Rock Mafia was formed in the early 2000s and is now one of the most influential record production and songwriting teams. How did you meet one another and decide to "conquer" the music industry together?
Tim James: Antonina and I met when I was an artist on Columbia Records. She was on a short list of top songwriters at the time, and she was about to have a huge hit with Mariah Carey, and when we met we immediately became best friends and just started writing songs, because we loved to do it. We started having immediate success with Hoku and a few other artists, and eventually after becoming best friends, decided we should be a team. Then at the same time we fell in love.
Antonina Armato: Tim was signed to Columbia Records and I was the new hit songwriter on the block and his then manager Larry Tolan put us together, and we had instant chemistry. I always wanted to do things on my own, but I was better with Tim. We became best friends for two years and then he started falling in love with me. Eventually I reciprocated, and we decided to form Rock Mafia to kind of show the world that you can conquer the music business on your own, and we had a really really good run. Now, I think the next ten years are going to be our biggest and best ever.
Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, Mariah Carey, Green Day, Justin Bieber… The list of the artists that you have been working with is really long - you are like a factory of hits! I guess that you have a lot of great memories from all these years in the music industry. Do you have your favorite one? Can you tell me one of them?
T.J.: It’s funny because when hear the word ‘factory’ about Rock Mafia, it makes me laugh. We’re probably the opposite in the sense that everything we do is couture for the artists we collab with. We don’t really approach artists as us telling them what to do more than we ask “What do you want to do, and how can we do it in the biggest and best way?” So, while it may seem normal to say ‘factory’, it really is more of the opposite.
My favorite memories? There are probably too many to mention, but every time one of those memories come into my mind, it’s always about some sense or feeling of destiny. The moment we met Miley, and our instant connection. The moment Selena took on “Love You Like a Love Song” and made it come to life. They’re all these moments that feel like “Oh man, this is going to make history, this is going to be amazing,” and it’s pretty amazing to watch it come to life after you make it. I have no favorite memories, they are all incredible. I do remember feeling a sense of destiny in a lot of those moments.
A. A.: Wow. There are too many memories to even come close to picking one or two, but the couple that stand out in my head was when we first recorded “The Big Bang” and we knew we had something really special. Tim’s voice sounded exquisite and everybody wanted to cut the song, and we made the decision to go on our own and just release it just as a Rock Mafia song, knowing we had no help from a major label or anything. So, that was exciting and for 9 months basically it felt like I was pregnant with this song.
We set it up. We produced our own video. You know, Miley was in love with the song so she decided she wanted to be in the video and the E! channel got involved, everybody started getting sticky with our record and everybody wanted to be supportive of it. So it was super exciting and so when we released it, it exceeded our expectations. We thought we would sell maybe ten thousand copies and we ended up selling way over a million. Howard Stern talked about it, and it was a huge, huge, huge moment for us and it was playing on the radio and where it played, it went number one.
So that was super exciting, and then the other one I can think of off the top of my head is when we were working on “The Heart Wants What It Wants” and we helped Selena with her video, which I think is one of my favorite videos that we’ve ever been a part of. Her performing it on the American Music Awards, and we helped her that whole week to get her performance just right. Tim was in the sound truck when she was dialing her voice in to make sure, you know, it sounded cool with the EQs and stuff and I was waiting in the green room watching it on the monitor, and it was the best performance up to that point of her life. We drove that night to Vegas as the song went to number 1 on iTunes and that was, you know, well it doesn’t get better than that. You arrive in Vegas, you have a number 1 song, and Frank Sinatra is singing “I’ve Got the World on a String.” So, I don’t know, I think those are two pretty special diamond moments.
Antonina Armato with Miley Cyrus
You are the co-writers of such songs as "Love You Like a Love Song" and "Kill Em With Kindness" by Selena Gomez and "See You Again" and "Can't Be Tamed" by Miley Cyrus. These are only the examples. What is your recipe for the music charts hit? What does your typical day at work in the studio look like?
T.J.: The idea of making the best music possible has always been the core of what we do. The other side of it is ‘What is the artists vision? What do they want to say? How do they want to communicate it?’ and that comes from the artists we work with. I always say we’re only as good as the artist we’re with so to that testament, all those records you mentioned and the other hits we’ve had really comes down to an incredible collaboration between us and the artist.
