just the other day. Join us as we uncover Lance's unique perspectives on sound and heritage and the evolving landscape of music in a tech-driven world. Let's go. First of all, I want to welcome Lance, lance, welcome to the show.

Chris Mchale:

C get your Jijiji on, and I'd like you to take us through if you would. I'd like you to take us through if you would. I mean, I consider there's no real defined route to having a creative career. I think it's kind of the opposite. I see it as a labyrinth. So take us through your labyrinth, where you began and how you ended up in New York City making a living as a sound designer making a living as a sound designer.

Lance Massey:

reativity have to preface this story with the history of my life is seemingly a history of dumb luck. It's because, again, I was this poor little redneck kid in the middle of nowhere, tennessee, manchester, tennessee. I took the ACTs, the college entrance exams, aced it. No idea how I did it, I swear to God, I closed my eyes and threw a dart and just scored really well. But because of that, oberlin, oberlin College, slash conservatory reached out to me and said hey, we'd like you to apply Again. Dumbass regnant kid, I never thought that I wouldn't get in. So it was the only college I applied to Somehow got in, so great.

Lance Massey:

There I am, little redneck kid, suddenly in the middle of a cornfield in Ohio, one of the best schools in the world, and in the basement of the conservatory they had an electronic music studio, again, out of the blue it's. It's like okay, let's see what this does. And I fell in love. The machines, the music, the art they had, like the early, early, early computer music systems were still going on there. So it's like a you know, like, like what I was, like a fish to baseball, right.

Chris Mchale:

Yeah, what technology was there?

Lance Massey:

Okay, have you ever heard of the Bell Labs Alice machine? Sure, sure, it was there. Wow, we had it right All 256 oscillators and all 256 bandpass filters, wow. And it had no operating system. So there we go we're writing a music operating system. My professor, gary nelson, had written a music programming language based on apl for the xerox sigma 9, which I I would probably crash. It was the school's mainframe and I'd crash it at least once a month. So those were the digital systems. Analog systems we had a Putney VCS-3. We had a beautiful Buchla system. The big giant Moog that you always see in those classic 1970s rock and roll shots had one of those, all of them in the same room. We had tape machines with razor blades. It was a blast and I was surrounded. I mean, I was definitely the idiot child in the room. I was surrounded by such brilliant people and had a great time.

Chris Mchale:

So just back me up one step though. I mean, like when you went, just like music itself, like you say, you applied to overland and they, uh, they invited you to apply, and I like the idea that you applied to one college. I think people make their choices too complicated sometimes. But um, how did? Where did you connect with music? I mean, you grew up, is that appalachia?

Lance Massey:

Where are you growing up? Well, okay, family history. The Massey family has been in the Appalachians for about the past 400 years. Wow, if actually this is another 400 years.

Lance Massey:

That's like Indian territory it was 1629 when we came over. Wow, and there is a direct line. There's been a massy in every war French and Indian, revolutionary, civil War, world War I, all the way up. But our history is. Let me go off on a tangent. In a bit I took ethnomusicology at Oberlin right Music of North America. I studied the same degree at the University of West Waterston. In a bit, I took ethnomusicology at Oberlin right Music of North America.

Chris Mchale:

I studied the same degree at the University of West Waterston in South.

Lance Massey:

Africa, cool. So I was studying music of North America as part of the ethnomusicology courses and on one of the pages in the book there's this picture, this old fiddle player, and I look at it and I'm like, wait a minute, that's my dad's cousin ted. Why is he in my textbook? He's a fucking drunk. So our family history is like. I learned songs from my father, he learned them from his mother, who learned them from her uncle, who learned them from his grandfather back 400 years. So we've been up in those mountains doing those songs for generations.

Chris Mchale:

What is one of those traditional songs that's on your mind?

Lance Massey:

Well, this is not one of the classics, but the one that always comes to my mind first is the I'll Fly Away One glad morning when this life is over. I'll fly away One glad morning when this life is over.

