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Tyler Meacham’s River City Alt-Pop

Noelle Abrahams | September 3, 2019

Topics: film school, kickstarter, Moving On, music industry, quitting your day job, Say Yes, sexism in music, The Camel, Tyler Meacham

Richmond singer-songwriter Tyler Meacham’s focused approach to her music is bringing career opportunities to her and great songs to the world.

If anyone ever told Tyler Meacham not to quit her day job, they’ve had to eat those words by now. The 25 year-old Richmond native ditched corporate America to pursue a music career and has quickly started making waves in the Mid-Atlantic indie scene.

Whether on stage or on the record, Meacham’s performances pack a powerful punch. She has a melodic, soulful voice and a natural stage presence – raw talent that’s hard to come by. And she’s much more than just a vocalist. On one song, she’ll be strumming a guitar riff and on the next she’s tickling the ivories, all while singing the lyrics that she wrote.   

I was struck by her sound while attending a recent show at The Camel, and just had to know more. Luckily, I was able to talk with her before she and her band head off on a summer tour across the Eastern Seaboard to promote the upcoming release of her debut album.   

Hailing from the West End, Meacham has music in her roots – her dad performs in cover bands. But while he may have helped harvest her love of music, he didn’t teach her to play guitar. “I was really stubborn as a kid,” says Meacham. “If you wanted me to learn an instrument, I was going to have to do it on my own.”

Photo by Forrest Mason

So that’s what she did. Meacham taught herself to play guitar in middle school, mainly using YouTube videos for instruction, and then started writing songs. She did a cappella in college and was also in a band while there. “It was just for fun though,” Meacham says. She studied film at Elon University and was dead set on a career in visual arts.

After graduating, Meacham landed her ostensible dream job at Walt Disney Imagineering. “To everyone from an outside perspective, I would be set for life with this job,” says Meacham. “But I found that I was incredibly unhappy.” 

While living in Florida and working for Disney, she had almost given up on music. There was even a time when someone had asked her to join a band, but she said, “No, I don’t do that anymore. I have a real job now.” 

Eventually, Meacham acknowledged that working behind a desk wasn’t working out for her. “I wasn’t thriving,” she says. “And I just really missed making music.” So, she moved back to Richmond and said, “All right, let’s try this again.”

Upon her return to Richmond, Meacham didn’t immediately start pursuing music as a career. She was still set on making the film industry work for her, so she applied for a video position with a record label in North Carolina. But her passion for making music was getting harder to ignore. 

She recalled a conversation with the interviewer in which she was told it would be a really cool position because she’d have artists coming in and she’d get to work directly with them. But Meacham told me, “The whole time, all I could think of was that I’d much rather be the artist.”

Photo by Joey Wharton

Meacham got all the way through the interview process and thought she was a shoo-in for the position, but ended up not getting it. She didn’t feel disappointed or rejected though – the news actually came as a relief. “OK, now I have permission to completely change careers,” she recalls saying. “Maybe this is a sign.” 

“For a minute, I felt a sense of failure,” says Meacham. “I felt like I had failed to maintain a ‘real person’ job, but in reality, I just had the opportunity to figure out what I really wanted to do way earlier in life than a lot of people do – that’s a huge gift.”

Support from friends and family made the jump a bit easier for her. While living in Florida, she would talk on the phone with her friends from college. They all told her she should be pursuing music and encouraged her to do an open mic or record something, but she was always looking for an excuse not to. “I was the last person to figure it out,” she says.

As for her parents, they’ve always been supportive of their daughter’s endeavors. “They still come to every show,” she says with a laugh. “Even the late ones that go until 2 in the morning! Plus, they let me go to film school, which is supportive in and of itself.”

Meacham spent 2018 writing a new song every month, posting the demos online and playing three or four open mic nights a week. She started meeting other musicians, who knew even more musicians, and now a handful of those people play in her band.

Now, she’s well past the open mic life and headlines local shows regularly with her band. She has over 1700 followers on her YouTube channel. A live version of her single “Moving On”, which was released in May 2019, has over 9300 views as of today. “Moving On” is available for streaming on Spotify, along with “Rumble” and “No Words”, two other singles from 2017.

