Primed for Ignition

It does seem odd to start pitching a new artist and forthcoming debut album by talking about her karaoke skills, but then, as it turns out, pretty much everything about this story is beyond the usual. There’s the fact that the ‘new’ singer in question is a business-owning solo mum with three young children. The point that, though petite, demure and very blonde, Anita Prime is making music that somehow reflects a blend of black gospel and modern American R&B diva. That hailing from Palmerston North and living in Wellington, she is being groomed by a multi-Grammy-nominated Canadian producer/manager for a major play into the American market later this year. And that there is literally no record label involvement, rather a business ‘exec’ who is providing not only funding, but corporate-level connectivity to the US business world, developing networks that are expected to see her become a mainstream presence there in relatively short order.

More a tall order you’d sensibly think, but Anita Prime has had more than enough from the knockers and non-believers, and rightly believes that her album ‘Destiny’ is aptly named. Her producer/manager/promoter/friend Ron Thaler clearly agrees, because he too is committing heavily to Prime and it is a business contact of his who is the mysterious ‘exec‘ in the background. “It’s not just financiers, it’s a little deeper than that,” Thaler explains when asked just where the buck starts. “This is the business machinery that I have set up in the US that is specifically dedicated to
this project and bringing Anita to wider attention. This is actually somebody who is a marketer and a promoter himself, and in this context he is fueling the entire business structure of how this is going to be launched and presented in the US – which is a very different thing than label architecture. Labels will provide up with distribution in the brick and mortar world, nothing more. In itself it is very forward thinking in the approach we are taking with this. We retain the rights, the directives, the artistic oversight – as much aesthetic control over what we do.

Although himself unassuming and softly spoken, Thaler has all the confident verbosity you’d expect of a New York-based business maker. He is opinionated and clearly a persuasive negotiator, and while deliberately vague is not overtly evasive. His own career to date has its foundation as a highly regarded session drummer with a musical background in jazz and fusion “… and crazy ass stuff”. Having played on hundreds of albums he now lays due claim as a producer/arranger/instrumentalist, and has literally worked with an A-Z of talent from Ashley Simpson to Dweezil Zappa, including Japanese underground, country/acoustic and funk/rock artists. In 2009 he enjoyed Grammy ballot success with the debut album
of US country/pop artist Kelly Saint Patrick. He describes the planning behind Prime’s launch as an “… evolving kind of model” and says most of the artists he has produced don’t fit it because they aren’t as mainstream in their potential connective value. Thaler produced (in the traditional full-involvement sense), mixed and also played drums on ‘Destiny’ and firmly believes in his diminutive Kiwi charge’s potential to make it big in the States. “That is her specialness, that she is not American. I’m not a marketer, my expertise is in the music, but the big PR thrust here is that a white girl from small town can sound like any of the great modern black gospel singers. Why? Because that’s her heritage. Within the industry here there is a weird rap, maybe it’s a legitimacy gap, about having a girl from NZ hit big in R&B. The industry seems to have shut out that possibility here. I look at it exactly the opposite: you have a small town girl from a far flung country that very few people know about, with a fantastic voice, who works at it more than any other singer, simply by virtue of having her own vocal school. So she is sharp as heck at what she does. People want mystery, surprise and this is a fantastic story.” It certainly has already been just that for Prime, who only a year ago basically approached a stranger asking for his opinion on her recent recordings. Thaler was in New Zealand at that time as part of a roadshow talking to audiences about modern production techniques. “To be honest I didn’t even know what a producer really did at that stage!” she happily confesses. “I had heard that he had worked with Alicia Keys [his website says that he played and programmed drums on Keys’ hit song No One], so I cancelled the rehearsal I had on to go and see him. I was trying to do an album but didn’t know how. I was trying my best, in my way, and as a singer I know how to arrange the voice and had vision for that, but not for the music side of things.”