Hello Hola Anthem:

I'll fly away, yeah.

Chris Mchale:

I mean you're talking there. When I was a kid, my father gave me an Alan Lomax collection 10 records of Roots music. I mean I absorbed that like water when I was like 12 years old.

Hello Hola Anthem:

Yeah, we had the same one.

Chris Mchale:

Yeah, over my career, I mean, I've always referenced that. I mean to me, if the music isn't rooted there, there's something wrong. I don't care if you're writing for a symphony orchestra or you're sitting in front of a gigantic antediluvian Moog.

Lance Massey:

There's an image.

Chris Mchale:

Yeah Well, I went to the Moog Museum in Asheville, north Carolina, so that was like a really amazing experience to see the evolution of that machine. Okay, you're in Oberlin, you end up with a piece of paper in your hand and you're like, okay, what can I do? And you went to New York City. Is that the story?

Lance Massey:

Almost, almost. I was going into my junior year and, of course, oberlin's very academic right. So it's all this avant-garde classical music and I'm thinking, two years I'm going to be out on the streets, how am I going to make a living? And literally the day that I asked that question, keyboard Magazine plopped on my desk and there was a picture of Suzanne Chiani on the cover with all these synthesizers, making a living with electronic music. And I'm like, well, that's cool. So I thought, man, so okay, I'm going to find out how she does this.

Lance Massey:

And Oberlin had an internship program in New York and they said you can basically define what you want to do for a semester. So I said I want to work for her for a semester, went through the paperwork, contacted her Somehow. She ended up picking up the phone and actually talking to me. She said, okay, we'll send a demo tape and we'll see what we can do. That's a whole other story. So I worked really, really hard on putting together this demo reel, put it on a cassette, sent it off. And then, years later, suzanne and I are sitting around over a glass of wine and she said, lance, I got to ask you, how did you have the fucking balls to send me a blank demo tape and I was like what she said yeah, yeah.

Chris Mchale:

It's like who's that guy? John Cage, it's like a John Cage moment.

Lance Massey:

And that's what she thought. She thought this guy, okay, who's that guy? John Cage, it's like a John Cage moment. And that's what she thought. She thought this guy, okay, he's going to Oberlin and he's got the nerve to send me a blank tape, got to try him out. And I said to her no, I worked really hard on that demo. And then I said but I did rewind it so that there'd be no bleed through it, right? So you did rewind it before you played it, right?

Chris Mchale:

And she said oh no, there's a lesson for you, young sound designers Send in a blank tape, don't sweat it. So the thing about this whole sound design world I mean it's really about the tools you know and how you get them. So that must have been a real uphill battle for you, because right from the beginning you were challenged to work with the tools, and that never ends right, it still doesn't, it still goes.

Chris Mchale:

I want to get into the tools you're using now to do this work. But before we get there, where did you start? What tools? I mean, like, I've been to Chiani's studio on 23rd, so it was a great place. I think Eddie Jouston ended up in that studio actually, but it was a great place and you know she was on, you know, the edge. You know, like most of the commercial houses and music houses in New York, you know it was all about pushing the technology. You know, and you know Suzanne certainly positioned herself in that marketplace, as you know, like state-of-the-art technology. So when you walked in there, what was there? What was there and how did you go about getting your hands around it?

Lance Massey:

Okay, she was still on Park Avenue when I started and there was the Sinclair. There was a Buchla in the corner, a Prophet 5, on one side, an Atari 24-track tape machine and that was it. So really just the Sinclair, the Buchla and the Prophet 5 were the main tools, were the main tools. And then she had, like this box she called it the voice box which was basically an EvoTide harmonizer, a Bode vocoder, a couple of delay lines.

Chris Mchale:

Those tools were amazing really. Oh yeah, it doesn't sound like a lot of tools, but each of those tools you mentioned were just amazing and really haven't been duplicated. I mean the way it wasn't only about the sounds that they were creating, but it was the way the musicians interfaced with the sound. I mean, you got your hands on it, you could kind of see it physically.

