By Joncier "Ms. Boogie" Rienecker with additional reporting by Tamone Bacon

Although he's a relative newcomer to the music industry, Brandon “Blue” Hamilton has already accomplished a lot in his career. Hailing from the Midwest metropolis of St. Louis, the rising melodic mastermind is an experienced musician. He has known how to play multiple instruments from a very young age, and he's parlayed this ability into crafting hit songs for the likes of Ne-Yo and Justin Bieber. Blue's production on Bieber’s “Born to Be Somebody" (written by Diane Warren and co-produced by Jan Smith) garnered him a 2012 Grammy nomination, adding to his growing list of career achievements. I sat down with Blue to chat about his Grammy nod, his upcoming projects and his favorite song of all time. Read on for the details, plus a look at him at work in the studio!

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Congratulations! You co-produced Justin Bieber’s “Born to Be Somebody” track, which received a Grammy nomination this year. How has this accomplishment changed your life?

I get more phone calls for work and for sessions, which is nice. More people ask me for Justin Bieber autographs. It’s been cool for Jan [Smith] and myself to finally get the momentum that we were looking for for our production company, which is called Plumbline Music Group. 

You’ve worked closely with Bieber on a few other projects. Overall, how was your experience working with him?

He moves quick. He bounces off the walls. But he gets a lot of work done; he’s really talented. A lot of the artists that I meet are just singers, rather than being actual artists. So it’s inspiring to see someone who is talented, has a vision, and is so young with all of those gifts and using them the way that he does. 

What are you working on for 2012? 

My primary focus for this year is the music and the sound design for Plumbline Music Group’s artists. I’m looking forward to seeing those careers start. We’ve been working for a long time with these artists, so it’s been cool watching them develop as visionaries and writers. 

I read that you are also a multi-instrumentalist. Which instruments do you play?

Consistently, I play the bass, the guitar and the piano. I also know how to play the drums, trombone and the euphonium.

How are your writing and production styles different from those of other songwriters and producers today?

I would say the main difference is my life experiences versus everyone else’s. We all have the same tools available to us. We all use the same computers and the same programs, but I think the main difference is where we come from. We all come from different places. To keep my music as unique as I would like for it to be, and as pure, I focus on more organic concepts. 

What inspires you to create music?

I think music is just a part of me. When I first picked up an instrument and I started creating, I knew what I was doing. What inspired me to first start creating music was the fact that it was a way for me to escape into my own world, to create whatever I wanted. 

Fill in the blank: ______ is the greatest song of all time.

There are so many good parts about certain songs. My answer today is “Working Day and Night” by Michael Jackson. The percussion was amazing, the band was killing the game, and Michael was in another world. Listening to that song is like an experience. 

If you could work with only one artist for the remainder of your career, deceased or living, who would you want to work with?

Leonardo Da Vinci, because that’s someone who I can forever learn from. 

When you are not working, what are you doing?

Reading. A lot of reading. 

Where is your #1 vacation destination?

Mountains, in general. I don’t really care where they are. If I go anywhere and I see anything that’s bigger than me, it’s amazing. 

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Brandon "Blue" Hamilton's website: www.bassieblue.com

Follow Blue on Twitter @bassieblue

By Etan Rosenbloom, Associate Director & Deputy Editor, Communications & Media and Jeff Jernigan, Associate Director of Film & TV Music

Given how music-intensive Flight of the Conchords was, it should come as no surprise that the group's co-founder Bret McKenzie (an APRA member who licenses his music through ASCAP in the US) would excel at writing music for film. But we were still shocked at the awesomeness of McKenzie's music for Disney's critically-hailed film The Muppets. And apparently, so is the film industry: two of his songs from The Muppets were nominated for Critics Choice Awards, and the movie's showstopping centerpiece "Man or Muppet" was also nominated for an Oscar.

McKenzie spoke with us about his experience working on The Muppets, his lifelong affection for the work of ASCAP president Paul Williams, and how his toughest critic - his daughter - reacted to his work. Watch the video above to see how it all went down!

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The Muppets on the web: disney.go.com/muppets

Bret McKenzie at the Internet Movie Database: www.imdb.com/name/nm1235366

Compiled by Etan Rosenbloom, Associate Director & Deputy Editor, Communications & Media

"If music be the food of love, play on" says Duke Orsino in the famous opening lines of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. What the melancholic Duke expressed so eloquently was that music is perhaps the best tool that we have for communicating love, that most ineffable of emotions. Love in all of its infinite permutations still flows through much of the music we consume today.

Of course, Duke Orsino continued with "Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting / The appetite may sicken, and so die." 400 years after The Bard's immortal words were written, it would seem that our appetite is still pretty healthy - or in other words, to quote modern-day bard Paul McCartney, "You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs / But I look around me and I see it isn't so."

