Tag: Jack White

Designer Anna Sui Explains Her Unique Connection to Music—And Musicians

September 10, 2019

From a young age, designer and fashion icon Anna Sui knew she wanted to clothe rock stars. In the late 70’s, she started piecing together the notes of a clothing line in her NYC apartment. That is, when she wasn’t flying around the world picking up freelance gigs. It was an exhausting period, but it also opened her eyes to a world of resources and techniques on other ways to create clothing. Streaming is doing something similar for music and creative inspiration, she says, (without needing to pay for a flight).

Now a veteran designer for musicians of all stripes, Sui has a very special relationship with music. Recently, she created a New York Fashion Week playlist highlighting musical selections from all her shows since her first in 1991. “I would say it’s a list of all my favorite songs because every song that I use in my show, most of the time there’s a personal affiliation with it,” she explained to For the Record.  

Read on for more of our exclusive interview on the unique relationship Sui has with music—and the people who create it. 

When you’re creating a new collection, do you play any particular artists or genres?

Usually when I’m working on a collection, I start by researching music that I’m going to use for my runway theme. If there’s something, let’s say historical or from some particular era, maybe I’ll start listening to music from that period. For instance, when I did a chinoiserie collection, I started listening to music from old and contemporary Chinese movies. So it’s part of my research in creating the mood for the collection. It’s something that I really enjoy because I always discover something new each time I do the research.

Have you ever heard something that’s inspired the collection or the theme for the show?

Oh yeah. I mean there are particular collections that were inspired by music, especially during the grunge period. I did a grunge collection. A few years ago I did a punk-inspired collection and went back and listened to all the old punk records and looked at old photos from that period. I think it’s really important to create an ambiance for an audience and transport them to where my imagination is.

And is this a process that you followed for most of your life as a designer? For example, when you were starting out in your apartment, did you have a similar attitude towards music?

Yeah, I mean when I started doing my own collection, my whole purpose to dress rock stars and people going to see rock concerts. That was my sole motive. And it kind of escalated from there, when department stores and boutiques started buying the collection. Then I had to think a little broader. But my original concept was rock stars.

Speaking of which, you’ve attracted big names like Madonna, Mick Jagger, Jack White. What are some of the elements that you were going for in creating pieces for them, and what are some of the things you think they picked up on?

I think that it’s a combination of the fact that they’re following fashion, but I’m also following music and it’s like a kindred spirit when you meet. Like when I met Jack White, I think he knew that I had that background of loving punk rock and loving classic rock. And so we kind of just started talking about it right away.

It was a fantasy my whole life, dressing The Rolling Stones. And so that was really exciting that Mick did his first hosting of Saturday Night Live in my clothes.

And then Madonna was really the one who gave me the confidence to do my first show. I didn’t know that she was a fan or that she wore my clothes. But one of the first times I met her was at a fashion show together in Paris. When she took off her coat, she had my dress on. And that was kind of a shocker because in her hotel room where we picked her up from, she had shopping bags from every major designer in Paris and racks of clothes hanging. And so for her to select mine, it gave me that confidence that maybe I could do something, maybe I could really have my own show.

What is your advice to others who feel they have a particular calling, but are struggling to start out in the art or fashion world?

Well, I think that you have to figure out your niche and really, really focus on it. I think that you have to realize that the competition is so tough that you have to really be sure that this is what you want and there’s certain sacrifices you have to make along the way. And so it’s a trade off. And you have to just have that determination. 

Anything else on your mind that you’d like our readers or your fans to know about?

Keep expanding your mind, keep expanding your horizons, keep expanding your world. Something like Spotify really gives you that opportunity where you don’t have to get the mileage, flying somewhere. You can just kind of dial it. You can find it. And I think that that’s an amazing thing that’s happening today.

Take a listen to Anna’s NYFW Playlist below. Plus, check out our interviews with other NYFW attendees, including Rebecca Minkoff, Sophie Elgort, and Natalie Lim Suarez.

Love Discover Weekly? Thank a Hack for That

June 5, 2018

Your beloved Discover Weekly playlist started out like many other innovations at Spotify—as a line of code. But thanks to Spotify’s annual Hack Week and various Hack Days, our engineers have plentiful opportunities to turn their wildest ideas into reality.

The music industry has a long history of hackathons, with Spotify as a consistent sponsor. “In fact,” says longtime music hackathon participant and now-Spotify data/backend engineer Jen Lamere, “a lot of people have their connection to Spotify through some sort of hackathon, since a lot of the flagship products were made through those events. Spotify is keeping the flame alive.” According to Lamere, even employees who are not software engineers can use Hack Week as an opportunity to learn coding basics throughout the week.