Lance Massey:

Oh yeah, you actually had to play the thing.

Chris Mchale:

You actually had to play the thing. Yeah, I actually think that that's still the case. To be honest with you, if I was to give any advice to anybody starting out in any form of a career that involves music and sound, I would say well, first of all, take 10 years of piano lessons, you know, or, if you can't deal with that, 10 years of guitar lessons. But even if you take 10 years of guitar lessons, you better take the piano lessons as well, because really that's the typewriter of music and it's never really changed. I mean, you can hear it, the sounds are out there, but when you hear sounds that are being played by a player, it's very different than sounds that are programmed by a player. That's the way I see it.

Chris Mchale:

So let's just like, let's go here for a second, because what we're talking about is a timeline that's been going on for you, for you know, maybe three decades, because the Chiani story is from the 80s. The pace of development in this music and sound design technology is incredible. I mean it's incredible. Yeah is incredible, I mean it's incredible. And so how do you keep up with the latest developments of what's going on? What's your approach to the continuous learning curve you're up against?

Lance Massey:

It's actually a personality quirk, it's just an insatiable curiosity, right? Just I. I can't help myself. It's like I mean, you can see this mess behind me and even though the screens are black, I, at last count, had about 20 000 plugins. Wow, I usually spend an hour or two with each one, at minimum, you know. And then I figure out I've got a um, you can't see it here, but I have a rolly seaboard right.

Lance Massey:

So, talking about playing, it's like it's no longer just the key well, you can see the, the regular keys, but the rolly and aliveness to it, that's really hard to control. Yeah, so I first I'll get a plug in with it, learn the basics of it and then immediately attach it to the rolly to see how far I can push it. I guess there are categories of things. So in the old days it was all the analog stuff filters, oscillators, envelopes, right, that was it, love it. Then samplers came along, and so now you've got filters, oscillators, envelopes, but now you can go in and stretch the sound, pitch the sound, reverse the sound, stretch the sound, mix it with other sounds and then play that through the other stuff where it's like okay, now we can start running numbers and generating really bizarre random sequences with these things and use that and record that and use that as a sound and then you get into physical modeling, right? So there are these categories, there's analog and there's the samplers and there's the physical modeling.

Chris Mchale:

So I learn the basics of each one, and then I read a crap ton of manuals. Look, you and I have collaborated on several really cool projects, but the thing I've always loved about your work is there's um, there's an element of humanity to it. You know, there really is, thank you, you know, which has inspired me a lot as a writer, but it's, it's like there's. You seem to have an ability to kind of take this process you're talking about, but somehow it ends up being, I don't know, a lot of the stuff just brings a smile to my face. To be honest with you, there's sort of a bouncy joy to some of the stuff you do that I really love. I always connect with it creatively and that tells me a lot. So there's got to be a point where you just say I'm going to play this shit or you're referencing it to like I'll fly away, you kind of connect it all.

Lance Massey:

Okay, there are two things I reference in my output. So what I was just going through was the learning process, right Of like, how do I ingest all of this stuff? But the output is always filtered through the energy of old time music, right, so, and white gospel, specifically, like old stephen foster, like gentle annie, or hard times come again no more, or I'll fly away, or all that kind of stuff right, there's that sort of level of historical emotion, I call it. It's like that is generational vibe going on there. And then the spirit of rock and roll. I mean, I grew up in the 60s and 70s right, and I loved all the industrial stuff from the 90s 2010 era. Edm right, it's got this energy to it, and so there's always that and I guess my most recent would be Kygo of all people in Tropical House, he's got this sort of intense spiritual energy to it. So those are the output filters. For me, it's like I have this probably annoying technical knowledge, but the output what did you say? This annoying technical knowledge, annoying.

