Bets pay off for Big Yellow Dog
Nashville music publisher celebrates 20th year.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Before he was a celebrated songwriter with a trophy case full of Grammy Awards and No. 1 singles, Josh Kear was lost in his musical career.
In a span of six years, Kear whiplashed from promising up-and-comer signed to BMG to wayward veteran without a publishing company to call home. As he took meetings with potential new publishers, Music Row executives told Kear that the songs he was writing at the time were too far outside the box for them to pitch to record labels craving radio-friendly hits.
It seems impossible to fathom now that Kear has 14 No. 1 singles and four Grammy Awards under his belt, but 15 years ago he was regarded as a creative genius whose music just didn’t fit into Nashville’s country music machine.
“My musical choices were really eclectic at the time,” Kear said. “There was some country, but I was writing some really dark folk music, some rock stuff. I was experimenting with the artist side of myself, not so much because I wanted to get a record deal, but I wasn’t getting many songs recorded. I wondered if the only way I was going to get these songs into the world was by singing them myself.”
And then in the spring of 2003, Kear took a meeting with Kerry O’Neil and Carla Wallace, the co-founders of the scrappy independent publishing company Big Yellow Dog Music. Instead of shirking at Kear’s catalog of songs that spanned country, rock and folk, Wallace embraced him. She offered him a publishing deal for the simple reason that she loved his musical talent – his songs, his guitar playing, his singing voice.
“Within an hour of taking the meeting, I knew I was home,” Kear said. “They got it. I said, ‘I do other things, too. I also do commercial things.’ They said, ‘Yeah, great. Bring that stuff in too.’ ”
To state the obvious, Big Yellow Dog’s bet on Kear paid off. Kear refocused his songwriting on mainstream country music. He landed his breakthrough with Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” and today Kear is regarded as a shining Music Row success story.
Big Yellow Dog, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in August, has achieved titanic success on Music Row. The company is home to stars including Maren Morris and Meghan Trainor. Big Yellow Dog was well ahead of the Nashville trend of investing in non-country songwriters.
As Big Yellow Dog begins its third decade of operation, the company is reaching new heights, having been named Billboard’s No. 9 publisher for the second quarter of 2018. That’s a remarkable accomplishment for a relatively small, independent company home to 11 employees and 17 songwriters.
Unlikely partners
O’Neil and Wallace took unlikely paths to becoming partners in founding Big Yellow Dog.
O’Neil is a serial entrepreneur. Before he co-founded Big Yellow Dog, O’Neil started a wealth management company, managed the careers of pop producer Barry Beckett and country artist John Anderson, and launched another successful publishing company.
Arriving in Nashville in 1980, O’Neil’s first love was songwriting, a profession he pursued early in his career. But he also had a business degree from George Washington and a master’s degree from Babson College.
“I came to Nashville, and during the day I built a practice that does all the behind-the-scenes business for artists that’s called O’Neil Hagaman,” O’Neil said. “At night I was doing the songwriter thing. Then I started finding out I was an OK writer, but I was not a great writer.”
So when the songwriting thing didn’t pan out, O’Neil shifted his focus to the business side and opened his own publishing company, which found success.
Just weeks before selling that publishing company to Sony, O’Neil hired Wallace, who was an energetic and ambitious young executive.
“Carla was 28, and I was amazed at the breadth of her musical taste. I didn’t know what we were going to do, but I knew we were going to do it differently than (the previous publishing venture),” O’Neil said.
The foundation for Big Yellow Dog, O’Neil said, was Wallace’s ear for talent. Instead of just signing songwriters, Wallace, a Nashville native, was interested in talent who also could pursue careers as artists. There are no genre boundaries to her taste, which spans country, pop, alternative and other corners of the music industry.
Early advice
And so, the unlikely duo of O’Neil, who had conquered Nashville’s music startup scene before, and Wallace, a spitfire of an executive who unabashedly stands up and dances around her office when a songwriter brings her music that moves her, decided to create their own company.
While they were conceptualizing the company, O’Neil said he was advised by Donna Hilley, the legendary Music Row publishing executive, not to launch Big Yellow Dog.
“She suggested I don’t do this venture,” O’Neil said. “She said, ‘You can take 18 months, but most people don’t do it well and are not successful the second time around because they’re not really as hungry.’ ”
O’Neil said Wallace was the change agent. “Everything I’ve been involved with, it’s always with partners who do well,” O’Neil said. “She was on the front lines handling this every day. It was always her decision. From the very beginning, finding the artists she wanted to do business with created a culture where it wasn’t a business first. It was a creative-oriented culture.”
Wallace grew up in a musical household, which cultivated her decision to pursue a career in the industry. She got into the music business program at Belmont University and interned at several companies, which led to her career in publishing. Wallace said there was no grand design for Big Yellow Dog to become a go-to publishing house for music outside the mainstream. When Trainor achieved towering global success with the pop song “All About that Bass,” it established Big Yellow Dog as a company that could do more than pair country artists with hit songs.
“All we’ve ever done is follow our gut instinct,” Wallace said. “If it happened to be pop or super indie music and didn’t have necessarily a lane, as long as it was great, ... that’s what we’ve worked on.”