Why H.E.R. Is Supporting Young Talent with the Life’s Good Music Project
The R&B singer will work with participants in a virtual collaboration to create a new song that reflects diversity and positivity
For Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter H.E.R., finding the “good” in life has helped her navigate 2020 and create reflective R&B songs — some that even earned her multiple Grammy Awards.
From now until mid-November, H.E.R. will team up with LG for the Life’s Good Music Project to help raise the voices of up-and-coming talent and collaborate on a track that reflects diversity and optimism. Participants from different cultures and backgrounds around the world will have a chance to virtually work with H.E.R. and create music that reflects their unique stories. At the end of the competition, one composer and two instrumentalists will be selected, and the collaboration with H.E.R will be shared as a music video.
We caught up with H.E.R. who filled us in on why she wants to foster rising musicians, her partnership with LG and how Alicia Keys influenced her own artistic journey.
■ What drew you to the Life's Good Music Project?
Well, I love LG. It's a good opportunity for young creatives. I was once somebody who really wanted my art to be heard, so I thought this is really cool. I love writing songs and helping other people like me be creative and have an outlet to express themselves. I just love what “life’s good” is all about. It's a really positive message, and it's very inclusive.
■ On that note, what does “life’s good” or having a “good life” mean to you?
For me, especially this year with everything going on and not really having control of what happens next, you just have to say, "Life is good because I'm alive, and I could not be, because I'm healthy, and I could not be. I'm living my dream, or I'm trying to make my dreams come true," and you have to enjoy the process. You have to love pain. You have to love things that make you uncomfortable because they'll only make you grow. Everything is a lesson. To me, that's why life is good. That's why I like that phrase.
■ What are your thoughts on a brand encouraging and supporting young people and their dreams through an activity like the Life's Good Music Project?
I think it's really dope. It's a huge opportunity, and there's so many talented and creative people. It's really cool for me to even start or initiate a contest or something that just challenges people. Everybody wants to be heard. Everybody wants their art to be noticed and to be heard, so this is the perfect opportunity for that.
■ What do you want listeners to get out of the Life's Good Music Project?
I want them to hear a great song, and I want people to get a peek into the creative process. It'll be really cool for people to see where the song starts, how it ends and who gets to be a part of it. It's really a peek into the songwriting process, so that's probably the coolest thing, but other than that, the message of the song. If you listen to the lyrics that I started it off with, it's very much that positive message [that’s] uplifting, which I think everybody needs right now. I think it's going to empower people.
How did you get inspired to create the 16 bars participants have to start with?
I really listened to what [LG] wanted to achieve with this project, and I took that and decided what I wanted to achieve in doing the 16 bars — and both had to do with empowerment. It had to do with positive messaging. It had to do with including other people to be creative. In creating the 16 bars, I sat with my guitar, and I wanted to make a cool progression on the guitar that was fresh, but still very classic and almost challenging for whoever is going to come and complete it. I really love having a challenge to create something — just to start something — and now I'm really anxious to see how people are going to finish it.
■ What are your expectations for this project, and what are you most looking forward to?
I'm definitely looking forward to how this is going to unfold, what the song is going to be. Right now it's just acoustic guitar and some words, so I'm really excited to see how creative people get with it and who [the participants] will be. I know a lot of people will probably be inspired to write something great. That's kind of what I'm most looking forward to. I'm really anxious to see [what direction] they are going to take the song [in] because whenever you start something as a creative person, you're always like, "Oh, we could go this way, we could go this way, or we have to go this way,” or, “This has to be this. This is the vibe for it, or this is the track for it. These are the harmonies." I'm really anxious to see the thought process of the person that's going to continue it.
■ At the heart of this project is diverse storytelling. What makes a great song from a storytelling perspective?