Chris Mchale:

Well, you have to. It's a way of thinking. It's like what we were talking about. It's really a way of thinking I don't know how to explain to people.

Chris Mchale:

I did 11 years hard time in the video game industry after you and I were working together in advertising and you know I had to really learn how to think on the way they thought and it really helped me. But you know, it's sort of like you come face-to-face with the technology and you have to kind of think, okay, how is this working for me? And somehow you have to put it in the context of yourself. You know you have to kind of make it into your tool. You know, not be beaten by the tool, but to set back, understand. I mean to me in a lot of ways, because I worked at a video game studio that had, like you know, 300 programmers and I hang out with these guys. You learn to see how they think, how they put their you met, their critical thinking process into their software. So a lot of times when I'll step back with a new tool, be like, okay, what was this guy thinking? Or this, this girl thinking, somebody was somebody, human, is behind her, is thinking like a human being. You know, and you got to kind of find that humanity there, which brings me to the next subject, which I think is, uh, the ultimate subject to discuss as a sound designer.

Chris Mchale:

Sound designers are usually working as part of a team. You know, um, you working with a director, or you're working with other musicians or a producer, or you're working on a show, and the process is like we're working on the show, they record the voice, you know, and we're gonna get it all together. Then we're gonna put in the music and, um, I don't believe in this process, but often the sound design comes towards the end of that process. Like, as a composer, I much prefer when the sound design is actually in place and, um, you know it's, it's actually actually. Personally, it's really hard for me to separate those two elements.

Chris Mchale:

You know, actually I wanted to talk about the, the, the uh, this incredible project we worked on together, which was birthed out of sound design, for want of a better description. You know, you were working with me and I saw you as a sound designer. I was making investments, as a studio owner, in your sound design technology. I think that, if I'm not mistaken, we purchased something that grew into logic. It wasn't called logic at the time, but I remember. I remember you coming to my office saying like I need this tool e-magic notator, which then became eMagic Logic, which then got bought by Apple.

Chris Mchale:

You kind of got in there and you could wire it differently and do all sorts of stuff.

Lance Massey:

You can still do that. If you're crazy, logic still has that environment tucked way in the back.

Chris Mchale:

Wow, where is it?

Lance Massey:

I don't even know where it is. They call it the environment and it's in one of the menus.

Chris Mchale:

And if you open it?

Lance Massey:

up, you can scare yourself. Oh wow, I actually didn't realize that that was still there. It's still there, and what is this 30 years later?

Chris Mchale:

you know, you could, you could accidentally create a lot of glorious stuff that way, messing around in there. That's happened for me because I'm not really a technician, so I would be like, oh, that's not what was supposed to happen, but you know, I kind of like that you know that's, that's a big part of the process is being being aware, right, right, it's like you've got to be.

Lance Massey:

You've got to be down in the weeds and sitting at 50,000 feet at the same time while you're doing it. So that's, I mean, I think that's part of why we worked so well together. We could do that flip.

Chris Mchale:

I just was listening to my old college band which had a synthesizer and we used to just plug it up differently and go like, hey, that's cool, you know, there was that kind of random physicality and the environment had that same thing. So we were working together at mikhail barone and we got this assignment from the uh, a big branding company called interbrand, a global company that the team we are working with was based in switzerland, I believe, and the client they were working with was deutsche telekom, which was based in bonn. The assignment was to come up with a what I call a sound mark to help the transition of deutsche telekom, which was a government agency basically the post office, if you kind of want to understand what it was and turned it into this incredibly modern telecommunications company that they rebranded as T-Mobile. So it was Deutsche Telekom became Telekom Mobile, became T-Mobile and Interbron, which is a brilliant brand company, took this whole thing and created an, created an entire um visual component and and a concept.