Most Spotify engineers from the Stockholm, New York, Boston, and Gothenburg offices participate in the week, using the time they might ordinarily allot to “normal work” to make something helpful or just plain fun. The week, which is usually in the fall, culminates in a presentation or science fair (depending on the office) in which teams demo their projects. Hack Days, meanwhile, are a little more sporadic. For the User Engagement team, they occur for two days every four weeks and include a Friday night pitch session. Then, Monday and Tuesday are reserved for hacking.

If a hack works, it might make its way into a test build of the app so that a small number of Spotify users can try it out and see if it works outside the music-nerd engineering bubble. Yet some Hack Week and Hack Days projects are focused behind-the-scenes, on ideas Spotify users will never see themselves, but still benefit from. For example, lessening the time it takes for Spotify engineers to make an app update build, or helping Spotify employees find weirdly named conference rooms more quickly. “It’s all about making our lives a little easier and helping us get our jobs done,” says Lamere. Other hacks, like Discover Weekly, become integrated in platform updates, or even a part of large-scale marketing campaigns.

“Spotify’s culture and strong support of Hack Week is a fun way to let our engineers, designers and other employees express their creativity for innovating on music technology,” says Senior Data Engineer and Hack Day Emcee Tim Chagnon. “Sometimes the best benefit from Hack Week is just the experience of banding together with a new group of colleagues and learning something new by working with people from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences.”

Check out the results of four of our recent hacks—from a site that lets you find the most dramatic part of a song, to helping immigrants better enjoy the sounds of their home country.

Where Is The Drama? (Paul Lamere)

Music Hack Day hall-of-famer Paul Lamere’s web app automatically finds the most dramatic part of any song on Spotify, and plays it for you with a single click. It works by analyzing the loudness profiles of the songs, to find the passage with the biggest build-up. To try it, simply click here while playing any song through Spotify.

NPR Podcasts Notification (Jake Lehroff)

Around 125K users searched for NPR podcasts before we had them (but now we do!) Jake Lehroff didn’t want to miss out, so when the podcasts launched, this hack sent an in-app notification to the users who had searched.

Milestone Printer (Skyler Johnson)

Skyler Johnson from Spotify’s NYC office made the handmade-looking printer pictured above that cranks out a not-so-steady stream of statistics – a new one every time an artist breaks one of our streaming records in a country with Spotify. Most hacks don’t make it to hardware status, but Skyler’s is a great visualization of what our work can do.

One Hit Wonderment (Glenn McDonald)

Glenn McDonald’s hack used Spotify data and stats to put the biggest one-hit wonders—from Tal Bachman’s “She’s So High” to Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”—in one place.

It works by ranking major artists by the percentage of their popularity that comes from their top track. Glenn also took it a step further, and made a playlist for songs that are the opposite of one-hit wonders.

12 Hours with Spotify Singles Producer Bryan Grone

April 9, 2018

Presiding over a recording session with a rock-and-roll legend would be a dream come true for most music fanatics. But it’s both a dream come true and a regular day at the office for Bryan Grone, Spotify’s head of audio production and executive producer of Spotify Singles.

Through Singles, a program Grone helped create, Spotify invites everyone from the biggest names in music to unsigned acts to record two songs for the streaming service—an original and a cover tune.

A graduate of the esteemed Berklee College of Music in Boston, Grone himself sings, plays the drums, guitar, piano, bass and other keyboard instruments. No wonder he was tasked with tricking out the in-house studio that Spotify built in 2016.

“I’ve personally curated every piece of gear,” Grone said. “It’s all the stuff I dreamed of owning my whole life, but didn’t have the scratch to buy.”

On a recent Friday, Grone produced a session for a childhood idol: Jack White. Here’s how the day went.

Photo credit: Spotify

 

7AM: Wake up. It was a more hustled morning than usual. Jack’s crew was arriving at 9 a.m., which is not super rock-and-roll. We usually start sessions a little closer to noon, but Jack was playing a show that night, and he had to be at the venue in the afternoon.

Usually, I would go the gym and play with our puppy for a little bit in the morning. But I just did some pushups, scratched the dog’s head, took a shower, took coffee to go, and got on the subway.

8:50AM: Get to work. On a normal day, I get in around 10 a.m. I guess I have a desk somewhere out amongst all the people, but I always go straight to the studio and spend my entire day there.

