Anthology

Ron Pope would never say so himself, but his extraordinary success story should give any record industry doomsayer hope. He is a hugely talented New York based singer, gifted guitarist and prolific songwriter with an incredible bluesy voice. He’s also an Internet sensation whose achievements of recent years are almost a preview of the music business of the future: viral, organic and hype-free.

Ron’s 2006 song ‘A Drop In The Ocean’ sold over a million downloads and a fan video of the track has had a staggering 17 million views on YouTube. The song also featured on The Vampire Diaries and 90201. Ron has also had repeated placements on US and Canadian TV’s ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ which sent two of his albums into the Itunes chart simultaneously.

And he’s achieved all of this as an independent artist – no mean feat. Ron is also an incredibly prolific songwriter and has released seven albums since 2008, including three in 2009 alone.

On to the new album, ‘Atlanta’. It’s full of big anthemic numbers and tender ballads just crying out for arena crowd sing alongs and lighters in the air moments. It also marks a new phase in Ron’s work. “I tried to incorporate varied sonic elements I love and turn them into one distinctive palette, to paint a picture that’s uniquely mine, then let the music speak for itself.”

The results have Americana elements, but the ingredients are as varied as his eclectic tastes. That started back when he was growing up in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, where he was exposed to a wide variety of music, from soul to roots rock, Van Halen to Michael Jackson, hip hop to gospel.

“If you listen to ‘Atlanta,’ there’s rootsy elements to it, but I love crazy sonic landscapes and interesting textures. Arcade Fire’s ‘The Suburbs’ is one of my favorite records of the last five years.”

Ron Pope’s story is an inspiration – and it’s only just begun.

Josiah Leming

You’d be hard pressed to find a kid in the world that could tell you the stories Josiah Leming could tell you. Stories of growing up in the hard-luck rural town of Morristown, Tennessee, of leaving that town at the age of 17 to pursue an unlikely music career. Stories of finding his way onto national television only to be cut down, and being lifted back up by a legion of newfound fans and eventually cutting a massive deal with Warner Brothers Records. He’ll even tell you the stories of that glory slowly turned to 3 years of more hardship, ultimately leading him back to the start, stories of lessons learned that would take even the most active of men a lifetime to amass.

Josiah Leming is a 22 year old American-born Singer/Songwriter and global recording artist. Born in the east Tennessee town of Morristown, along with 8 siblings, he discovered at the age of 10 an insatiable love for music, and devoted the majority of his pre-teen years to musical discovery and creation. In these years he taught himself to play piano, guitar and drums, and began what he would call “a love affair” with songwriting. At the age of 17, Leming dropped out of high school, sold his possessions and left his quaint hometown to pursue his higher calling of music. He played anywhere for anything, or as the case often was, nothing. Waiting tables and various odd jobs provided financial stability, while he drifted around the South, Jacksonville to St. Louis, Nashville to Fort Worth, honing his writing and experiencing youth in the purest form.

Josiah is most notably known for a brief tenure on season 7 of the television show “American Idol”, on which he made a name for himself performing original songs and accompanying himself on piano. Although he was booted from the show before the voting rounds, his raw emotion and original spin on music caught the ears of Warner Brothers Records executives, who signed him a month after the airing of the show. Josiah spent 3 tumultuous years on WBR, releasing two EPs titled “Angels Undercover EP” and “Punk Ass Rain EP” and finally in the fall of 2010 released his debut album “Come on Kid” behind a weak label promotional effort. He was dropped from the label’s roster at the end of the promotional tour for the record.

“I gave myself a couple of seconds to feel completely lost, and then I felt it all come back to me. All the answers, all the reasons, all my next moves. I knew within about 60 seconds of getting the news, I had to bring this back to where it all started,” said Josiah. In the coming weeks, he released his management, booking agent, business management, and publicist. He gathered his unrecorded songs and an arsenal of new songs and began to envision a new record, the record he always wanted to make. He called upon his favorite musicians, mostly personal friends, to be a part of the creation of a record free of corporate sway. The last piece was teaming up with producer/engineer Jesse Owen Astin, who produced the final cuts of the leading singles on “Come On Kid”, and they swiftly began laying the groundwork for the new record. After a summer of hours turned to days and weeks on end in the studio, he has now appeared with his sophomore album “Another Life”. In it’s early promotional stages, it is already gathering more attention than his previous label efforts. His fanbase is growing more rapidly than ever, his fans ever-energized by his new independent revolution. The first single off the new record, “One Last Song” – one of Josiah’s most revered tunes – wasted no time in breaking into the iTunes top 100 charts. His second single, “Too Young”, is already getting airplay in local and college markets. Josiah Leming has risen and fallen, and risen and fallen, and he is certainly rising again. He is currently in Tennessee and off the road for the release of his record, and is booking a national and international tours to begin in the spring of 2012.