She credits the tight-knit atmosphere of the River City’s music scene for the accelerated rate at which the project is moving. “That’s why I love Richmond,” says Meacham. “You spend enough time doing it, and eventually you know everyone else who’s doing it too.”

She and her band have a unique and robust live sound. Meacham plays either guitar or keyboard, depending on the song, and is backed by two additional guitarists, Joel Worford and Nate Hubbard, plus bassist Chip Hale and drummer Brandon O’Neill. One would think they’ve been playing together for years because of the expert cohesion you can hear, but the current band was formed when she was in the studio this past January recording her first EP. 

Meacham hopes to release the album this October, but she’s still about $3500 short of the pricetag for all of the necessary expenses, including mixing, mastering, CD production, marketing, and promotion. She’s currently running a Kickstarter campaign that has already raised over $1000 from about 30 backers, but it ends on September 11, and there’s still quite a ways to go.

“It’s a really tough gamble doing a Kickstarter – it’s all or nothing,” says Meacham, referring to the fact that Kickstarter returns the money to the backers if the campaign doesn’t reach its goal. “But we’re going to get it done regardless. I’m not going to let the album sit for another five to six months.” Her determination is palpable and enviable.

The big single off of the EP, “Say Yes”, will be released soon, so keep an eye out for that on her YouTube channel or social medias. You can find her on FaceBook and Instagram. She wishes she could give an exact date, but laments that, “nothing is certain in the mixing and mastering process” — especially when funding is the main factor. The summer tour she’s embarking on will help with that though, especially through merchandise sales. 

“Streaming doesn’t really provide anything to artists unless it’s by the millions. The money in music comes from touring and selling merchandise,” Meacham explains. Plus, physical copies of music like CD’s appeal to the consumer as much as they do the producer. “I’ve found that at shows, if you have a CD to offer, people will buy it and ask you to sign it because there’s still something special about having that physical product.” she says. “If you’re on Spotify, you can’t listen to an album and then read the credits. If you’re a musician and a music nerd like me, you want to know who did what.”

Photo by Tim Win

Amidst the whirlwind of her sudden success, Meacham still deals with sexism being a female in an industry that’s long been a “boys’ club.” “I’ve developed a thick skin,” she says. There’s been a lot of experiences she’s had that her male bandmates haven’t, such as inappropriate behavior from unruly patrons at gigs, sexist comments, and unsolicited mansplaining about how to play the guitar just after she’s played guitar extensively for a live audience.

She recalls a time when, after she’d taken the stage at an open mic, a guy cornered her at the bar. “He was talking my ear off like, ‘You were great, but you could’ve done this, this and this thing better.’ The feminist aspect of my song ‘You Know Nothing About Me Yet’ spawned from a lot of interactions at bars after gigs, like that one,” Meacham says.  

It was impossible not to notice that she was the only female artist to grace the stage at her recent show at The Camel, which featured three bands. That’s the norm for Meacham. It has been ever since she started out by doing open mics in Richmond. 

“It’s a little scary,” she says. “It’s something that I take notice of often, but I don’t let it prevent me from doing what I do. People have a tendency to view female-fronted music as a genre, but I just want to make good music and I happen to be a girl. It doesn’t have to be a boys’ club, and I mean that for the industry as a whole – there’s room for everybody at the table.”

Despite the emotional, physical and financial demands of making independent music, Meacham is committed to seeing this through. “Fewer people are going with labels,” she tells me. “There’s been a lot in the news lately about how major labels are really difficult to work with. Artists are losing the rights to their songs. Who knows what’s going to come down the line, if anything, but while independent music is difficult, time-consuming, and exhausting, it gives me so much freedom to navigate this the way that I want to.”

Photo by Joey Wharton

Meacham has big plans for not only herself, but the entirety of Richmond’s music scene. “Independent music is really hard to make, but there’s a lot of people here doing it right now,” she points out. Her hot take is that if we keep going out and supporting live shows, buying merch and promoting artists online, that’s how we take this city from the fringes of the industry to the mainstream. “I’d love to see that happen,” she says, “because there’s a lot of talent here.” And there’s certainly no doubt about that.  

