Conversations with Women in Music Production: The Interviews

1

GENDERED PERCEPTIONS INFLUENCING THE RECORD-MAKING PROCESS

The experiences of the engineers and producers discussed in this book span a few decades and include the periods before the major technological advances to the present day. Some of the women interviewed have worked during the older music industry model of large multinational corporate major record labels with big-budget-style productions in an era before streaming. Others mentioned that they were just coming up, as I did, when this was starting to shift; the Internet was in its early stages, major label monopolies were beginning to break up, and independent labels were becoming more prominent. Notable, too, would be key technological inventions underpinning a lot of these changes for the engineers and producers interviewed (which is discussed in further detail in a later chapter about technological accessibility as a potential democratizer); the first digital audio workstations (DAWs) and some of the moves away from the traditional studio hierarchies were in their early stages during this period. We see the first instances of home studios, as well as innovations like plug-ins and more powerful computers, emerge during this time. In hindsight, these technological advances have really changed the way music is made. For example, in 2004, a 250 GB portable HD with a 7200 RPM was heavy and quite large (by today’s standards); it needed external power and was pretty expensive. (I now have a 2TB flash drive sitting on my desk, the size of a standard USB drive and at a fraction of the cost of the aforementioned drive of yore. I am sure within just a few years of writing this, things will have advanced even further and faster.) So while the landscape of music making has evolved from the process of thirty to forty years ago, for those working today, these previous paradigms cast a long shadow. Working nearly from a musicological framework for this first chapter, the analytic structure and line of questioning were devised to look at recording industry paradigms that have recently started to shift.

While women’s experiences of these shifts are explored in more depth later, it is important to start with what they had experienced initially (if they were active in their careers during the earlier paradigm) or of the remaining overhang from the previous paradigm model, which is rapidly being reshaped by things like social media, online streaming, and other avenues of revenue for everyone in music and music production globally. During the pandemic of 2020–2022, these changes, to things like who controls popularity and who gets to make records, became more visible. That is not to say that major labels don’t hold any sway; in a very large way, they still dominate what gets played on the radio and major streaming services like Spotify—and who gets paid from these streams. (Under the current model, major labels, for example, collect the royalties and then redistribute them among their artists based on popularity, often leaving independent artists without their fair share or their royalties lost and not distributed at all.) A recent Rolling Stone article summed it up best: Spotify pays out its royalties on a pro-rata basis, meaning that, at the end of each accounting period, all of its royalty money gets virtually dumped into one pot, from which artists are paid according to their share of all streams on the platform. So if a group of artists is getting 90% of the streams, they’re also getting 90% of the money (Ingham 2020) Without diving headlong into how those systems work, notably, major labels are also major shareholders in Spotify, for example, and do control how black box monies are distributed. Nevertheless, many new artists are surfacing and discovering ways to skip over gatekeepers and find their audiences—forcing the major players to take note.

The audible male gaze, my term to describe what we as a society (or perhaps formerly as major labels) deem acceptable for the kinds of music women make or are assumed capable of making or are marketable enough to make. This includes the kinds of women who get to make music and be visible and what they get to make and perform music about, which is something that we begin to explore in this chapter of questions. The audible male gaze is more prevalent in some music genres than others, especially in pop music. One need only to think about the harsh critiques heaved at Madonna for suddenly being too old or at extremely young Billie Eilish for being a different body shape than what is preferred (by whom?). Again, pop music is harsher on women and women-identifying people, where ageism is also at play. For example, women aren’t allowed to age in nearly the same way as their male counterparts are, and their product (i.e., music) is deemed less viable or marketable. Tori Amos talked openly with Ann Powers in their book Piece by Piece about an incident with Atlantic Records in 1998, when they planned to bury her and not promote her work because she was considered too old:

Tori, wake up. It’s over. Silence. What? They won. What I said in shock, in walking nightmare kind of voice. They won. They’ve got you sewn up for three records. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Tor. I think they want to bury you. How can they bury me? I said, somewhat dazed. I can play a full house at Madison Square Garden with or without Atlantic. Yes, but they’ve got you sewn up for three records and by then they say you’ll be . . . What, be what? I said, now with tears running down my face in this small café, with the waiters bringing me napkins for the dam that was about to burst. Be what? I whispered, through the tears. He lowered his voice and said, Oh, honey—too old. And then . . . And then, what? I demanded. And then no one will want you.

