When Big Machine Music General Manager Mike Molinar met Laura Veltz, he saw what he looks for in promising songwriters: humanity.
Veltz describes Molinar as her “treasured” publisher at Big Machine Music. Molinar has been working with Veltz since she became a paid songwriter around 2012. “It really began with us over a conversation,” Veltz recalls in the latest episode of the Songwriter Soup podcast presented by American Songwriter, hosted by Veltz and financial advisor Tracy Hackney and produced by Kevin Sokolnicki.
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Veltz and Molinar met over dinner, inching “closer and closer” to each other at the table until finally they were side-by-side, finding themselves in a very “impassioned” conversation, Veltz describes. The next morning, the two met for coffee, which soon led to Veltz signing a publishing deal with Big Machine Music.
“One of the odd things when you’re sitting with a songwriter is you’re not just listening to their songs, you’re listening to their history,” Molinar explains about the night he met Veltz.
He adds that as a publisher, he also looks for writers who’ve built a “musical vocabulary” and performance experience. “In their actual speech, if you can hear the rhythm of the words in their emotions, you can hear a certain level of empathy or humanity that you think is going to plug into songs,” he continues. “I don’t know that I was consciously thinking that or breaking that down in the moment with Laura, but it was certainly like, ‘You are checking a lot of boxes right now.’”
Their instincts about one another paid off. In her more than 10-year tenure with Big Machine Music, Veltz has written such hits as “What If I Never Get Over You” by Lady A, Maren Morris’ CMA and ACM Award-winning single “The Bones,” Chris Young’s “Lonely Eyes” and many more.
“Songwriters are very wired to be like, ‘What feels good?’ and that very simply was a feel-good moment for me,” Veltz praises of Molinar. “I’m like, ‘This person feels like my people.’ I think your empathy about how to handle creatives was subliminally evident to me.”
Songwriter Soup airs on Monday and can be found on streaming platforms.
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
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