Top Photo by Williams Photography  

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

Richmonder & Fellow Sci-Fi Writers Launch Kickstarter to Bring ‘Amazing Stories’ Back to Life

Andrew Goetzinger | March 27, 2018

Topics: Amazing Stories, kickstarter, sci-fi, sci-fi magazine

Does the theory of life on other planets fascinate you? Are you a sci-fi fanatic whose childhood days were spent delving into galactic conquests, ancient alien artifacts, stories of robots taking over the world, tales of mad scientists concocting wild experiments or fables of extraterrestrial societies? Well, if so, you’re in luck because one Richmonder, along with a few other collaborators, are aiming to revive a infamous science fiction publication.

Henrico native Kermit Woodall, along with New Hampshire resident Steve Davidson have launched a Kickstarter to bring back Amazing Stories, the world’s first and longest-running publication dedicated to all things science fiction.

First printed by inventor and writer Huge Gernsback’s Experimenter Publishing in 1926, the magazine ran for nearly 80 years and was an innovator of blending entertainment with education and inspired the careers of authors, artists, editors, academics, scientists, and engineers. During its time, it went through multiple editors and owners, weathered bankruptcy, and went through a serious of changes before ultimately folding in 2005.

Davidson, a former fanzine publisher and former games designer, bought the name in 2009 and in December 2012, launched Amazing Stories online as a multi-author blog of both action and non-fiction with over 175 contributors, and r40,000 registered members. And now the two, along with writer and author Ira Nayman are hoping to raise $30,000 to bring the beloved and historic publication back to its original form in print. 

“I read about the potential return of Amazing Stories and heard about it via a mutual friend, the late Bud Webster, and was introduced to Steve Davidson,” said Woodall, who serves as art director. 

Woodall started writing for Davidson’s blog since its beginning in 2012 and has contributed fiction pieces as well as science news articles. Originally born in New York City, Woodall grew up a son of two artists in Williamsburg and is the only Amazing Stories employee currently living in Richmond.

“I’m the classic science fiction enthusiast,” he said. “I discovered science fiction when I was a teenager and was a reader of the ‘Big Three’, {Isaac} Asimov, {Arthur} Clarke, and {Robert} Heinlein. I {also} enjoy modern writers like Charles Sheffield, Allen Steele, Ted Chiang, Kameron Hurley and many others.”

The trio has currently raised a little over $12,000 of their $30,000 goal to launch Amazing Stories. The Kickstarter will run until April 7 and if successful, Amazing Stories will be published quarterly at its start, focusing on high-quality collectors print editions with its first release slated for sometime in August.

The first revived magazine issue is around 200 pages and 35,000 words. Amazing Stories has already been acquiring content for the first issue from a variety of science fiction authors, but are still looking for new stories. The submission site will be open for writers to submit stories anonymously upon the launch of the magazine.

“We lean toward stories that have a positive future outlook on future plausible or realistic science, but we also have fantasy and horror,” said Woodall. “We are also focusing on the balance of literary quality in our fiction as well as a quality story that grips you and is entertaining.”

The plan to relaunch Amazing Stories and implement this Kickstarter program had been brewing since before Davidson and Woodall even got together for the blog.

“There are a lot of science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazines that use their online audience as their primary audience,” Woodall said. “Some include print, some include podcasts, and some do a little of everything. That being said, our plan has always been to return the magazine to print. We want to delve into other media, but print has been our main goal.”

Woodall said the focus will be on filling issues with good storytelling that many magazines today have neglected. “A lot of magazines, starting back in the 1970s, started embracing literary styling over storytelling. We think both are equally important.”

Woodall’s specific goal is to bring back a higher respect for art and be able to evoke emotion with his art as well. “The same magazines I obliquely referred to before are using pretty poor art these days. And by these days, I mean for over the last two decades,” he said. “Generic spacescapes, illustrations that have vacant-eyed characters with poor proportions. The online magazines are doing pretty well – but the print magazines? Not so much.”

“I think most people, outside of fans, don’t realize that most science fiction, fantasy, and horror conventions feature a room set aside as an art gallery and have artists speak as well,” Woodall added.

Woodall, Davidson, Nayman’s Kickstarter is an all or nothing funding site. If they don’t meet the goal by the April 7 date, Woodall said they do have backup plans, but couldn’t go into any detail as to what that would be. 