In honor of Valentine's Day, we asked the ASCAP writers behind a few evergreen love songs to tell us why they think listeners are still singing these songs for their sweethearts, dedicating them on late-night all-request radio, playing them to set the mood. 

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Chris DuBois on "We Danced" (original recording by Brad Paisley)

Brad and I wrote "We Danced" back in 1996 before he had a record deal. It was one of the first songs that the two of us wrote together. That was an interesting time for us creatively, because it was back before either of us had a clue what we were doing as writers. We wrote with reckless abandon and consequently ended up with some incredibly bad songs. Every now and then, though, that reckless abandon would lead us to a magical creative moment that couldn't have been found any other way. "We Danced" was one of those moments.

We started that song (as we frequently did in the early days) without any lyrical idea at all. We literally wrote the first verse line by line without any idea where it was going. We made up a story about a guy working in a bar after closing time that meets a girl who came back to get the purse she left. The problem was that we didn't know what was supposed to happen next. After sitting there for a few hours and running through a hundred possible scenarios, we decided that they should dance in the empty bar. Something about that felt incredibly romantic. Once they danced in the first chorus, we knew that they were going to dance again in the second chorus, so the song flowed pretty quickly from there.

I think people loved "We Danced" for the same reason that they love movies like Sleepless in Seattle. It's a great love story with a happy ending. It's a little unrealistic, but that's okay...it's fun to imagine it happening. One of my favorite things about being a songwriter is that it allows me the freedom to create characters and situations that are so much more interesting than the sometimes boring reality in which we live.

More about Chris DuBois: wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_DuBois

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Crystal Nicole on "I'll Be Lovin' U Long Time" (original recording by Mariah Carey)

I wrote “Lovin’ U Long Time” in Miami with Mariah. It was the last song we did on her E=MC² album. DJ Toomp produced the track and when I first heard it, I thought it felt happy, like a love song – but not corny. I felt like the song represented an “a-ha” moment or announcement. I felt like it deserved a big statement.

My favorite lyrics from the song are: “As long as I know u got me / I'll be loving u long as I can breathe / I'll be loving u for eternity” and “Don't want another / Ain’t gonna ever be another / Can't nobody do what u do to me.” This part repeats because I felt like it needed to be reiterated. At the time, I was engaged to my now husband, so of course I pulled from that. I pull from a lot of places, believe it or not. I can pull from even a mother/daughter relationship, just love at all angles, and I dissect it.

When I hear that people enjoy the love songs that I write, I am honored and flattered because I feel that's my duty as a narrator, a songwriter. I want to be able to put people’s feelings into words, so when they hear it, they are able to say “That's exactly what I was feeling!”

People spend alot of time talking about love, this month, but every day should be Valentine's Day.

More about Crystal Nicole: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristyle

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Marilyn & Alan Bergman on "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" (original recording by Michael Dees)

With composer Michel Legrand, we were given the assignment to write a song for The Happy Ending, a film written and directed by the late, great Richard Brooks. The song was to appear twice in the movie. The first time it is heard, it is sung behind a love montage – two young people (Jean Simmons and John Forsythe) romantically, optimistically in love and about to be married.

It is 16 years later. The marriage has broken apart. The wife is now an alcoholic, an “appendage” of her workaholic husband. She leaves him and her 15 year old daughter, never to return. She is seated at a table in a bar, gets up and goes to the jukebox and makes a selection. We hear the same song, the same voice…not a word or a note changed from the earlier scene, as per our assignment. This time, of course, it has a very different meaning, as in a martini-induced haze she listens and reflects on her past as well as her future.

Though the first and second times are identical, clearly it is the first impression of the song which so many couples have chosen as the love song for the rest of their lives.

Alan and Marilyn Bergman on the web: www.alanandmarilynbergman.com

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Happy Valentine's Day from all of us at ASCAP!

By Daniel McMahon

Daniel McMahon (right) and Miles Nielsen. Photo by Mike Graham.

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In May of 2010, an old friend who needed original music for a film he was directing contacted Miles Nielsen and me. The film was a documentary about a high school football team from Memphis, TN, and its struggle to conquer demons both on and off the field. The filmmakers immersed themselves in this story by living with the team in Memphis and filming every part of the players' day-to-day lives. A year or so later, they came back up for air with a lot of footage to edit and the need for some music to soundtrack the stories of these characters they had been documenting. We were provided with an open door to audition material to get the job, so we booked some studio time, recorded four original instrumental pieces and sent them in. A couple weeks later, we got word that the film company liked our submissions and we were approved to do the project. Thus began our journey. 