Chris Mchale:

You know, they were very conceptual thinkers and they they sort of worked out this whole thing and they showed up at our studio one day and handed us a brief which at the time, and maybe even today, is still like wow, you know? I mean, mean, I send out briefs when I'm hiring people to do work because I learned how to do it from those guys, but I never get a brief from anybody that hires me to do work. But it's such a great tool and I had some rules about this kind of work. I wanted a precise answer, a very conceptual answer. We went to work on that, but when I handed you this brief, take us through the process of how you got to where you got to so many moving parts.

Lance Massey:

So the first thing was you had all these different concepts right about communications and about sound packets and about human voices and about technology that you, you brought to the table. And then I met the guys from interbrand and they came in with like this huge, thick book saying these are our colors, these are the measurements, these are the ratios, these are. You know, this is how big the pink tea is going to be in relation to these gray squares. We don't really know how many gray squares there's going to be, but we know that they're gray and we know that they're going to be interspersed with all these pink teas and they're just rattling all this stuff off.

Lance Massey:

I had my background in just music music, but also an algorithmic composition from my computer days at Oberlin, but also an algorithmic composition from my computer days at Oberlin.

Lance Massey:

And I was thinking, and then it was either you or they who said you know, we're kind of imagining it like this 3D thing with all these gray squares swirling around with pink T's interspersed in between them. And again they said but we don't know what order, so I put on my algorithmic hat. And again they said but we don't know what order, so I put on my algorithmic hat and then I was working with Seth Horowitz, who was a PhD in neuroscience at the time, specifically for the audio cortex, and then just basic music theory, and I said, well, okay, we need to somehow pull all of this together. We need to somehow pull all of this together and I ended up just saying what if we assigned middle C to the gray square and the E above it to the pink T, and then we can just have ba-da-da-da-da, or we could have ba-da-da-da-da or ba-da-da-da-da, you can have them in any order, it doesn't matter.

Chris Mchale:

Right, and I just want to clear this up for people listening. We are talking about the T-Mobile ringtone here, which you hear all the time everywhere If you're in an airport or sitting on a subway, or sitting in a library trying to study, and it annoyingly comes over. I think we accidentally created something that was very intrusive and very noisy. It has now been used. I mean, I just heard it on a t-mobile commercial just a couple of days ago, so it's well over 20 years it's. It's been in circulation, so uh I still have the paperwork I want to say this lance did that logo.

Chris Mchale:

I mean, I walked into his studio at irving Place and I heard it. I may have been the first person to heard it and you know it came right out of his head into my ears and I'm like, wow, that's the thing. The reason why I say that is because over the years, a lot of people have been out there claiming that they made this logo. There's been companies that have been built around. We did the T-Mobile logo, it's. You know, people can say anything, I guess, these days, but it's bullshit. It comes out of this man's brain and it was an incredibly successful creative event for us and, like I said, I like to be hyper-focused and to look for one idea and like, literally, it took me one second to hear this thing and go like that's it, we're done with that portion of the broker.

Chris Mchale:

2.74 seconds actually, yeah 2.74 seconds and I think you played it live, I believe, on our seven and a half foot yamaha piano.

Lance Massey:

I think that was the. Yeah, the first time I played it for anybody else was there. I actually. I actually put it together in logic, right. I was like, yeah, because I uh I think well, I've told you this before too it's like underneath it, very, very, very quietly, there's a pedal g, and that's what I worked out in the studio before I played it for everybody, because I was like the, I said that was, but it didn't have any life to it, it was just kind of flat, and then I put that G just ringing underneath it and it just kind of lifted the whole thing.

Chris Mchale:

You know, I did only hear that recently when you told me that, obviously, excuse me, I've been working with that quite a long time, listening to that music in all its applications, but I never heard that before and it just makes perfect sense. So really, what it was was those notes which are five notes or as many notes as needed really, and that pedal G which was really probably the secret sauce, probably the secret sauce.

Lance Massey:

To me? Yeah, it always has been. It was the algorithm, well, also the neuroscience part of it. I was talking with Seth Well may he rest in peace and he taught me about multimodal association and the ability to associate the pink T with that third and those gray squares with that middle C. It was built in such a way that if you see it and hear it just once, you will never, ever forget it.

