When Big Machine Music General Manager Mike Molinar met Laura Veltz, he saw what he looks for in promising songwriters: humanity.
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Veltz describes Molinar as her “treasured” publisher at Big Machine Music. Molinar has been working with Veltz since she became a paid songwriter around 2012. “It really began with us over a conversation,” Veltz recalls in the latest episode of the Songwriter Soup podcast presented by American Songwriter, hosted by Veltz and financial advisor Tracy Hackney and produced by Kevin Sokolnicki.
Veltz and Molinar met over dinner, inching “closer and closer” to each other at the table until finally they were side-by-side, finding themselves in a very “impassioned” conversation, Veltz describes. The next morning, the two met for coffee, which soon led to Veltz signing a publishing deal with Big Machine Music.
“One of the odd things when you’re sitting with a songwriter is you’re not just listening to their songs, you’re listening to their history,” Molinar explains about the night he met Veltz.
He adds that as a publisher, he also looks for writers who’ve built a “musical vocabulary” and performance experience. “In their actual speech, if you can hear the rhythm of the words in their emotions, you can hear a certain level of empathy or humanity that you think is going to plug into songs,” he continues. “I don’t know that I was consciously thinking that or breaking that down in the moment with Laura, but it was certainly like, ‘You are checking a lot of boxes right now.'”
Their instincts about one another paid off. In her more than 10-year tenure with Big Machine Music, Veltz has written such hits as “What If I Never Get Over You” by Lady A, Maren Morris’ CMA and ACM Award-winning single “The Bones,” Chris Young’s “Lonely Eyes” and many more.
“Songwriters are very wired to be like, ‘What feels good?’ and that very simply was a feel-good moment for me,” Veltz praises of Molinar. “I’m like, ‘This person feels like my people.’ I think your empathy about how to handle creatives was subliminally evident to me.”
Songwriter Soup airs on Monday and can be found on streaming platforms.
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