Coming from one of those big families that all play and sing together to entertain others, at just 13 Anita Prime was the singer in her first band. By the end of her teens she was lead vocalist in a Youth for Christ group, Certain Sounds, which toured NZ and also ventured across the Tasman. Remaining in Palmerston North she started teaching singing in high schools as an itinerant teacher, and studied herself through
Trinity College. She later used singing as a tool to help in alternative education programmes for young people, teaching life skills for kids struggling at school and those on the verge of expulsion. “My singing was always key because as soon as you sing it opens up the hearts of young people – I used it in that way and made a decision to work with them.”

In 2006 Prime established her own singing school in Wellington that employs two other teachers. Despite some obvious business smarts she seems thoroughly ignorant of the perils and pitfalls of the music biz. She attended the evening seminar specifically in order to meet Thaler, armed only with her naivety, burning aspiration, good looks and a CD burn of 16 originals she had worked up in the Carterton studio of ex-pat Brit Paddi Addison. She thought she had an album ready and was hoping for his advice on how to get it heard in Alicia Keyes’ territory. Listening (in a car) just after the seminar Thaler told her she had an excellent voice, but the musical platform was not where it needed to be. Remarkably he agreed to work with her, but told her she would need to up the game. “I could see the style she was going for and it was current in the States, Beyonce, Mariah Carey, R&B/ pop or whatever. The lyrics were cogent and they had the vibe and energy I was looking for, and clearly she had the voice – that was a non-issue. The issue was, how do we get something underneath to support it to make sense, so that the voice flows through on top?”
He was due back in New York, but reshuffled a busy schedule to allow him five days in Wellington just a month later. On arrival they went pretty much straight into STL Audio studio in Wellington and completed their first track Serenade in that trip – a day for instrumentals, day and a half for the vocal tracks then a few days for editing and mixing. Thaler has great praise for STL’s engineer Troy Kelly. “Troy is really the best game in town from my perspective, plus he has an acuity and intelligence and is open [to trying things].”

Thaler took Serenade to the States where he says it got “… some pretty decent feedback, but they needed a video”, though it’s hard to glean just who ‘they’ are. At his suggestion Prime flew to New York to film her first ever video. “There are some basic realities about equipment and location and so forth, and if you are going to shoot a video properly you have to be prepared to invest a certain amount to make it happen,” he explains.
At this stage any investment was all Prime’s, her personal savings covering the New York video as well as recording of the first two tracks. She would have been pleased not to be responsible for the second video (for La La La) which, despite Thaler’s earlier observation, was shot at Epsom Girls Grammar school in Auckland and directed by James Solomon of Fish’n’Clips. Thaler points out that Solomon is an ex-Brit, which supports his argument that the “out-of-the-box” kind of thinking needed to produce something globally appealing remain the domain of U.S. and (to a lesser degree) U.K. practitioners. He describes the NZ On Air video funding as “joke money”. “How do you do anything of serious quality with that? A lot of the videos I’ve seen here the production values are horrible. On some level you can say that’s part of their charm, on the other hand it is clear to me why [almost] none of these videos have crossed the Pacific to the U.S. You’ve gotta see what you are competing with.“ The La La La video shoot involved about 30 people, with hair, make up, lighting and camera crew as well as 10 dancers and choreographer on set – a big budget clip.

 

The song itself Prime describes as just being about wanting to sing, saying she had wanted to write a song “like How Bizarre” that was about pretty much nothing, yet everyone wants to sing it. The balance of tracks on ‘Destiny’ are rather more earnestly about her journey in life and as a singer. “It’s really hard to make it in NZ, people are always putting you down, and even those close to you can be unsupportive. That’s what the name of the album is about, they never thought you could be something.” The challenges of a divorce and subsequent solo child-raising meant that this lover of singing went through a period when she didn’t sing at all. “I started to write about how I was feeling at the time, it was a release. Honestly it helped me to sing, and my friends who were going through similar things told me my songs were helping them too. Some of my songs were written in tears, others are happy and positive.” “’Hopeful’ would be the word I would use,” says Thaler, who selected 16 songs from the 40 Prime initially submitted to him – five she had previously recorded for her ‘album’ making his cut. He got his international connections (songwriters, programmer, musicians, studio etc.) to further develop and pre-programme the album tracks before Prime spent 20 days working with the musicians in New York.