Chris Mchale:

He was a brilliant man and dearly missed, very, ever forget it. He was a brilliant man and dearly missed. Um, very. I'd like to, uh, just quickly. I'm going to play this piece of music for us to listen to, but before we get into it I just want to quickly go over the disparate parts, because there's a lot going on in here and I want people to kind of hear what we did.

Chris Mchale:

We created something called a what I I consider this a montage technique and lance, and I actually had been working together on several projects where we were using this approach of a montage piece, like he would just give me a piece of music and then I would take it and I would write some poetry to it, basically or you know spoken words sometimes and there was sort of an inspiration going on there and then we would cut that together. We had a great mixer working with us, tim Leitner, who was just really brilliant. He worked on the T-Mobile piece, but he had already been working on a lot of these other pieces with us, so he kind of knew our thinking and it was not about it was compositional, but it was really a composition we made in the studio. We would create despair parks. So when we got this job from T-Mobile, we were already sort of thinking this way and I was seeing the possibilities of doing this as a matter of fact.

Chris Mchale:

As a side note, I use a lot of those techniques in our radio commercial advertising too. I started recording voices separately and I didn't care, just give me the parts and then leave me in the room for like three hours, you know, and I'll give you the commercial back, and I think a lot of our work was successful because of that technique. But I I think with with this piece, what concerned me. I was a business owner, so part of it is a pitch. So we had this incredible what I consider an incredible uh logo, sonic branding, trademark, soundmark, whatever you want to call it and we built out from there. So the other elements of this campaign were that it was telecommunications, so I was very interested in finding a unifying global word and some research in a library with my daughter turned up the word hello, which is common to all languages and used to answer the phone in almost every culture on earth, and I believe that that was because of Hollywood films. Actually, because you look at all those 30 Hollywood films, they're like hello.

Chris Mchale:

So it became a thing hello you know, hola you know, and there were Chinese words. Everything kind of broke down to that basic word, hello, in different accents and that. So that was one thing. Another thing I got in my shorts was, uh, the idea of vowels, because I thought like that must be a universal thing, like I lived all over the world. So it was like there's all these different languages and the length, the differences tend to uh, be around the consonants. But the vowels are sort of universal. They're pronounced more or less the same way, produced more or less the same way with the voice, and some languages have taken the element of vowels, like Chinese, and elevated it to an R form, know, so that the a sound can mean everything from.

Hello Hola Anthem:

I'm going to kill you to. I want to love you, you know I mean it's like incredible how they do that, um.

Chris Mchale:

So, you know, I got hung up there and then there was this, uh, this technique called glossophilia, which is a technique I learned from the cocktooth trends. She would go into the studio and just basically make up words and I had been trying to write some lyrics that would be global. I looked at a couple of different you know, esperanto, a couple of different languages, but nonetheless I wanted to kind of go beyond that. So we made up a made-up language. Then we had the other element which was important, which you and I had been exploring already.

Chris Mchale:

I was completely addicted to terry riley's nc and I would walk around new york city with this thing on, which is better than uh, drugs, to be honest with you and uh, um, so this idea of pulses, you know, building up a, a thing of pulses, that's a bunch of elements we had. We had the word, we had the glossophilia, we had the pulses. I wanted the world music and you know I want. I want to talk about that one second. There's one other magical element. But before we get to that, talk to me about the world music, because we had a. You know, it was obvious we were doing a global piece of marketing, a global piece of to power. This company and I spent time studying music in africa, so I sort of had african roots to look at. So how did you approach the world music? Part of this because you built a intense, as you'll hear in a minute, a really beautiful rhythmic track. How did you go about that?

