I heard my first KISS album when I was eight years old. It belonged to my friend’s older brother. We stared at the cover art for hours. I wanted to be Ace Frehley, the Spaceman, in the worst way.

It took me a few years to get my first guitar – it was Christmas — a black, Gibson Explorer rip-off made by Hondo. I loved it. What started as idealization of spectacle, would become a real love for music and sounds, and by age eighteen David Gilmour had replaced Ace and I was working for Paul Reed Smith Guitars in Annapolis, Maryland.

It would be years later that I’d start listening to movie scores — with headphones if I could manage it. John Williams. Hans Zimmer. James Newton Howard. John Murphy’s score to Sunshine is my favorite. I was buying more movie scores than anything else. I never became a great guitar player, but I was starting to appreciate the nuance in music.

Many years later, when I was studying to becoming an editor, I would labor over the sound part of a commercial. I would struggle to cut TO THE music — to let the music be the driver. With experience, I learned to envision (as odd as this is for an auditory experience) what the perfect music for a project should be, and that to-the-beat-cutting wasn’t always the right way.

Back then, the music came in fairly late in my workflow. Now, it’s the opposite — it comes in very early. I don’t spend time making it perfect and, in these early edits, it’s very low in the overall mix, but it’s there. It’s playing a role and helping me make decisions.

The music was becoming part of the story.

Late in the process I purchase the license. I’ll work with a scratch watermarked track for most of the edit. I do this because sometimes we all have to admit we got something wrong. If I get that queasy feeling that something is off with the feel of an edit, the groove, I’ve found that it’s often the music. So I’ll turn off my music track, playback my edit in a loop, and do the work of auditioning alternative songs. It’s a process.

I’ve learned many things about storytelling, but one lesson stands above the rest: don’t fall in love with your work. Whether it’s your writing, your cinematography, or even your music choice; nothing is immune to being cut out. If you’re in love, you won’t cut it out when it needs to be cut out. The pieces are not precious; the whole is.

I really want to spend more time on audio — specifically, sound effects and audio production in the field – but this is getting a bit long winded. So I’m going to do a Part 2 and Part 3 and dive into the other stuff on my mind in later posts.

One last thought on the business part of music in commercials: I’m curious if anyone reuses licensed songs. For 99% of the hundreds I’ve licensed, I can reuse the song in another project. But I never have. Once I use a song, it’s tattooed in my mind as being attached to a project. I cannot envision it with anything else. When I try, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard. Weird – but true.