on his songwriting and his live performances. Perhaps 30-yearold Gertler’s greatest success has been to position him firmly in that lane. As a team, they of course know how to engage modern fans around the world, and how to operate at the cutting edge of the 21st century music business, but their sights are set on a body of work, on stadiums and critical acclaim. Old school/new rules – it’s a mash-up that’s worked well so far, parlaying a sliver of digital fame into something much more significant and sustainable than six seconds of UGC... What’s the first music you were into? I think really early on I was kind of following what my older
for random bands, and through that I met managers and started building up some contacts. Then, while I was in college I started interning for a management company. From that I got an internship at Atlantic Records in college; it kind of all spiraled from there. Meanwhile, a friend of mine from High School called me one day and said, Hey, this kid from our school is a rapper; I know you’re doing the music industry internship thing, are you interested in managing him? I kind of jumped on the opportunity, started managing him through college, and that was my first artist, Rockie Fresh; he signed to Rick Ross at Atlantic. And then, when I graduated college, I ended up with a job at Warner. I worked there for about
“SHAWN’S VERY MUCH A HUMAN RELATIONSHIP PERSON. NUMBER ONE FOR HIM, WAY BEYOND THE BUSINESS DEAL, IS THE QUESTION: IS THIS A GOOD PERSON?” brother was listening to. He was two years older than me and be buying things like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was also into a lot of the early era MTV bands that broke out in the late ‘90s. I have memories of tuning into TRL every week. We grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago and we went to a bunch of shows at an amphitheater in Tinley Park, Illinois. After a while I realized I could work at these shows, not in a music capacity initially, but trying to sign people up for credit cards at the amphitheater. It was a really poor paying gig, but it was enough to get me into the show. Throughout that, I started asking, Can I help at the merch table? I ended up doing that 98
two-and-a-half years. And then that’s when I found Shawn. It sounds like you got your breaks by networking even when you didn’t know you were networking. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it wasn’t like I had the intention to get into the music business; it was more I was a fan and I loved going to shows. And it somewhat just ... happened, you know? I met more and more people that had different jobs in the music industry. I became more and more enamored with the business side, and eventually I realized that it could be a profession. You mentioned the moment
that changed everything, which was finding Shawn; how did that happen and what were your first impressions? I remember that I immediately knew something was different. I stumbled upon this video of his cover of A Great Big World’s Say Something. And there was just something about him that made him different to every other cover artist that I would come across online. It felt so authentic. It was shot pretty poorly, but at the same time, it was charming that it was shot that basically. I remember seeing cover artists online that would have these crazily well-produced videos, and it wouldn’t connect. And then there was this kid who literally put a cell phone in front of him and recorded a cover and threw it up on YouTube. I sent it to a few A&R friends of mine, asking them what they thought, and the one that came back to me immediately was Ziggy Chareton, who’s still Shawn’s A&R now at Island. As soon as he saw it he said, We need to fly him out to New York immediately; so we did. I wasn’t managing Shawn at that time, but all of a sudden we’re taking meetings at Island and Republic and a bunch of other labels; all the time I was convincing Shawn and his parents that I should manage him. Shawn would have been very young then, and this storm blows up around him, so were there any thoughts, from either Shawn or his family, about wanting someone older and with more experience to manage him? Because from the outside it seems like a situation that might have called for an old hand. I’m very fortunate that they believed in me as a young person, and I think a big element of that was Shawn needing to connect with someone. And also Shawn
