We love independent artists and we love to feature them here on TheCraftyMusician.com! Today we’re featuring Todd and Jingyu, a boy/girl singer-songwriting team based in Detroit, USA and their music has reached worldwide status without ever leaving their home base.
Todd Lerner has worked for Rolling Stone and Spin magazines, and his previous album of songs was played worldwide and positively reviewed. Jingyu Yao is from China and together they have worked for 10 years on their album, “Find Me, Find You: A Story.”
Here are a few notable press quotes they’ve received:
“Knocked me sideways when I heard it… there’s such a captivating charm about the music.” – Sonic Breakfast
“Thoughtful and tuneful… commendable clarity… elegant piano-driven arrangements… a jewel.” – Jersey Beat
“Unshowy singing and playing reveal the essence of the beautiful melodies & harmonies.”
– Entertainment News, China
I had a chance to catch up with Todd and Jingyu for this interview and I’m excited to share Todd and Jingyu’s story with you.
Describe your music and tell us where you are currently based.
We are in Farmington Hills, Michigan, which is near Detroit. Our music is an album of original boy/girl pop-rock duets. Jingyu is Chinese, Todd is American — and this is our first and probably our last album.
What inspired you to pursue music together?
What’s unique about your music?
The songs on our album “Find Me Find You: A Story” tell a full narrative if you listen in order. The album parallels our own story, from love-wreck and breakdown, to rebooting and searching, to meeting and falling in love.
How did you establish a following in China?
In “real life” I have a small advertising creative shop, so I worked for about a year preparing all the album marketing materials… and Jingyu handled all the marketing in China. She’s from China, but she’s an eye surgeon doing research in America so she knew nothing about the music industry and she had to learn a lot…
She took all the materials I had created and “selectively translated” them into Mandarin. She made adjustments for the culture difference, and she did amazing for us in China! She went full-force with promoting the album’s love story, something that was harder for me to do. We’ve been real successful over there, with lots of press in the biggest publications… interviews for big podcasts… many thousands of listeners on all the music streaming platforms. Jingyu is amazing 🙂
What kinds of venues did you perform at in China?
Not only did we not perform in China, we’ve never performed anywhere. And that fact makes it hard to market ourselves for sure. I guess we’re a unique case. Jingyu could perform (she danced semi-professionally in China), but I’m more of a studio musician/writer/producer kind of person. And we both don’t think we like the idea of a traveling and performing lifestyle – although certain aspects of it do seem like they would be very cool. We like our lives the way it is, enjoying our nice quiet home life.
The International Pop Overthrow music festival invited us to play in their Detroit festival this year (they heard our music somehow and liked it) and we had to turn them down. But we were very flattered! One thing: we’re going to start playing and singing together more in our living room, just for the joy of it. And who knows, that might someday lead us to playing out somewhere. 🙂
Are you and Jingyu doing music full-time?
We both never did music full-time. Which is one reason the album took over 10 years to write and record. I had decided long ago not to make money in music and to keep it as “my art” where I didn’t have to answer to anyone or to any audience. That, actually, gave us a certain freedom… which helped us to create something unlike most of what’s out there.
Since our approach was so different, we wrote a one-page declaration called A Song Is Not Over-Polished.
A couple of excerpts from the declaration:
“Singing is not… faked expressiveness… there is no inclination toward flashy posturing.”
“Van Gogh didn’t aim to win trendy favor.… he unleashed a raw, original vision.”
What’s your ultimate goal with music and life in general?
For music, I think we might have already reached our ultimate goal: To do a meaningful album of songs, and to write and record the songs as well as we possibly could. We wanted every word and every note to be as good as we could get it.
The one thing I regret is that I don’t love my voice. I’m not and I never wished to be a singer. I wanted to hire a more refined vocalist to do my parts, but Jingyu said “I like your voice, Todd, and this is our album – it’s us.” So if anyone doesn’t love my voice, they can feel free to blame Jingyu. 🙂
Our ultimate goal with life in general? That’s really a great question, Anitra. And it’s a question I think everyone should ask themselves. We talk about these kinds of things frequently…
After working hard to reach our music goal, we want to relax a bit and enjoy life and each other as much as we can. At the risk of your audience throwing up: we love each other’s company, we like to take walks, talk about philosophy, make nice meals together, travel (including lots of visits to crazy-beautiful China)… and probably, we’ll make some music together for ourselves, without promoting it.
What advice would you give to other independent musicians looking to earn a living with music?
I’d love to have some solid advice to give, but it seems challenging to earn a living making music. Though I believe that if it’s truly your calling, it’s certainly worthwhile… and doable! We had our own very-unique idea about our album, which didn’t involve making money, but there are endless roads one can take, and many ways in which a musician can earn money.
One marketing thought, which worked for us (in the west and also in China), is to prepare lots of different social media content… maybe short series… and you can use them to do social media posts. Here are links to 3 “content marketing” series ideas we came up with (and Jingyu translated them into Mandarin and used them in China) – we have these series on our website and we posted from them to social media with links leading back to the website here, here, and here.
We also did advertising on Facebook/Instagram, where we created lots of different angles and tested them to different audiences – we rolled out with the ads and audiences that worked best. And we worked hard to make a great and functional website, which serves as grand central for all our marketing efforts. But since our goal was never to earn a living with music, I’ll have to leave that to the experts like you Anitra! We love your blog, you have so many good ideas to help musicians on that front!
Check out Todd and Jingyu’s website here.
TheCraftyMusician.com is looking for independent artists to feature. If you’re interested in being featured on TheCraftyMusician.com, please fill out this questionnaire.
