Interview: Sarah Sharp

23rd November 2013

Following her very popular blog entry on hypebot.com on licensing tips , I recently spoke with Sarah Sharp one part of songwriting duo Kaliyn, whose work has appeared in a number of films and advertisement campaigns for major companies such as Chanel.

How and why was Kaliyo formed? –

Andrea Perry and I first wrote and recorded a song together for an indie film “When Harry Tries To Marry”. We teamed up again to write some songs for FirstCom, which is a production music library under Universal Music Publishing. At first we did 5 songs in 5 weeks for them, just giving FirstCom what they had asked for, which was easily licensable music, nothing too serious or complicated, just like the song we had done for the Harry movie. The result was something we ended up both liking a lot, so we kept writing a song per week. We ended up selling about 30 songs to FirstCom. Early in the process we decided we were an actual band and Andrea chose the name Kaliyo (Kah- LEE-yo), which means fortunate.

How difficult did you find it to get your music noticed at first? –

We both had some song placements with our solo material in film/TV. The Kaliyo placements took on a life of their own, because our songs kept getting randomly chosen from the FirstCom library. When Chanel used our song for their 2012 Spring Summer Campaign, we started to get a lot of fashion placements. It was really random. We had one music supervisor in Poland use several songs on every show she worked on and we had a Dell mobile phone commercial in China. I was super excited to have a song on the promo for the TV show Smash in Finland.

What was the first major project you got brought in on?

After composing for FirstCom, we were approached by Macy’s to write a song for a video they created for their annual company meeting. Unfortunately they don’t make the video public. But you can hear the song here. It aired for all of their employees at Radio City Music Hall and at satellite theaters throughout the country. This was a really fun assignment, because we not only had to write a song that covered certain lyrical themes, but we had to time when the lyrics hit around the script. As a music supervisor, I have woven a song into a scene, but that was my first time to write a song so precisely around a locked scene.

Did you find the work snowballed from there?

There is definitely a snowball effect. It’s kind of like as soon as someone is dating you, other people want to date you, ha!
What are your hopes for future projects?

Andrea and I are about to get back into our Kaliyo routine after she just released a solo album and my other project “Jitterbug Vipers” put out an album of mostly originals inspired by 1930s-40s Viper Jazz. The Vipers are getting a lot of national press and touring, going to Europe in a few weeks. We just taped a 1 hour feature that will air nationwide on Jan 21 on NPR’s Song Travels with Michael Feinstein. I can’t wait to see what might come out of that.

Do you have any advice for people who want to get their bands music onto TV or into film?

Well, I wrote this blog recently for HypeBot with licensing tips, this is something I now send to anyone who asks my advice. It’s a good starting point.

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