And while their campaign will end soon, there are several rewards to entice people to donate to get Amazing Stories off the ground such as signed books from big-name authors, one on one creative writing and editing sessions, and a reward that will get your name in a story or your face in cover art. You can learn more about the project, rewards, and donate here.

Local java company hopes to bring nitro coffee to market with help from fans

Brad Kutner | January 28, 2016

Topics: Black Hand Coffee, coffee, kickstarter, nitro coffee in RVA

Nitro coffee is the newest brew on the market and one local company is hoping to bring it to RVA, but they need your help.

[Read more…] about Local java company hopes to bring nitro coffee to market with help from fans

King of Pops hopes to mural-ize his “factory” with crowdfunded support

Brad Kutner | March 30, 2015

Topics: Hamilton Glass, kickstarter, king of pops, RVA murals

“We want to add art to the outside of the building but we also want to preserve what came before us,” said Richmond King of Pops owner Paul Cassimus about the new kickstarter project they’ve started to fund a new mural for their pop-factory.

[Read more…] about King of Pops hopes to mural-ize his “factory” with crowdfunded support

Clair Morgan hopes to repeat crowdfunding success on second album

Brad Kutner | January 28, 2015

Topics: Clair Morgan, crowdfunding, kickstarter, rva music, shannon cleary

Recording an album is not only an arduous task, but an expensive one too. However, thanks to crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter, bands and other such artists have been able to reach out to audiences across the globe for support.

[Read more…] about Clair Morgan hopes to repeat crowdfunding success on second album

Local pop punk band hopes to reach ‘damaged kids’ with new clothing line

Brad Kutner | January 26, 2015

Topics: Broadside, depression, kickstarter, RVA punk music

“I really wanted to be that bridge to the idea of hope,” said Oliver Bierman, lead singer of local pop-punk outfit Broadside, who described his own issues with depression and anxiety when he was growing up.

He remembered honing in on bands as a teenager and how their music helped him deal with his own emotional issues. Taking inspiration from these memories, Bierman hopes his work with Damaged Kids, his fledgling clothing line, will allow for more personal and direct communication with his fans.

“I am living proof that you can push through anything that you put your mind to,” said Bierman. Bierman is using Kickstarter to begin his new clothing line, Damaged Kids. The line will bring awareness and raise money for the causes of teen depression and anxiety.

The Kickstarter, which began a few weeks ago, is asking for $1200 to help begin the line. Designs are mocked up on the crowdfunding page and stickers have been ordered. Bierman said he turned to Kickstarter because he couldn’t get the money himself.

“Being someone who just works a daytime pizza job, I couldn’t just pull it out of pocket. I couldn’t make it really come alive,” said Bierman. “But if you stand behind something like Kickstarter, it really gives you the opportunity to reach out to people so that they can have a piece of something so they can build it with you.”

He also said he has looked into other ways of getting the money needed to begin the line if the Kickstarter fails to meet its goal. He also stressed that the line isn’t a front for anything.

“Every penny of the $1200 I ask will be used for the initial costs. This isn’t me being a broke band dude saying ‘give me money’!” Bierman laughed. “I just can’t do it all myself, it’s something I need a crowd to help me out in the best way that they can.”

Bierman is in contact with various charity groups to donate some of the money from the Kickstarer fund raising. But he said Kickstarter’s rules were unclear as to what he could list on the crowdfunding page.

Bierman said the concept behind Damaged Kids comes from the idea that those suffering aren’t totally broken, and can still get help. He believes those he reaches with his music can relate to the message and will hopefully throw some money behind his cause.

“I just really wanted to take the idea of [how] right now it feels like the end, but it’s not. You’re just damaged, not broken,” he said.

Bierman said that even when he is traveling the country on tour, the line won’t be neglected, because he is building a staff here of people he trusts.

He said he would keep up with the line’s social media, and that he balances his many projects because can’t sit still for very long. Bierman said that “if there was a way I could just open up my head and pour coffee in, I would.”

His central motivation here, however, is to give back: “I really wanted to take that word ‘damaged’ and say we are damaged and we are hurt and we are bruised and we are isolated and afraid and anxious but that’s what we as a collective are. I wanted to take that word and shine light on it.”

Check out Bierman’s kickstarter page here.

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