What makes a great song is truth: It's really pulling from the inside and understanding what feels good to you and committing to that. What makes a great song is lyrics that people remember — connect to — lyrics that you can either learn from or that make you want to dance, that make you want to fall in love, that make you sad and make you want to cry. Those are all things that are in a good song. A great, well-written song has things that may make you want to change, that gives you perspective. Music is healing, so it may make you feel better. It may make you feel hopeful. It's just gotta make you feel something. That, to me, is a great song.
■ Why is it important for you to give opportunity to new talent?
It's what helped me get to the position I'm in, looking up to people like Prince and Alicia Keys — and having met Alicia Keys when I was really young. I performed actually at the ASCAP awards for songwriters and producers, it was a tribute to her. She paved the way for me. There's a responsibility to create the new leaders of change after you've done it yourself. Especially me being a musician, there weren't that many Black female musicians. When I was young, there were Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys [and] India Arie. Those are the three that I really looked up to, and Alicia gave me that room to be myself. She helped me be competent in being a musician, like, "Oh, I can do that. I can pick up a guitar, or I can rap, or I can write songs." I love to be a small part in somebody's musical journey or a journey we don't even know yet. One of these people who finish the song could be the next Quincy Jones or the next Lenny Kravitz, or who knows, Amy Winehouse. It could be anybody.
■ For more information, visit @lg_global on Instagram or the LG Global official YouTube channel.
time each afternoon. “He wasn’t open about what was going on inside his private world,” Tench says. “He’d come to the studio and have these remarkable songs.”
As newly hired drummer Steve Ferrone learned, Petty was in search of a creative redo. “Occasionally, there was a song we’d play and I’d say, ‘This sounds more like the Tom Petty I know,’ ” says Ferrone. “We’d do a few takes and then Tom would say, ‘Nah, we’ve been here before.’ And he would walk away from the song.” Home from college during a Thanksgiving break, Petty’s daughter Adria watched her father and Rubin work on string arrangements. “He really had a fun time doing it,” Adria recalls. “You’d never have known what he was going through.”
Many around Petty were taken aback when he agreed with the label’s suggestion to trim back Wildflowers. “We thought the quality was there, so I was let down and confused,” says Tench. Campbell insists that Petty wasn’t pressured: “It wasn’t shoved down our throats,” he says. “We were being cooperative and maybe deferring a bit to what they thought would work in the marketplace. But Tom was going to do what he wanted to do.” Rubin was “shocked,” in his words, but now wonders if the move was connected to Petty’s concern for his fans: “If part of the pitch was double albums are twice as expensive for the fans to buy, I could see Tom not wanting his music priced beyond his audience.”
Petty moved on to further albums and tours, but Wildflowers stayed with him. When he and engineer Ryan Ulyate began revisiting the shelved half, Petty realized he’d forgotten about songs like “Somewhere Under Heaven,” a psychedelic Wall of Sound creation. “I’m listening to it and thinking, ‘This is cool — I wonder who it is?’ ” he told Rolling Stone. “And suddenly my voice came on and I was just stunned. I had no memory of this song.”
In his later years, Petty began plotting a tour in which he and the Heartbreakers would play all the Wildflowers songs — a classic-rocker gimmick he had long avoided. A week before he died, he told Ferrone that he wanted guest singers to join them, mentioning Stevie Nicks, Eddie Vedder, and Steve Winwood. “Oh, God, he was so excited to do a tour behind it with all of his favorite musician friends,” says Dana. “He wanted to make it something special. He talked about it nonstop.”
Aweek after his last Heartbreakers show, those dreams faded when Petty collapsed at his L.A. home and was rushed to a hospital, where he died the next day. He had just returned from a tour where he was often in such pain, due to knee and hip issues, that Ferrone had to walk him up the stairs to the stage. “I did not want him to go,” Dana says of that last tour. “He wouldn’t hear it. He really thought it was going to be OK: ‘I’ve had a broken hip for two years. What’s the worst that could happen?’ It definitely wasn’t the healthiest move. Not worth it.”