Rock music and all its subgenres have a different set of constraints; for example, in rock, punk, and metal, we don’t see women having the massive successes of Alice Cooper, Green Day, or Metallica, performing in those styles. Because these harsher/tougher genres of music are seen as less feminine, the women in these styles have to put on a different bravado (perhaps in some ways overcompensating, even if they identify with the subculture of that genre) to fit in, or they get left out; they may be more free in terms of visual imagery under the old paradigm models, but free in this case is a loose term and really depends on the artistic vision of the creator and the production team. Without digressing into a completely different discussion of cultural underpinnings, these points are part of the undercurrent of my questioning during this chapter. What music doesn’t get made? How does this audible male gaze affect the music that gets a budget, gets signed, or gets promoted (nevermind how)? That is a much larger question than can be addressed here, so what I asked these women is how they experienced these influences and their thoughts on them. There are some cultural parallels here; for example, in pro league sports, it’s argued that women’s teams aren’t as marketable for a variety of reasons. Similarly, what are some of the subconscious biases that are held about how women shouldn’t sound, behave, or write in these music genres? Western society seems to have plenty of time for music by women to be in one of two camps: sexy diva or mournful siren, especially in pop but not limited to it. It’s almost like a lot of music considered the standard chick music would fail its own Bechdel test. That is not to say that there aren’t exceptions; there very often are. The focus here is on what upholds these stereotypes and whether they hold anyone back. Another parallel is any sampling of women’s Halloween costumes in the United States. Most of the costumes are Sexy__________, and whatever it is it had better be sexy. Again, this is not to say that it is wrong to be sexy or that it isn’t popular and doesn’t sell. The important notion here is: Does the audible male gaze limit people in this context and, if so, how? Is music constrained by this audible male gaze? This topic alone could be its own discourse for a body of research, perhaps too broad for the scope of this book.

Additionally, some women interviewed had no major label experiences, while others did. We discussed the paradigm shifts and what they feel its impact is, before moving on to talking about recent developments to the industry. This is when the 1990s Lilith Fair and girl power branding emerged in some genres of music. This branding had a different set of semiotic coding and complexities, resulting in a different style of othering for women making music. These types of labels sought to communicate that the music was women’s music or chick music or a chick band and somehow was not for everyone (i.e., men). I wondered if these women felt pushed out from making certain kinds of music or if they had a self awareness in making sure they didn’t get labeled as making chick music. While most were not performers themselves, I wanted to know what they had seen from their side of the glass and if there had been artists they fought to get recorded or projects they believed in that received pushback.

Focusing on chick music and the assumed feminine touch, my term for the subconscious bias that women make pretty, soft, elegant, or sexy music—in other words, decorative or titillating but not serious—that music is somehow gendered from the outset. There is plenty of writing on these musicological topics, so the intent isn’t to unpack those here but to look at how these subconscious biases may impact what music gets made and if these women were deemed capable of recording and producing music that wasn’t women’s music or chick music.

Were these engineers and producers potentially not getting hired or thought of for some projects because subconscious gendered biases can exclude women from certain scenarios or subcultures? In essence: Did the decision-making process and these subconscious biases determine that women were the wrong culture fit to make the record? This is perhaps a larger hurdle, depending on the cultural norms associated with a particular style of music. I wanted to find out from these engineers and producers how they had handled working where there might have been perceptions that they couldn’t do the tougher, harder, or more technical style of music. Because many of these women draw from different time periods in the industry and different genres of music, they unsurprisingly had varied experiences. Notably, the women working in rock music developed coping mechanisms (to my own surprise, they were some of the same tactics I employed when I started as a recording engineer and producer, not only because that’s the music I liked, but also because I wanted to make sure that no one thought I couldn’t make rock records because I was not tough enough [i.e., a woman]). It does, however, raise more questions about presumptions; indeed, Ebonie Smith made a good point about people wanting simply to make records with people they identify with or like hanging out with, and there is no changing that. (There is a large social component to music and music making, and areas like semiotics shed light on how music can be examined under the scope of being, in its own way a unique cultural language with cultural signifiers.) This is indeed a facet of the music industry and is very much why there’s a substantial amount of reading the room that most engineers and producers do on a daily basis with their clients. Simply put, if you are going to be locked in a room with no windows for twelve hours with someone, you had better hope they’re enjoyable to be around. That being said, are women given the chance to be colleagues and not secretaries, groupies, eye candy, and so on? It’s more about subverting the expectation of who women can be than it is about a social grouping of who likes hanging with whom because while you must have mutual visions to work together on creative projects, women are too often overlooked and not thought of for roles or are not trusted to be skilled (read technical, which is discussed later) enough to do the work or not seen as an equal one would casually spend time with (which is a larger societal issue). These topics came up in passing with many of the people interviewed here. Abhita Austin and I took a small detour at one point to talk about being misremembered. I’ve gone to many trade shows and had great interactions with my colleagues about very technical subjects, regarding acoustics, recording, or the gear, and so on, only to have them run into me later and misremember me as a singer (I am not a singer), completely forgetting that I am an engineer. Fair dues: We all meet a lot of people, but after repeat renditions of misremembering, as well as finding out that many other women in your field (which is still rare) also experience this same specific misrememberence, one does start to notice a pattern. The act of misremembering someone has a substantial psychological background to it. Angela Saini, in her book Inferior, explains,

