Fleming McWilliams, who is blessed with a beautiful voice and a cascade of ravishing red hair, met and later married John Mark Painter, a musical prodigy in his own right, while studying at Belmont College in Nashville. Together, they make up one half of the alternative pop band, Fleming & John; the other members being Shawn McWilliams (Fleming's brother), who plays drums, and Stan Rawls, who covers bass for the group. These days, they're swimming on a rising tide of enthusiasm, following the 1995 release of their album, Delusions of Grandeur on REX, an independent label based in Nashville, Tennessee. Having recently signed with Universal Records, who is re-releasing and promoting the album, they now stand poised to ride an alternative wave to a national following. But the journey to where they presently stand has been a long and winding road from where they began. Consumable recently was able to talk to the duo.
Consumable: How did you come to Nashville?
Fleming: When I was in high school, there was this guy who wanted me to get into country music. So he would bring me to Nashville. I would take days out of school. And my parents liked him and trusted him. They knew this was all I ever wanted to do. So they were pretty cool with it. And we would come to Nashville and he would get me involved with weird little showcases, a pilot for TNN where Grant Turner from the Grand Ole Opry was hosting new singers night or something. That's how I became acquainted with Nashville.
John: I had a friend that moved to Nashville that I came to visit, and I was thinking about moving here. But my parents wanted me to be in school. And so I wasn't even thinking about going to school, I was just going to move here, and we went to visit a friend of his who went to Belmont and he had this catalog lying around and I opened it up and saw recording classes, and music business classes and everything. And I thought, ok, this is how I can sell my parents on my moving to Nashville.
C: Did you pick up the formal training at Belmont as far as string arrangements or did you pick that up on your own?
J: Well, I did that when I was real young. Probably the best thing I did was study theory when I was real young. I got to where all that was pretty instinctive and I understood it all on a very basic level. Then I could just listen to music and come up with my own ideas, and use the theory to write it down.
C: How would you evaluate the time you've spent in Nashville? Has it been a positive experience?
F: There was a point about three years ago when we were kind of getting discouraged. We had made our big splash in Nashville. We had done development deals with companies, and at that point, to be on an independent label you had to be sort of underground. They didn't have independent labels for acts like us, and so we were sort of this in between thing, where we weren't really pop, and the adult alternative format hadn't really caught on yet.
There wasn't really a place for us. We had industry people and record people come to see us play and they liked us and liked our music and thought we were talented but didn't know how to market us. They didn't know where we would fit in. We had been through this over and over. We just didn't know where to go or what to do. So we thought, let's move to New York and get a following in New York like we had done in Nashville.
There was an attitude, I think it's changing, but there was an attitude in the industry from LA and New York that, well the people in Nashville like 'em, but that's just Nashville. We thought of moving to New York really seriously, and we would have if we'd had enough money. We had a publishing deal. We were signed to EMI Publishing in 1991, shortly after the Extravaganza, but it was set up on albums.
J: We weren't on the draw.
F: So we couldn't get any more money from EMI until we signed the record deal, and it had been a couple of years and we still hadn't signed the record deal because the SBK developmental deal fell through.
We were in a rut and John was finally getting work as a session player, where we didn't have to work in a restaurant. We knew that in New York, we'd have to start all over again and John wasn't guaranteed any session work in New York. So we came to EMI and said, "We really want to move to New York. We feel like we can really do something here, but we need money. We need help," and they wouldn't help us.
C: Do you think the rock scene in Nashville is improving; is there some momentum here?
J: Every time there's momentum, something starts to get going and levels off. There have been several bands in the last few years that put out records. Some of them are still playing and some of them aren't.
F: I think it is better now because all the bands have learned what took us so long to learn, which is that you do your music, you put it out, however you have to put it out-- whether you have to put it out on a label or put it out yourself, then go play out.
C: Can you identify a style or sound that is from Nashville, like the Seattle sound?
F: The only thing the bands have in common, and this is another thing getting back to why we stayed in Nashville, I think it's very song-writer oriented. I think the bands here and people really know the value of songs and try to write songs. In Austin, there's an "Austin" sound. If there has to be a Nashville sound, I don't think we have it.
J: I don't think anybody does. Back then, there was a definite cow punk, rock-a-billy type thing going. It was very identifiable. The bands were all cueing off one another. There could be four bands all playing in one night, and together it would make sense as a bill, but now it's not like that.
F: I think there are a lot of good musicians here. I think that a lot of people that kind of grew up around here, grew up around musicians, studios, and instruments. I know the guys in Walk the West, and they, probably more than any other band, have sort of a Nashville sound.
J: Yeah, Jason and the Scorchers and Walk the West have a lot in common.
C: People say that until a band really breaks big nationally from Nashville, the scene here is not going to get better; it's not going to get any easier for bands to get signed. Some people think that you guys might be the ones to do it.
F: I'd love it. That would be great if we could help out in some way. I don't know. I think it's hard for people to take. I think the country music thing overshadows every thing else in Nashville, and it's really hard for the industry to take Nashville seriously as a pop music or alternative music scene.
J: I don't think they're going to see it as a scene so much as they're going to acknowledge that there's some good people here. I think there will be more of that. In Seattle, I think there's more of a movement. There's not a movement in Nashville except just to make music and do well. There's not a genre out here.
C: The album was done before REX, right?