With Dana as the designated trustee of her late husband’s estate, plans for posthumous projects began, starting with a box set and hits package in 2018. Court documents indicate that Warner Bros. put up $900,000 for the expanded Wildflowers, which was penciled in for 2019, the album’s 25th anniversary. But those plans ground to a halt that spring. Accusing Dana of “gross mismanagement” of the estate, Petty’s daughters from his first marriage, Adria and Annakim Violette, sued her for $5 million, contending that she had excluded them from the estate’s finances. In subsequent court filings, Dana called Adria “erratic” and “abusive,” and claimed she wanted to put her father’s name on products like salad dressing.
Adria says the Wildflowers plans were part of what troubled her. “They were going to just slap out All the Rest with the same cover from Wildflowers, like, ‘Here you go,’ ” she says. “I just felt like they weren’t going to do the due diligence.” She blames unnamed “70-year-old white men,” coming from “a very misogynistic place,” for ignoring her and her sister’s wishes. “They can put whatever they want in those filings,” she says. “It’s a bunch of bullshit. They used that to try to pressure us to make financial and creative-control concessions we were really uncomfortable with.”
Dana admits that her late husband’s legal affairs were not necessarily airtight. “Tom’s will wasn’t written very well, to be honest,” she says. “It was very confusing, and it got ugly. When lawyers get involved, they like to sling dirt. And regrettably, lawyers got involved.”
From the sidelines, the Heartbreakers — Campbell, Ferrone, Tench, bassist Ron Blair, and multi-instrumentalist Scott Thurston — could do little but watch the fight play out. “It was sad that it was not harmonious at times,” says Campbell. “Everybody was stressed and grieving.” Adds Tench, “I didn’t want anybody mad at each other or feeling abused on either side. Tom would have been furious because he never let his personal life get into the press.” (Adria clarifies that the Heartbreakers were not her targets: “They are my family, like my uncles. There’s no disrespect for them.”)
In December 2019, the two sides reached an agreement to table their legal disputes; new manager Will Botwin was hired to oversee the estate. Work on Wildflowers & All the Rest resumed, using a full disc’s worth of home recordings that the Pettys and Ulyate had found after searching “the home studio and all of our closets and cupboards,” says Dana. In addition to unplugged versions of Wildflowers songs, they also discovered completely unknown tunes like the gentle, harmonica-laced “There Goes Angela (Dream Away).” “I was baffled,” Tench says. “Why hadn’t I heard this before?”
Regarding the release of those private recordings, Campbell says he used a simple formula: “My approach was to just pretend I was Tom: ‘This is good’ or ‘No, please, don’t let the world ever see that song!’ I had a pretty good sense of that. I hope we did it right.”
Listening back to those tapes proved surprisingly healing, for both the family and the band members. “It keeps me in the band — I really don’t like not being in the band,” says Tench. “It was very disorienting for [the Heartbreakers] to just vanish into thin air. It’s been hard to find my way. But things like this box set have been helpful. It makes me happy to hear it.”
With the first part of Petty’s dream project finally done, attention may eventually turn to the Wildflowers concerts he envisioned. At this point, though, nothing has been nailed down. Campbell and Ferrone both say they are open to preserving Petty’s idea of an all-star tour, but in a sign of how raw emotions remain, Tench has a few reservations about the plan. “Do I want the band to back up somebody else?” he says. “It would just be too weird. And as far as playing the record with different singers, I don’t know. Why? It could be fantastic, and my mind is always open to anything. But right now, I’m not over this.”
For now, Petty’s survivors are relieved that the legal turmoil of the past two years appears to be behind them. “It was really embarrassing and a weird and horrible thing to go through after you lost your dad,” says Adria. “But if we had to fight to say we really care about this and that it wasn’t about money — and about being able to make sure [the projects were] at a level he would have appreciated — it was worth it in that regard.” Adds her stepmother Dana, “Hopefully, we can move forward. We did on this record.” ■