American psychologist Diane Ruble and gender development expert Carol Lynn Martin have explained how, by the age of five, children already have in their heads a constellation of gender stereotypes. They describe one experiment in which children were shown pictures of people doing things like sawing and cooking. When a picture contradicted a traditional stereotype, the kids were more likely to remember it incorrectly. In one instance, instead of remembering that they had seen a picture of a girl sawing wood—which they had—someone said instead that they’d seen a boy sawing wood.

It’s not surprising, then, that many women recording engineers get mis-remembered as singers. That’s the gendered stereotype, and that’s what psychologically gets replaced.

How insidious is this pattern, and how does it affect women when it comes time to figure out whom to hire? Let’s try for a second to draw a parallel to another creative industry. Imagine for a moment that you are a film director at some sort of networking event to meet other directors. You meet a woman and talk about doing that job and that role. The next time you meet her, you ask her how her modeling or acting gig is going—because that’s how you view her. She’s not your peer, but she might be talent. If she’s attractive enough, maybe you can make her a star! Maybe you can discover her!

It is hard to get work if the people in your industry forget you exist because there is such a deeply ingrained cultural assumption that women do not exist in this field and are not technical. Furthermore, even if you claim to be an engineer or producer, you are either misremembered or told that you are not those things, making it even harder to obtain opportunities for work. Try to imagine this happening to men in any field, and it may highlight this strange phenomenon. Are men constantly asked whose boyfriend they are when they try to show up at work?

A personal anecdote of my own to add to these women’s stories is an experience I had working with a rock band. More than once I was asked (not by people in the band) by industry people around the band whose girlfriend I was, or I was mistaken for a party girl. When people are used to seeing women only as potential dates or sometimes as a singer, you practically have to wear a sign around your neck declaring your job, and even still people will file that away with a grain of salt. Sylvia Massy brought up her own experiences that echo this, as did a few other women I spoke with here.

The last point in this chapter is the question, When is there more than one woman? This isn’t unique to the recording industry. For a start, it’s pervasive in many fields and industries, as well as culturally. Two women is too many. We are barely in a place in the United States where we could think of electing a woman for president; furthermore, many would have a hard time digesting a president and a vice president who are both female or identify as female. It’s just fine to have two men, though. So this becomes something of an issue in a male-dominated field, where women never see each other. The term tokenism comes to mind in some instances. It’s deeply isolating, and I wondered how this impacted the output of these engineers and producers. How did they cope? Did they notice? Did they get to work with other women? Some would say, Why does it matter? Just work with everyone. Well yes, of course. But that everyone includes women. Ask men how many men they work with in their role, in any role. I am guessing that unless they are a preschool teacher or a nurse (traditional women’s work), they won’t have ever given it a second thought. Psychological studies suggest that stereotype threat sets in and can indeed impact a person’s performance on the job. Sadly, a lot of the women I interviewed had never even thought about working with another woman behind the console as engineer and producer or as engineer and second engineer or in any other combination.

I asked the women to reflect on their work environment experiences and how they felt their work environment impacts the music being recorded, their perceptions of clients’ responses, and so forth. Many had recorded women but had no experiences with having another woman behind the glass with them. This is evaluated in more detail in a later chapter where stereotype threat is addressed more closely. Interestingly, some women had not reflected on this phenomenon before. For those who had worked with women behind the console, it was because they had hired them.