My engineers arrive around the same time. We check in on the day and see what’s coming up, whether it’s preparing for a session or doing some mixes. But on Friday, we hit the ground running, excited about Jack coming in.

Photo credit: Spotify

 

9AM. Setting up. I spent the first couple of hours liaising with the band’s crew. I was also overseeing a photo and video team, figuring out how they could capture some b-roll content for us without getting in Jack’s way.

We set up all the equipment the night before. We do production calls before each session, so we have an idea what the artists are going to be doing. When they walk in, I want them to feel like everything is already figured out.

I take a lot of time to explain to the crews why we’ve set up the way we have. They’re often laser-focused on reproducing the setups they do for every promotional opportunity. But we approach these more like recording sessions than live shows. The artists can do multiple takes, we can do overdubs, we have isolation booths so we can get a clean vocal, etc.

In this case, the crew liked the setup. They spent most of their time fine-tuning the settings on the guitar amps, bass amps and drums, because all the members of this band are pretty hypersensitive to sonics.

10:45AM: Spotify, meet Jack. Jack has a four-piece band—a bass player, a drummer, and 2 keyboardists, and they all arrived within 10 minutes of each other. They had never rehearsed the second track, so they spent about an hour on that.

Musicians feel at ease when they come into the studio. The lights are very low and cool and vibey, and there are great old rugs and all this vintage gear.

The organ player, Neal Evans, was really excited to see our 1962 Hammond organ, which I picked up last year from Custom Vintage Keys in North Hollywood. You can get a keyboard with organ sounds on it, but nothing replaces the sound and feel of an analog instrument.

Photo credit: Spotify

 

12PM: We’re rolling. When the band was done rehearsing, they went straight to work on their original track, “Over and Over and Over,” which was from the album released that day, “Boarding House Reach.” They did a loose, very frenetic and emotional version of that tune.

It was pretty amazing to have Jack playing out of the amp that I bought for the program I built. He is maybe the only artist whose fan club I paid to be in as a kid.

When I’m sitting in the room, I also have my producer hat on, thinking about what I’m hearing and what I could recommend. I vibe out each artist to get a feel for how much they are interested in additional creative input. A lot of them are, once they know that we’re the ones who built this and know all the gear by heart.

This time, there wasn’t a lot of room for feedback because it was almost like a jam session. Nor was there anything I would have said, because everything sounded amazing. So, I was just checking in on them, making sure everyone had water and seeing how they felt about each take.

They were done recording by about 12:45, which is pretty fast. I’ve had bands in here for 12 to 13 hours.

12:45PM: It’s a wrap. A lot of times, the person taking video at the session will do an interview with the artist after the session. Given my relationship as a fan and my relationship to Jack’s manager, they requested that I do it. We talked about his approach to recording this album, what they had recorded at the session and why, his relationship to the cover song he chose, and what makes a great studio experience. The interview went about 15 minutes, and then we wrapped.

I rarely ask for photos with artists because I’m just not that guy. But I also think if there aren’t things in this business that still make you nerd out in the way you would have when you were a kid, it’s time for you to move on. So, I tastefully waited until the end and asked for a photo. I got a really good one.

Then, I escorted Jack out of the building. I’m really cautious about the artist’s experience here. When the artist is out the door and back to their car, then I can exhale a little bit and revel in the experience.

1:30PM: Catching up I hadn’t eaten yet, so I grabbed some lunch, which Spotify brings in every Friday. After that, I had a quick debrief with the engineers and the videographer to make sure everybody was on the same page in terms of the next steps for postproduction. I made sure Jack’s crew got everything they needed off to the venue, and then I caught up on some work emails.

Photo credit: Spotify

 

4:30PM: Coaching time. I have a professional coach, who I spend 45 minutes a week talking to over Skype. It’s been a great opportunity to have conversations with an unbiased third party in a way you can’t necessarily with your wife or friends or coworkers or anybody else.

6:30PM: The fun continues. It was time to call it a week. We were fortunate to be able to segue our day with Jack into an evening with Jack. He was playing at a club called Warsaw in Greenpoint, and his management arranged for myself, the engineers and a couple folks from Spotify who worked on the session to go. So we all hung out and got drinks beforehand in Greenpoint at the Keg and Lantern.

9:15PM: Jack White, live and in concert Jack played for 2.5 hours, ripping through stuff from his new record and a bunch of stuff from all his previous bands—The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather. I wasn’t really keeping track of time, but all of a sudden it was 12:30 or 12:45 a.m., and my ears were ringing and it was time to call it a night.