Lance Massey:

so I started with the um, the concept of the audio, the, the, the information packets is the way you described it to me communication packets, so these little packets of communication running around the world. So I actually started with that, just the little boops and bops going boop-da-koop, boop-da-boop-da, boop-da-boop-da, boop-da-boop-da, right. Then on top of that somebody had mentioned there was a bicycle team and I thought, well, that's cool. So I basically used some shakers and did some sound design to emulate the sound of a bicycle team, right. So I kept that rhythm going. So that felt good.

Lance Massey:

But then I was thinking the thing that's going to set it off for world music to me was going to be the bass line, and so I leaned heavily into. It was sort of a mix between reggae and what very little I knew of Kenyan music at the time, the way the basses and the guitars kind of roll, yeah. And then I just sat down and played it. I used a pentatonic scale because, again, it's universal. That's pretty much the story of the world music, part of it, for me well, the missing magical element was mike harvey.

Chris Mchale:

Okay, who?

Lance Massey:

uh is that's, that's your part, that's your part of the world music. You thought of mike and you thought of okay, let's throw mike into this thing.

Chris Mchale:

And well, yeah, take it up a notch mike is, mike is I believe I've said this to him. He doesn't ever buy this, but I believe mike is is probably the best vocal arranger I've ever worked with. I mean, he is extraordinary in the studio, um, and he is incredibly conceptual as well. I mean, basically, he gets it. I don't know what else to say A guy like me. I'm always working from a conceptual perspective and Mike would just listen to me and go like, oh okay, oh yeah, glossophilia, I get it. And we were literally writing words out on a napkin and he was going into the vocal booth and singing.

Lance Massey:

I remember that session, that was magic.

Chris Mchale:

And he got the idea of the pulses, what I wanted to do, and he drove this entire piece with his music. He kind of brought it together. So that really kind of sums up. I want to play this.

Lance Massey:

It's really worth listening to. Wait, wait, wait. You left out the guitar part. Again, another one of your ideas.

Chris Mchale:

Oh, let's talk about the guitar part.

Lance Massey:

Yeah, I don't know who you hired. I just know that you said we need a guitar part and it needs to be ethnic right, something African Well.

Chris Mchale:

I was more precise than that, because I lived in Johannesburg and I studied guitar with Cyril Mbobani, who was a fantastic, absolutely iconic African guitar player. I kind of knew the township music so I kind of knew what I wanted. I'm not sure who he brought in either, but the player we brought in got it. Probably, you know, knowing us, it was probably some authentic player. If you're out there, player, please reach out to me because I would love to give you credit, because the guitar part was like just that was the final icing on the cake.

Lance Massey:

It's like I laid the basic foundation, which was okay, right, it was a nice, solid foundation. Mike took it to another level and I remember this you were sitting there saying it needs something else and then you popped up and you said guitar, it needs African guitar, yeah, and you brought this guy in and it just closed the deal. It was beautiful.

Chris Mchale:

Yeah, it was a global piece of music. Let's take a second to listen to this thing.

Hello Hola Anthem:

Hey, hello, hello, hello. Hey, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Hey, hello, hello, hello. Hey, hello, hello, hello. Hey, hello, hello, hello. Hey, hello, hello, hello. Hey, hello, hello, hello, hey, hello, hello, hello. Thank you. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. E-i-o-e-o-n-o-i-e-i-o-n-o-i-n-o. I'm ready to, I'm ready to, I'm ready to, I'm ready to. Hey, hey, hello, hello, hey, hey, hello, hello, hello. Hey, hey, hello, hello, hey, hey, hola, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. One of the keys is presenting your work.

Chris Mchale:

I think about that a lot. Obviously, I'm a marketing guy, so I'm always looking to present. What you heard just then was what I would, in the crudest fashion, I would call a sonic PowerPoint. The entire presentation was about presenting that logo, that little da-da-da-da-da. That's what it was all about. And, um, I think the reason why it was so successful and I think the reason why um it, it created the revenue it created was because of the presentation, because we didn't just send in five notes.