Diving in, the writing process for this project was full of blind creativity. We didn’t have a lot to go on. The directors, Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, were in the early stages of editing around 500 hours of footage down to about two. The original musical direction given to us was to create dynamic, ethereal compositions with Hammond organ as the focus instrument. They wanted the character of Memphis gospel and soul, but with mostly atmospheric overtones. Seeing as they had just begun the editing process, there wasn’t any picture to work with. 

So we got to work recording and submitting music in the vein of the given direction, composing pieces with spaced out organs and guitars, stomps and handclaps. As the directors narrowed down their edit, the direction began to change from both sides. We experimented with some different vibes, trying everything from simple nylon-string guitar pieces to snare drum cadences and movements with strings and woodwinds. They eventually sent us scenes and we created music to accompany each one. At times they had a very specific direction for us to follow, and sometimes they left it up to us to set the vibe and they would edit around our piece. As an example, here's a piece we wrote with layered and effected cellos along with a drum cadence. It was recorded to back a scene that needed a steady build of intensity with a final release.

"With God's Help" by McMahon/Nielsen

Eventually, ethereal soul music developed into straight-up Memphis soul, sometimes bordering on hip-hop, rock and blues. To accomplish a more authentic rhythm section sound, we called up Miles’ brother (and current touring drummer for Cheap Trick) Daxx Nielsen and invited him into the studio. We recorded Daxx playing different grooves at several tempos and made drum loops out of that. Upon completing the rhythm section work, we added horns, organs, guitars and necessary production. This collaboration proved successful and really helped shape a lot of what would end up being in the final edit of the film. This track was recorded for a scene in the film that needed a "movin' on up" feel, upbeat and progressive. We recorded the horns, drum, bass and electric guitar to reflect an old-school soul vibe. 

"Soul Bash" by McMahon/Nielsen

At this point, the finish line (in terms of the film edit) was in sight, which allowed us to really start dialing in the music. It was the end of December 2010 and our deadline was May 2011. Unexpectedly, the film got accepted to the 2011 SXSW Film Festival, and our deadline changed from May to the end of February. Because of the change in deadline, the film company decided to bring in composer and fellow ASCAP member Michael Brook to help finish everything on time. With the scenes divided between us, Miles and I could focus more on the quality of a smaller workload. We turned in final mixes of our music two weeks before SXSW and they continued editing the film up until just days before the festival. While walking into the SXSW premiere, we half joked with one of the directors about whether the film was really even ready to be seen yet. Everything felt so rushed in the end. The next day, before the festival’s second screening, we learned that someone from the Weinstein Company was at the premiere; after an all-night negotiation, they purchased the film. 

Now it has been almost a year since that deadline. The film continues to gain momentum. It has won multiple awards at film festivals, was nominated for a Critics' Choice award and has now been nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary Feature category. As for us, we are back to work with our band, The Rusted Hearts. We also operate a studio in Northern Illinois called The Midwest Sound, where we continue to produce music for film/TV and work on various other recording projects.  

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Undefeated will be released February 17th in NY and LA and March 2nd in other markets.

Daniel McMahon website: getmcmahon.com

Miles Nielsen website: www.milesnielsen.com

Find out more about Undefeated here: weinsteinco.com/sites/undefeated

By Etan Rosenbloom, Associate Director & Deputy Editor, Communications & Media

We've all known of the staggering talents of ASCAP member Siedah Garrett at least as far back as Michael Jackson's 1987 album Bad. Siedah sang the duet part on the album's first single, "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," and co-wrote (with ASCAP member Glen Ballard) its inspirational fourth single "Man in the Mirror." And while those feats alone might have secured her place in the pop pantheon, Garrett has parlayed her natural abilities into a career full of highlights. She won a Grammy in 2008 for co-writing the Dreamgirls showstopper "Love You I Do;" late last year, ASCAP honored Siedah for her longevity at our Women Behind the Music event; just two months later, she was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing the raucous "Real in Rio" from Rio.

All this good news comes as Siedah prepares her forthcoming album The Answer's Always Love in collaboration with ASCAP writer/producers Barry Eastmond and Dapo Toromiro, as well as Mervyn Warren of Take 6. The album is fan-funded through ArtistShare - you can get an insider's view of the process and get involved here. In the above video interview, Siedah tell us about the inspiration behind the album, and shares some pearls of wisdom gleaned from her long, illustrious life in music.

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Find out more about The Answer's Always Love: www.artistshare.com/siedahgarrett 

Siedah on the web: www.siedah.com

Siedah on Facebook: www.facebook.com/siedah.garrett

Follow Siedah on Twitter: @SiedahGarrett