Music Production

Nature Valley licensed the publishing for “Send Me On My Way”, the 1994 American classic by worldbeat rock band Rusted Root, made famous for sync placements in Matilda, Ice Age, and an ever growing list of tv shows.

The team at EP+Co brought us on to explore covers of the song with the Fulton Street artist roster for their new Nature Valley Granola Bar campaign. The goal was to pay homage to Rusted Root with versions that felt true to the sonic qualities of the original, while exploring alternate voices for the lead melody. In 24 hours we produced 14x :30sec options with different artists, and delivered this batch of custom demos:

>> Listen to the “Send Me On My Way” Demos Here <<

Ryan Ordway, an artist and producer from Portland, ME, had regarded Send Me On My Way as an ace up his sleeve for lighting up an audience. He had been covering it on the road for decades. When we asked if Ryan was available for the project, it became clear that maybe Rusted Root themselves would be the only ones more prepared.
Of the 14 options we presented, Ordway’s was the one selected and approved for this campaign.

Audio Post

Since it’s launch last summer, Fulton Street Media Group has serviced this campaign with voiceover recording, sound design, and mix for 7 spots, including the latest which introduces the new line of savory granola bars.

“EVERYTHING BAGEL BAR?!”

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We can all provide vivid anecdotes for the times when music has shaped a memory in our lives. It’s that dopamine rush of hearing your favorite song for the first time, or that nostalgic feeling when a melody transports you to a place and time where you made a deep connection with someone. 

In our day-to-day lives, music is an elegant tool for generating and regulating emotions. 

Whether to relax, jumpstart a workout, set the mood for a romantic evening, or engender a sense of belonging with total strangers, this unique power of music is a visceral part of our human experience.

Music’s ability to get our attention and capture our imagination goes far beyond just what we hear. Listening to music, or even the passive participation of humming and tapping along can increase connectivity between ordinarily disparate regions of the brain, including those responsible for:

• language processing
• attention and memory
• emotion and mood control
• motor skills

This enhanced connectivity supports cognitive functions, facilitates learning, and aids neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections.

This Song is Dop(amine).

Dopamine is a chemical messenger involved in reward, motor function, and pleasure. Its release strengthens the positive associations between an event and the neural connections involved. 

Here’s how the music you love triggers the release of dopamine:

Anticipation and Prediction

Part of the pleasure of listening to music comes from an expectation fulfilled or the pleasant surprise of an unexpected resolution. Our reward circuitry is hinged on both patterns and novelty.

Enter “the drop”!

Everybody Rock Your Body

Infectious harmony and compelling rhythm inspire movement. The synchronicity between body and sound stimulates motor control and reward pathways, leading to dopamine release. 

Limbic Listening

Dopamine is a powerful tool of the limbic system, responsible for our emotional responses, behaviors, and long-term memory. Music and our affiliated memories spark positive emotional connections, thus activating the release of dopamine.

Harnessing Music To Commit Brands To Memory.

People buy with their hearts not their heads. So how can the power of music shape the emotional impact a brand has on their customer?

You don’t own your brand, your audience does. So how can music shape the way your brand is remembered by a super-fan? 

An intentional and coherent music strategy creates impactful and enduring activations for an audience. 

Such a strategy employs what we know about music’s ability to shape memory and align brand ethos with audience values. It does so deliberately and cohesively, with every interaction reinforcing brand position. Just as with a visual aesthetic, repetition of a musical aesthetic unifies audience perception, and generates an identity that is not only memorable, but worth remembering.

Branding and advertising, at their cores, aren’t merely about promoting products. They’re deeply psychological, designed to tap into our hopes, fears, and desires. In navigating brand psychology, a wealth of insight can be found in the work of Carl Jung, whose theory of the collective unconscious offers a fascinating lens through which we can view modern branding.

Jung posited the existence of a shared mental reservoir of archetypes: universally recognized motifs inherited not from personal experiences, but from our shared human journey. These archetypes are present in stories from every human culture across every era, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the latest Marvel movie.

Brands are contemporary storytellers. They construct narratives, aiming to resonate not just with our personal experiences, but also with deeper, more universal feelings. They do so by appealing to the archetypes that, as Jung suggests, are hardwired into our psyche. Brands that successfully leverage these archetypal narratives achieve something significant: they resonate on a deeper level, across cultures and continents. They’re not just telling you a product story, but THE story, one that feels intrinsically human.

The Outlaw

These rebellious brands are characterized by a desire to disrupt the status quo. They seek to break conventions, introduce innovations, and attract audiences who value non-conformity, independence, and radical change.

The Magician

Brands that fit this archetype are transformational, creating special life-changing experiences for customers. They offer innovative and cutting-edge products or services that seek to improve and transform the consumer’s life.

The Innocent

These brands represent purity, goodness, and an idealistic view of the world. They strive to deliver products that are pure, safe, and beneficial.

The Ruler

These brands hold authority, exude leadership, and express a sense of power and exclusivity. They resonate with ambitious individuals seeking success and status.