Chris Mchale:

What we did, we, we sent this thing in the middle of a gorgeous context. You know, like, this is where this is coming from. We gave it context and it's so critical, um, if you're talking about making a living in any, any facet of of your, of creative work, the presentation, don't just like send your shit in like we used to. I used to work at an advertising agency when I would run these little mnemonic what they used to call mnemonics corporate acoustics, and we would get like 200. It was ridiculous. Every composer I asked to send me something would send me 30 or 40. It was just like bullshit. I mean, it really was bullshit. We sent in one, we sent in one logo, that's like me and my college application.

Chris Mchale:

Yeah, exactly that's why I responded to that, or the blank tape. It's like you know what. In a way, it's kind of like let the angels just take it over for you. This is our logo and this is how we're hearing it Because, as you said, it was very conceptual. I'm a conceptual producer and they were a conceptual client and you're a conceptual sound designer and composer and it was important to us to say like this is our concept. I mean, it's not just this logo, it's this whole thing. And that turned into actually a recording contract with BMG and an entire record, clan Chi and all sorts of stuff. And, more than anything, it's still on the air today and still as powerful as ever. And I don't think many people have heard that music, but, believe me, when they heard that music at Interbron, it sort of blew them through the back wall.

Chris Mchale:

So, take the time to take your precious ideas, you know, think them through, you know, figure it out. Don't. Don't just like start sitting down in front of a computer and start composing shit like step back and and get an idea. You know, yes, I'm an agency trained, creative in a lot of ways, and you know I worked with a guy called keith reinhardt, who was a marketing genius in his way, and and it was all about the big idea. You know what's the big idea? You're looking for the big idea.

Chris Mchale:

Well, our big idea were these five notes, but we wanted to show how big of an idea our idea was. You know, this was a piece that, uh, you know, and we broke it down into disparate parts and said you can use this piece and you use that piece, you can do all the different pieces, because we had worked with a musical montage technique. What we did, we put all this together and then we all left the studio and we left it in the hands of Tim Leitner, who was a genius at this stuff, and we came back into the studio I don't know how many hours later At the speed we were, probably only a couple hours later but we walked in and we heard what you just heard. I mean, it was like that's it. It came together. I don't think we made any more changes from what you hear right there.

Lance Massey:

I don't remember any revisions.

Chris Mchale:

Yeah, we're done, and we sent it off and two weeks later I'm on a plane with my partner, joe Barone, to Germany to cut a deal. It's just so important. Every success I've had as a writer, as a musician, whatever I get up to, has always been presented in a way that just brings people in. It's the candy store. I mean. We built this incredible piece of ear candy to get this thing done, and it's work that we can be proud of all these years later.

Chris Mchale:

I've got to get Tim on this show and I've got to get Mike on this show too, but I think that there was sort of a magic that happened in that studio. It was a magic studio and that was a piece of magic that we got out of there. That was really something else. Yeah, Lance, I want to thank you for joining us today. It's my pleasure and that wraps up this episode of Creativity Jijiji. I'm your host, Chris McHale, and I want to give a big thanks to Lance Massey for joining us and sharing his insights into the intersection of music and technology, and we hope you enjoyed this journey of creativity and innovation.

Chris Mchale:

Behind the scenes of this incredibly complex world. Before we go, before we go, check out Clan Chi. Behind the scenes of this incredibly complex world. Before we go, before we go, check out Clan Chi. We talked about it on the show. It's the groundbreaking band that blended world influences and electronic soundscapes and that grew out of the T-Mobile project. Their album I See a Great City features the anthem that launched the telecommunications giant, T-Mobile. It's available on Apple Music and streaming on Spotify. It's awesome, it's unique, it's really something else, so give it a listen. Creativity Dijiji is produced by Studio Dijiji, where we're passionate about bringing you content that celebrates the creative process and to support our ongoing projects, subscribe to our site and our newsletter at studiojijiji. io. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time.

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