J: We did most of it before we signed with REX. It was about 80 percent done and they knew we were working on an album already. We were thinking about going with RCA, and REX said if we ever get tired of dealing with RCA, to give them a call. I said, alright - and a half hour later we had a contract.
F: RCA was serious and they were signing bands who had proven themselves and we hadn't proven ourselves yet.
J: They were signing the Dave Matthews Band, and he had sold like a 150,000 records on his own.
F: We were at the point where we were excited about the stuff we had put on tape, and were really anxious to make a record. And REX came along and said, ok we're going to hire college promoters. And they believed in us so much. They were small and they had this good distribution deal.
J: And it was a one album deal.
F: I don't know if we could have gotten that from anybody else. I don't think that they would have done it. So it kind of felt like this is what we have to do to get something out there and to be able to tour. To be able to move on to the next level, we had to get a record out somehow.
J: And they were able to do enough with it that we got some things going in Atlanta and Virginia Beach and a few big southeast places.
F: They had no money to promote the record but they did it anyway. They got us on some radio stations.
J: We got enough going to attract the attention of the Universal people.
C: What happened towards the end? Did it sort of fizzle out with them?
J: They believed that it was only a matter of time before someone would approach them and want to buy the record out. They were prepared for that.
F: But they actually felt that they could be the ones to break us. And it was almost sad when some other people were coming with offers because they had known that they would have to let us go on with other people. But they were really disappointed because they wanted to be the ones to break us, and they were so close. They could have done it if they'd had more money.
Some people from Atlanta that work with Uni Distribution, they had been to our shows in Atlanta, and we were getting some air play in Atlanta. They told the marketing guy [at Universal], "You really need to check out this band, Fleming & John."
So they finally got hold of our manager, and we sent them the cd and they called back and said "We love it. We love the cd." Then Doug Morris and his partner, Melba Winter, came down and we had a big meeting at REX, with the REX people and the Rising Tide (now renamed Universal) people.
J: Doug's first words were, "I think you've got a hit record and I want it. What do I have to do to get it?"
F: That impressed us right off the bat. We thought, this is the first time anyone has ever come in and had the guts to say something like that. For years and years and years people just ran us through the mill.
J: People would say, "Well I like it but I don't know if anybody else will."
F: "You all have really great ideas, but then you have to do something to make it weird. Why don't you just keep it simple and normal?"
After getting all this input from record people it was telling us that, if we don't sell the kind of records that they want us to, then all of a sudden they could be telling us how to write songs. At least right now, coming into the company, it just seems like they appreciate what we do and they see us as career type artists.
Right now we're just really happy at Universal, with the staff they have. They're really music appreciators. And they're keeping costs low. They'll spend half of what people normally spend for a video.
C: Is that getting you some airplay?
J: It's not been released yet. They figure to submit it to MTV soon. There's like a timing thing. We're doing the Conan O'Brien show on April 2 and that's going to be a big thing for us.
C: Let's talk about the music. When you sit down to write, do you write from bursts of inspiration, or do you, like some songwriters in Nashville do, slug it out and say "I'm clocking in and I'm going to write songs today?"
F: No, I could do that. I don't want to just throw something out, but I wish I had the discipline to sit down and say "What are my ideas today and get 'em out on paper. We kind of write slowly because I write the lyrics and the melody, or get the melody ideas together. I might not have the whole melody to the song. I might just have a chorus and an idea for the lyrics and then come to John and sing it to him and say, "I think it should be like this." Then we kind of work together. But I initiate the idea, so he has to wait on me.
J: We usually don't finish anything until we need it. We'll have little fragments of ideas for six months.
C: Do you just work off of feelings, or are there concrete things that trigger an idea for you?
J: On "A Place Called Love," I'd been working on the tuning, the intro and the riff in the middle of it, on my own. I was telling Fleming about it and she had been working on a song, ironically, in the same key, the same mode.
F: That riff just fit. It was one of those things.
C: So you basically start with a melody that you hear in your head and you give that to John and see what he comes up with, as far as the harmonic arrangements?
F: Exactly. I think that's why it works. Usually it's melody and I think John likes having a melody because it inspires the voicings that he finds, instead of a counterpart or a counter melody. It makes it easier for him. It's funny, when we travel, we don't really get a lot of time to spend alone. This is something we need to do, but with a lot of people around it's kind of hard.
You need a little privacy, and on the road you're not getting privacy. We just bought a small, inexpensive four-track to carry with us on the road, and we actually put down some ideas. But that will be great if we can get more time, cause we're really going to have to write on the road. It's difficult to do, but we're going to have to.
C: Perhaps I'm reading into it with my own impressions, but I feel that your music is very affirmative, that there's a sense of hope expressed in the lyrics; and yet, there seems to be a certain doubt that accompanies that hope.
F: I think that's very true. We enjoy life. But I think that the doubts that I do have kind of creep out into the music. "I'm Not Afraid" is probably a psychologist's dream. It was written five years ago when I was first beginning to feel that I was an adult. All of a sudden there was this world, and I was an adult living in this world and it was scary. Before John and I got married, it was actually written as a quirky kind of love song. I'm afraid of all these things but I'm not afraid of you.
C: It's an interesting idea that expresses at the same time the fear and the hope and the trust that you invest in someone.
F: That's really what life is, I think. You have hope and you have fears. You try to learn to cope with the fear.
Fleming and John's debut album, Delusions of Grandeur, was re-released nationwide on March 26.