The Everyman

This archetype creates products, services, or experiences that are relatable and designed to fit into everyday life. They appeal to the average person through practicality, honesty, and hard work.

The Jester

The Jester archetype aims to bring joy, entertainment, and levity to their customers’ lives. These brands represent fun, humor, and light-heartedness.

The Hero

Hero brands inspire and motivate others to overcome challenges, achieve greatness, and realize their potential. They promote triumph, excellence, and victory.

The Creator

Creator brands appeal to their customers’ sense of innovation, creativity, originality, and craftsmanship. They encourage customization, and a visionary outlook, and look to build community around creation.

The Explorer

These brands encourage their customers to explore new places, ideas, or experiences. They appeal to customers who value independence and self-sufficiency and offer products or services that enable self-reliance, adventure, and freedom.

The Caregiver

These brands focus on helping people care for themselves and others. They provide service, support, or comfort. Brands that fit this archetype are nurturing, compassionate, empathetic, and protective.

The Sage

These brands are characterized by wisdom, knowledge, guidance, and a pursuit of truth. They assist their customers in understanding the world better through information, analysis, and insight.

The Soundtrack of Your Brand’s Archetype

Each archetype represents not only humanity’s stories and symbols, but also the music that has been used to score and cue them since time immemorial. In this way, you might say that Jung’s collective unconscious comes complete with a soundtrack. These symbols and stories that are encoded across humanity have sonic retrieval cues that can be harnessed in storytelling to swiftly familiarize the audience with concepts that are already innate, facilitating trust and familiarity between the storyteller and the listener.

The challenge for brands lies in interpreting the archetypes as they apply to music in ways that align with their unique stories and values. It’s less about fitting into a predefined mold and more about tapping into collective symbols while retaining authenticity.

There is deep nuance in that interpretation, which is why choosing music partners who understand the rich cultural underpinnings of music in storytelling as it applies to the archetypes of your brand is so important.

When the creative team at Circus Maximus approached FSMG for custom music on La Colombe’s “For the Love of Real” campaign, we were thrilled to find that the artists & references hit so close to our musical core. As a Philadelphia-based brand, it was crucial that our pieces reflect the virtues of creativity and grit that define The City of Brotherly Love.

Our conversations with the creative team about the aesthetic of the campaign brought to mind a range of musical references from classics like Funkadelic and 90’s legends like The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul, to heavy-hitters of modern hip hop like Anderson Paak, Pusha T, & Brockhampton. we set out to create tracks that spoke to and accentuated the creativity and grit that La Colombe inherits from its birthplace.

We kicked off our production with a drum tracking session at Strange Weather in Brooklyn, NY where we put down authentic hip-hop drums with legendary drummer Lenny “The Ox” Reese (Demi Lovato, DJ Premier, Run DMC, Lunchmoney Lewis, M.O.P, Kimbra, Joey Bada$, Gentei Kaijo).

Our producers from Philly, NYC and LA used our drum tracks to create 8 original custom demos, blending real drums & classic sampling with modern production, all of which exude the swagger and love-of-real that is ground into La Colombe’s delicious coffee.

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Ultimately, Franco Colon won out with his piece “Rwanda” – an elegantly executed production with tape-smacked drums, punchy horns and infectious vocal chops.

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Final takeaways: This project was ultimately successful for two reasons: first, top notch production, notes, and direction from the agency and brand. Second, creative alignment on a direction that reflected both the ethos of the brand and campaign, but also the musical artists who would ultimately create its soundtrack. That is FSMG’s Love of Real.

OBJECTIVE:

• To create compositions conveying a sense of wonder and sophistication that felt cohesive with the animation style, all while supporting the overarching brand message of Butcher Box: to raise the bar on high-quality meat, delivered with ease.

PROCESS:

In collaboration with director Ben Severance, we put together a reference palette keying in on “Somebody that I Used To Know” by Gotye and the film scores of Joe Hisaishi (Studio Ghibli) and Michael Giacchino (Up). A blend of acoustic folk and orchestral instrumentation felt appropriate to the notion of a simpler path for the food that arrives at your table.

Working to the early stages of the animation we called upon composers and arrangers Darien Shulman, Christian Almiron, Eva Gertz, and Carmine Mattia to create traditional film scores. Additionally, we tapped James Beer and Dallas Thornton for a more pop-oriented approach that explored sampling orchestral elements as a nod to Gotye’s sampling of Luiz Bonfás “Seville” in the opening of their song.

After the first round of demos, we landed on a few select pieces to move forward with and tailored them as the animation approached its final iteration.

Our clients fell in love with a track called “Camden” written by Carmine Mattia and, once a final version was settled on, we booked a studio session at The Studio in Portland Maine to replace all the strings and woodwinds with live players. The depth and nuance this lent to the piece cannot be understated and, while the original sequenced version was good, the authenticity this added not only elevated the piece musically but spoke more directly to the ethos of the brand.