I worked with a band couple of years ago. The band was on it’s way up, things were going well. In this case, the guitarist thought himself to be the person that created the sound of the band. He had kind of a big ego so many times the band had to change things because the guitarist thought this and that about really everything from the look on the cover to the sound to the places they should play on, he had an opinion about everything. The opinion usually leaned on the indie side. It was a lot talk about sellout and corporate gigs and stuff.

After a while, we got good feedback from a record label and they signed with that label. Just shortly after the label had been on several shows and talked to the band I had a meeting with them as the publisher.

They were asking questions who wrote the songs. I always got them from the band with an equal split so I told them I would investigate it. And when I was doing so I found out that the bass player wrote the most of the critical stuff but the guitarist took credit for most of the work. On top of that was also that the bass player felt overrun by the guitarist all the time with the cool ideas he had himself.

Of course, the guitarist claimed that the bass player ideas were just rough things and his polish to them was the thing that made them shine.

I went back to the label and described the situation. The label said direct, we thought it was in that way. They had got a hold of a demo done just by the bass player before the guitarist had a chance to get to it, and they thought it was brilliant. They realized that the potential for the band was much higher if they sacked the guitarist.

Now you have a real trouble. The guitarist who thinks he is everything should be replaced. In the end, he was fired but with a lot of struggle. Also since the label knew the capacity of the band they didn’t do so much as long as he was there. Not until it was solved they showed their true capacity and got the band to a quite good reach in the world.

I had a meeting with the A&R on the label last week. He is now working on another label but he brought it up during our meeting. He said that they had seen that all the bad decisions came from the guitarist but couldn’t bring that up with the band. And then when the demo came in it was so obvious that they had to react. The sad part was that it took time to get rid of the crap stuff that it slowed their career for at least two years.

I find this quite often in bands. It’s not the industry that holds them back it’s someone holding them back within making decisions that they really don’t understand and have a thought that they are the greatest thing ever happening to this project. And history is full of stories about a change of people that made the difference. It’s not always the people around it can be at the core of the things as well.