The impact, apart from the professional and personal experiences of the engineers and producers interviewed, is the music. The music is impacted as a cultural by-product of these institutionalized biases, in the case of the previous paradigms, or in casual subconscious groupings and assumptions about what kinds of music women make. These biases impact the people making the music and the music being made. It’s difficult to untangle these categories, as it is a complex relationship between technician, creator, curator, and technology in and among society. In general, the aims of this first chapter are to begin to raise questions about the far-reaching impact that society’s biases create by gatekeeping and how this influences who gets to work and what kind of work gets to be done—specifically, music and what kind of music.

TASTEMAKERS AND GATEKEEPERS: THE AUDIBLE MALE GAZE AND MALE ARBITERS OF TASTE

Music made by women for the most part is being curated through male tastemakers and gatekeepers. How does this affect the music being recorded and produced? Are artists and projects held back by this? If so, who’s held back and in what ways? Is it a case of label pushback? What are your experiences?

Abhita Austin: Well, I think there’s just less of us. I think, from what I’ve experienced, women producers—in relation to how male gatekeepers affect that—we are a lot of times looked over or not considered, and I am guessing that’s the case because there’s just not a lot of us there. I remember when I started interning years ago, and I went to Bad Boy [Records] first, and they were not accepting interns. And then I went to Quad Recording Studios, and they took me on, but I remember the management was all male. And I was being pushed, although I was studying music technology and audio engineering at New York University—they knew that; I was one of the only people who [was] studying, you know, back in the day. This was like the late ’90s; there were not a lot of schools for audio engineering. So they knew I was studying, and I was slowly being steered toward management and toward the front desk, and it made me think, I have to put myself forward and make it known that this is what I am interested in.

I think in relation to women music producers and male gatekeepers, there is just a lack of sensitivity, or there’s just a certain gaze, and they just don’t see women in certain roles. They just might assume, from my experience, that, Why would you wanna?—even though you’re saying [you want to]. I have had male gatekeepers tell me that I’m not an engineer. . . . So I guess, to come back to the question we are talking about, I think it kind of allows for less women producers to come through the pipeline. I have had male gatekeepers tell me that I am not an engineer or that I’m not, like, the caliber to be an engineer— which in hindsight is crazy.

Because I work independently, none of the projects I am working on are running through that channel. It’s also a different time; it’s a totally different time. Music has greatly been democratized because of the Internet.

So, as far as pushback, it’s not overt in a sense because the men that I am dealing with, they understand what it is intellectually—and some of them more than others—but, like, there is a sense of not taking women producers seriously unless there’s a persona that they can grab on to. This is not in all cases; there are a couple of cases where they respect the music. But lots of times in choosing the women that they want to bring into the fold, it’s a visual more so than the music.

I am even thinking about artists because, you know, I come from a lot of hip-hop music, a lot of R & B music, and even a lot of the women that are considered feminist in those categories are ridiculously misogynistic—just ridiculously violent toward women. And I’m not talking about physical violence; it’s mental. It’s affecting how other younger women envision themselves, and so that’s always fascinating in an unfortunate way, and that happens a lot.

Leslie M. G. Bird: I don’t actually have any experience with the music-recording artists. I’m on the technical side. I am not a music-recording engineer. I do audio for film, radio, and television and just teach recording arts. So my role is more of an engineer, not a producer. I see what happens to my students when they go that route, and I see that a lot of women are discouraged from working behind the glass. That’s the angle I come at it.

Hillary Johnson: I think it really only—in my experience—really only affects female singers, like solo artists, in the sense that, if they are working with a male producer, just from what women have told me over the years, is that . . . they don’t necessarily feel comfortable. They feel sometimes that the producers are working them too hard for reasons other than the art. [Laughs] Just to sort of push them around sort of thing. But that, you know, has been such a long time since I have really heard anyone tell me that sort of story. It’s probably been twenty years, so maybe it’s different now.

I think that there’s enough political correctness that’s been going on for long enough, at least, that it shouldn’t really matter whether the producer is a man or woman or that the artist is a man or a woman. I would think that it’s better than, say, twenty to twenty-five years ago, but it could just be wishful thinking. Most of the stuff that I’ve worked has not been in the pop-culture realm, so my only experience with that is seeing it in the