When you dedicate your life to making music, a typical day is like a living meditation where you’re looking to connect with inspiration. The idea that inspiration can flow through anybody at anytime is always happening and it’s just about being open enough to receiving it. So, everyday we’re searching and experimenting and playing with ideas and trying to find things that can connect on a global level. That’s really what most of our time is spent on. The other time is messing with the boring parts of the business, or you know, email, but most of our time is dedicated to being creative and surrendering to inspiration.
A. A.: We don’t have a recipe. We probably would be a lot more successful if we had an actual formula or recipe. Our main ingredient is that we love it more than anyone else, so we ended up falling in love with the artists that we work with, and we really care about them and we listen to them. We try to put our ego aside and try to create the best music possible.
A typical day in the studio is different every time. It is filled with music in every room in our like 8 room studio. People are just bouncing off each other. We’re usually held up in the back, in the A studio. We write two or three songs at different times, but it’s always kinetic and exciting and frantic and exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. We work 6 days a week. I wouldn’t call it work, we love it 6 days a week, and usually get in around 12 and come home around 12, but exhausted with happiness.
Talking about the former Disney stars like Selena, Miley and Demi - you have been watching them grow up and develop musically. Do you feel the difference between working with them when they were teenagers and working with them now?
T. J.: Absolutely, and let me just say I am so proud of all of them in their own way. They have all kind of done their own thing, and in their own way continue to define who they are as musicians. I think, why we’ve been able to work with those artists for such a long time is we have always taken them for who they are in the moment.
Tim James
Tim, you had the opportunity to show your great musical skills in a song called "The Big Bang" released in October 2010. Have you ever been thinking about making your own career in music and recording your own album?
T.J.: It’s amazing to see “The Big Bang” become such a pivotal moment for music and the fact that it sold a million records worldwide is so humbling, but I think at the end of the day, being an artist is such a calling and such a dedication and to me, I just want to dedicate my life to making music. I love singing, I’m always going to sing, I’m always going to make music, but the idea of turning it into somewhat of a product is kind of hard for me to swallow. I would much rather help artist who really feel a need and a desire to connect with audiences, thats kind of my calling, and I kind of realized that when “The Big Bang” started becoming successful, because the record deals came in, the offers to do tours came in and all that stuff, and I found myself just wanting to stay in the studio and being pure to myself/ourselves, being true to myself/ourselves. I think thats kind of where I feel comfortable.
I still sing, I sing on “True Colors” with Zedd when we collaborated. I just did another one with Zedd as well, I lend my vocals to different DJs and different things and I am happy to do that, so I still get to do what I really love to do, but I’m not one who craves attention or celebrity.
Antonina, one of the first song written by you was "I Still Believe" for Brenda K. Starr in 1987 when you were just sixteen years' old. It became a hit and it was covered by Mariah Carey. How do you remember this first success in music?
A.A.: I knew nothing about the music business, I just knew I had songs in my head, so at 16. when I had written a hit, I had no idea what it was. I learned a lot by just calling people literally from the directory of the music business, because there was no internet back then. I would just meet with people and they would help me learn more, so you know, it was exciting – you went from completely not knowing anything to hearing your song on the radio. Then when Mariah cut it again, I was in my 20s then, a little bit older and wiser, but it was the most exciting moment for me at the time, because it went from being just a song, and Mariah was the biggest artist in the world at the time, to being not only just a song on her album, but being the first single off of it and going number 1.
That song was super special to me, because when I wrote it at 16, it was about a heartbreak and my first love so it still is a really important song to me.
Antonina Armato
You are still very active and a lot of young musicians are starting working with you. Could you reveal to me who will be the next star from your "factory of hits"? Do you have some predictions about the future of Rock Mafia?
We feel like Rock Mafia is going to have the biggest decade of our lives now, coming from 2017 to beyond. I predict that Bahari, who we are just about to release their main single, is going to be epic. They are three girls who are really different. They all play instruments and they sing harmonies like they’re sisters. They are 18 and really spectacular. We are developing lots of artists at our label and studio, but most importantly we are all family, we all love each other, we all care about it each other and were all protecting each other in a business that can be pretty cold. We are a force, and focused on making the best music in the world.
Antonina Armato and Tim James
If you want to learn more about Rock Mafia and their projects, please visit their official website:
http://rockmafia.com/
https://www.facebook.com/RockMafiaForever/
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