Two Composers, Two Continents: Who The Hell Are We?

Welcome to the world of Jeff Meegan and David Tobin. 

We are Two Composers - Two continents.

Jeff was born and raised in the Windy City (Chicago if you’re British).

David is a Londoner that moved out as a kid and now lives in the rural bliss of West Yorkshire, UK.

This episode introduces you to who we are, what we do in the music industry from production music to film scoring, how we met, and the names of our first 4 track recorders…

If you want to check out more about us, find us at www.meegan-tobin.com.

If you’d like to check out our current “For Your Consideration” campaign, here’s the link:

https://play.reelcrafter.com/Meegan-Tobin/KeepOnMovin-FYC

Check out our latest album KEEP ON MOVIN’ here!

#musicpodcast #composer #composerpodcast #librarymusic #productionmusic #filmmusic #filmcomposer #tvcomposer #musicindustry

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Jeff Megan. And I'm David Tobin. And we are Megan and Tobin. And we write music for film and TV. Today's podcast is just really uh who we are and what we do.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

And I think we're really going to be focusing over some time on trying to demystify a little bit of our jobs because we've been told we're a well-kept secret. Well kept secret great, really.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Yes, an insult and a compliment at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

So Oh, you want to go?

SPEAKER_00 0:39

What do you do? Tell us about yourself, David Tobin.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Okay, well, since I was old enough to walk, I've been a musician of one form or another. I was classically trained as a child, and most of my childhood I was playing playing a piano or playing the oboe or playing another instrument, a recorder, or uh whatever, singing and writing since I was a kid, and and eventually decided I was going to take that seriously. In fact, I I pretty much knew that as a kid. How old were you? I mean, I was playing from the age of four, three, four. I was playing very, very young. Wow. And then I remember they used to have a careers advisor at school. At four years old? Oh yeah. I mean, it was in advanced school. But no, I mean, when I was probably about eleven, they'd start saying, What do you want to do? And they never even asked me. They just thought, oh, you're the musician.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

He's the music kid. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

And it was always, it was never a never a thing. Until I went to college to study music and I went there as a recorder player, which is pretty niche. I'm not gonna make it a lot of the recorder players out there, but it's pretty niche. And I realized pretty quickly that that the work world for that was gonna be fairly, fairly limited. And I was already writing and said I wanted to be a film scorer. And I was songwriting.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

So how were you were you writing on piano? Obviously. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

Yeah. And when I told the college principal, I'm gonna write music for films and TV and and and songwrite, he said, Oh, we don't do that. So I uh popped off to Berkeley in Boston. From there began began a journey of learning to do that. But I think we need to hear less about me and more about you right now. Tell us about early Megan years.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Well, mine is much the same. I was a recorder player from a very young age. Yeah, right. I've heard you play through the nose, but I've heard um uh both my parents were musicians. I you know was in love with the drums when I was a kid. They used to play in a wedding band, and um I was always sitting behind the drummer and wanted to be a drummer. So um, of course, they gave me piano lessons, did all this stuff, which I never played, never practiced, so I stopped taking piano lessons. Took drum lessons, and and it was just always part of my life, yeah. Um started writing music when I was 14 in high school, started writing songs just out of nowhere. I sat down and started playing some chords and singing, and it was like, whoa, what is this? Um and then just continue to do so. I got my first four-track recorder when I was like sixteen. And the Task Cam uh cassette one.

SPEAKER_02 3:22

Sorry, uh you had a Task Cam four track at sixteen. Yes. See, I didn't get that until I was I had the same.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Did you really track 244 or something like that?

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Yeah, but I was I was older.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

I was not as advanced as you, sadly. But uh my mother was very supportive. Right. Um and so yeah, so it just kind of blossomed from there. I kept going. I got uh started collaborating with people when I was in my early twenties. Um and then yeah, just kept on going. And now write for film and television and all kinds of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

So So maybe we should talk about how we met and yeah, I'll kick it off because actually I think it was that way around. I was um I was taking a class, an online class, uh with Berkeley online. Right. And the class was run, I mean, should I mention a name or absolutely so I was taking a cra class with, excuse me, I was taking a class with Brad Hatfield.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

A longtime collaborator of mine.

SPEAKER_02 4:23

Yes, yes. He had a job that he couldn't do and um suggested with a little with a little nudge that maybe it's something I could do. So I took that on and it was very short notice, and it was quite niche, 20s and 30s TV thing. I think it was a pitch for Boardwalk Empire, that's what it was. Yes, yes. Yeah. And so the long and the short was I said, I need a singer and I need somebody pretty quickly. And they said, We have somebody you should talk to. And his name's Jeff Meegan. So um they put me in touch with you and and you sang and I didn't use it. You didn't use it. I didn't. I did the demo and he didn't use it. Anyway. It wasn't very good. Oh no, actually it was great, but it wasn't stylistic. Yeah, it wasn't quite what I was looking for out of that. I'd got an idea what I wanted. But we hit it off so well. And at the end of that gig, the uh woman who ran the company, the um at uh Heavy Hitters Music in LA, yeah. And she said, Next, I'd like you to make a big band album. But the first thing I did was self-funded, and it cost everything I'd got and more, and borrowed and stole to you know get there. And I said, I can't afford to pay for a big band. And she said, Well, we'll pay for it, but why not collaborate with one of our writers? You might know him, you've spoken to him, his name's Jeff Meegan. And that, I think, was the first time I heard about you as a writer rather than as a singer.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

So, what about from your well, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

So I had been writing for Heavy Hitters music for years, getting music placed down soap operas and and all that stuff. So, um, and I had a relationship with Brad, we had written a bunch of music together. So that was um sort of our you know, our our through our connection was Heavy Hitters and Brad. And so yeah, I once I did the demo for you, um, which was fun, and um then Cindy called me up and she said, I know you you know you met David, and you know, we were thinking about doing this big band thing. Would you be interested in writing uh, you know, doing this album with David? And I was like, Yeah, of course. That would be fun. And the first song we did was something called, Well, you tell the story, because I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 6:34

Well, I remember I mean, we should say, I mean, uh we're gonna talk later in this series, I think, more in depth about collaboration and types of collaboration and our collaboration and other people, but I think you had a much longer history of collaboration than I did.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Collaborated for a long time.

SPEAKER_02 6:50

And I'dn't I'd collaborated with other people, I'd collaborated with a great friend of mine, Gil Linton. We'd written musical twice about Houdini. Um, but I'd never collaborated with another musician, songwriter in uh like that. I was terrified. I was absolutely what if I'm shit, excuse my language, but what what if this just you know, what if I I got laughed at stressful, yeah, absolutely no idea. So you sent me um a vocal. I don't think there was anything under the vocal, I think it was just the drums, maybe it might have been. I think it was just a top line. Oh, I think I've still got it somewhere on a song called I Want It All. And I listened to it and I was mesmerized. I'm like, this is fantastic. And then I suddenly panicked and thought, what am I gonna do with this? Because I genuinely I don't want to look like an idiot. Yeah, and then it occurred to me, this is a big band thing, and I've never written big band music, and I just had that panic, and I think I then thought, we're gonna have to get somebody else involved in this. Right. And then I panicked and had a whole life and death conversation with my wife and said, He's gonna think day one, you don't know what you're doing, and you've got to bring somebody else in.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

We're gonna work together.

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Yeah, what are you doing? And away. So I uh yeah, so we had this along, and I I think I fessed up pretty quickly. Absolutely, yeah. I I have never done that, but I recorded a full thing underneath it, and I remember just having a blast. But I also remember because of the time difference between us, writing something, hitting send in my really badly equipped internet system, because in the middle of the street.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

This was so everyone has a little uh gauge here. This is 15 years ago we've been writing together, so this is Yeah, maybe something like that.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

Yeah, no, it would be five now. This would have been 2010. Yeah. And I remember sending this, pressing go, but you would have been asleep. And then going through all manner of turmoil of I'm gonna get a cool thing. So are you serious? Where where's the real stuff?

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Well, it's funny because I do remember getting it back now that we've been talking about this and that we were gonna tell the story. And I remember uh listening to it and being like, Yeah, man, this is great, you know. Because it was there was piano fleshed out on it, and you you were you did that intro. And it's always so cool to send something out to someone and then it comes back and it's like completely different and new. Not completely different, but it's just better, you know. So it was exciting. So that conversation about bringing in someone else, because w uh we do a lot of different, we specialize in specializing in nothing. How does that sound? We um we do a lot of different genres of music and we bring in people who are experts. In this case, it was a uh, you know, uh a big band orchestrator that we brought in. Um and and I remember thinking, well, yeah, I mean uh it was a bit of a surprise, but it wasn't like, well, that's it, I'm not gonna do this. It's like, well, yeah, let's bring in whoever we've got to bring in, let's get this done.

SPEAKER_02 9:56

I was just so green that I didn't know, I'd not been in the world of you do this with other people. I'd only ever really written by myself.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

And the idea that you would go from two to three like overnight with something, I just had had no idea. But also the idea of being a specialist, I mean, we've obviously we've talked about what we're gonna talk about and and argued fairly robustly about the idea of what you call somebody who does multiple genres. Because we're gonna come on to this in a minute, but I mean there's eclectic and then there's us styles. And yeah, but big band being the first thing. I'm really glad that's what it was, because obviously to get to know each other, we talked about you know your musical loves and passions, and I mean I remember us talking about all manner of musical artists, and there was a sort of Venn diagram of who we enjoyed listening to, and they were pretty similar, yeah, actually.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Trevor Burrus, Jr. We'd never recorded a big band before. I'd never recorded a big band before. Both of us never having experienced this before, with twenty guys or however many people were in the big band in a studio in Chicago, and that was just hinge studios. The hinge studios. And that was just frickin' stressful, man. That was just crap. I was absolutely terrified.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Baptism of fire, it was And I'd never conducted a big band, and I was stood there thinking, I just hope they don't laugh at me. I mean, they're gonna look at me and go, okay, yeah, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

So it was it was quite the learning experience.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

But we worked with that band over and over several times. Yeah, absolutely. But we recorded, I think, three tunes that day, and that sounded like a lot to do in three hours. And it was, yeah. For that day. Yeah. Absolutely was. I go to your profile and I'll go to Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal, lots of great providers out there. And I see like you're listed as an artist, and you are an artist because you're a singer, but I see you listed as an artist for what you write that you don't sing, but there's just so much stuff there, so many different things. Why? Why is that all there listed like that?

SPEAKER_00 12:11

In our collaboration, yeah, we do lots of different styles of music. You know, there's folk, there's pop, there's jazz, there's country, there's I mean, there's all kinds of stuff. And it all gets released uh onto the streamer so that people can hear it. And we we do these projects for um a production music company that then releases them. So we write music for sync.

SPEAKER_02 12:33

I'm just yeah, I'm gonna stop you there and just say for anybody that doesn't know what that is, it's music written like an intermediary company that then helps put that on the TV. We're gonna go way into that stuff. So sorry.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

So anyway, so we do all these projects for for a company like that, and then they release it onto the streamers. So we are the producers and the composers, uh, sometimes we're the artists. Um but it's more like if you go to our our profiles, you have to think of it more like David Foster or Quincy Jones. Like these are the people who put the music together, and they themselves become the artists because that's what they do. They make music.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

But the yeah, the thing in common with all of it is that we've written it.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

That we've written it all, yes. Yeah. Or arranged it all. I mean, yes.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

There are there are things where we've become known for being the arrangers of of pieces of pre-existing music. Right. Um but but it's it's our creation.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Yes. I mean, we have a lot of people who go to listen to our music every month, right? I mean thousands and thousands of of people streaming our music. And I always think to myself, what are these people mustn't be so confused? Because if you did like this is Jeff Megan or this is David Tobin, you might get, you know, Beethoven's fifth to, you know, some like something that sounds like pop album. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just all over the board. Um and I always thought, wow, this has really gotta be confusing for people.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

But actually that's why we have this discussion about being sort of what I like to use the term cross-genre specialists.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

Because then we'll work in a genre, but we're we're not paying lip service to it. We're studying it, we're figuring it out, we're bringing in other specialists to work with us, which is the other reason why we do that, I think.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Because somebody that works in that style and they'll help us hone something.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Absolutely. So, yes, we've done a whole classical favorites collection where we work with um you know, we go into Abbey Road with a whole symphony orchestra and uh work with some of the world's best musicians. And uh, we have uh gentleman, Julian Gallant, that we do all that stuff with. Um, we've done big band albums and bring in big band arrangers, we've done pop music with pop producers. I mean, we whatever we need to do, whoever we need to work with to get the job done.

SPEAKER_02 14:57

Yeah, it's about servicing that song, that individual, and not even the same person on the whole album, maybe. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Just one piece at a time, who's the right person to do that. And we're gonna talk in in future episodes of this, we're gonna talk about, as I said collaborations and the type of people we collaborate with and some of the funny stories that have that have gone along with that.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yeah. Um, I think we're pretty good. I think we've kind of told people what we do. I hope you have an understanding if you're watching this about what Megan and Tobin do, and and I hope you stick around for maybe some more uh conversations. Yeah. Until the next time. All right. Thanks.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

Thanks to Audio Network and Heavy Hitters for letting us use the music you can hear in this episode. All of the music was either written, produced, or performed by Jeff Megan and David Tobin.