More than kids’ stuff

As a songwriter, Stacy Eisley got off to a good start by being born in Texas. After all, that approach had worked well for Scott Joplin, Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, Don Henley and plenty of others. But unlike, say, Kris Kristofferson -- a Texan who was a Rhodes scholar, a military pilot and a janitor before finally getting down to writing “Me and Bobby McGee” -- Eisley is a bit short on life experience.

“I was 8 when I wrote the first one, I just picked it out on a guitar in my room,” said the native of Tyler, Texas. “I’m 14 now.” Eisley writes songs for the band that bears her last name, and the heft of its work is evident in the songwriting company it keeps: The band just finished a tour as the opening act for Coldplay, with gigs at the Hollywood Bowl and Madison Square Garden. On part of the tour, it was joined by a second opening act, Ron Sexsmith, the acclaimed veteran troubadour.

The Eisley siblings were considered cute novelties when they began their career performing in their parents’ coffeehouse in a strip mall, but now they are part of a growing group of precocious songwriters that the record industry is taking seriously.

Youth acts are hardly new to the music scene, of course. They were with us long before even Little Stevie Wonder hit the scene in the 1960s, but for years the majority who got record deals were singing material written by adults. Many were talented vocal performers, and many were examples of market-calculated packaging, but few came into the studio with dog-eared notebooks (or now, laptop computers) filled with their lyrics.

The youth surge is apparent at Warner Bros. Records, where label Chairman Tom Whalley says three-fourths of the artists signed in the last two years have been too young to vote. Warner labels signed not only Eisley but also Jonathan Rice, a Scottish teen who cites Flannery O’ Connor and Nick Drake as compass points for songs he began writing at 14, and Bonnie McKee, a fiery 18-year-old Seattle singer-songwriter with a sheaf of material she penned at 14.

Before them, Whalley was a key figure at Interscope Records during its signing of Grammy-nominated Vanessa Carlton (now 23 but 17 when she was working the New York club circuit), who surged to popularity in 2002 along with peers Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne.

Warners is handling these youngsters in a manner that suggests that they can become career artists. In other words, they are being treated like budding Joni Mitchells instead of just-add-water Britney Spears knockoffs. Their debut albums have been methodically assembled, and there has been no mad rush to get their music on the radio

“It wasn’t like we were saying let’s go find young singer-songwriters or even just young talent,” Whalley said. “This wasn’t a search for look-alikes for Avril Lavigne. These were artists, stand-alone acts. This is what we were finding, this is what was walking in the door. And we were finding it everywhere.”

It was a bit of a shock to Whalley, one of the music industry’s respected thinkers and a veteran who, in the 1970s and 1980s, saw older “youths” making music.

“Years ago, it seemed that the sort of maturation age, the age where you felt ... they should be signed and they were writing songs that meant something, was in their mid-20s,” Whalley said. “To be in your early 20s, you were young. Anything that was really young -- 13, 15, 17 -- was viewed as pop novelty acts, one-offs that came and went.” More recently, though, “These were people writing songs with lyrics that were mature at a different age than what happened in years previous. There was definitely an age drop in my mind.”

And the reason? Whalley offered a timely comparison to the sports world, in which LeBron James went from high school to NBA first-round pick and 13-year-old golfer Michelle Wie of Hawaii qualified for a men’s PGA tournament.

“She’s hitting the ball 300 yards and playing against grown men,” Whalley said. “You see parallels here. You’re seeing it in every area of youth, whether it’s education or sports or entertainment. The age level is dropping and dropping. Perhaps you could say this existed and just now media is showing it, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems there’s something more to it.”

THEY LEARN FAST

TheRE’S no question that the influx of junior songwriters speaks to the focus (and target audience) of the music industry these days. The rise of MTV and then Nickelodeon and Radio Disney as increasingly kid-specific tastemakers sharpened the industry’s attentiveness to young consumers. And the rise of froth pop in recent years (‘N Sync, the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears when she was singing “E-Mail My Heart” and “Soda Pop,” etc.) further honed those attentions-- but eventually left a void to be filled when the appetite for bubble gum waned.

Just as the young Beatles and their hits may have primed an audience for Bob Dylan and his poetry, the Backstreet Boys clearly set the stage for teen songwriter Lavigne and her 5.8 million in album sales.

But there may be broader messages in this youth trend. One view: Kids today are so technologically savvy and prematurely worldly that the songwriters among them are appearing more quickly and at a younger age -- and they have things to sing about. “Absolutely, I see that,” said Terry Dry, president of Fanscape, a company that specializes in marketing music to young audiences. “The kids are a lot more sophisticated than they used to be just a few years ago. They are a lot further along in everything they do. What used to take us days to learn, they get in seconds.”

Dry said artists are passionate fans first, and if the ranks of intense fans have gotten younger and younger, then it’s logical to see the development of artists begin earlier. Teens have computer hard drives loaded with music files, 5-year-olds have Hello Kitty CD players to play the “Spongebob Squarepants” theme. Kids in the middle -- the so-called tweeners -- have spent years watching Hilary Duff on the Disney Channel and are so financially powerful that the actress’ first album debuted last month at No. 1.

It’s not that the saturation of music and media has created new artists, but perhaps it’s accelerated their growth.

“I wrote my first song when I was 9, but I didn’t take it seriously until I was 12,” says Skye Sweetnam, another Canadian youngster. Capitol Records signed the peppy 15-year-old to a recording deal in December. She recorded her first album in a friend’s basement, a testament to the ease of music-making in a desktop computer era. “I’m so excited to have this chance so young. There’s not very many relationship songs in my music, because I haven’t been in that many relationships ... it’s all kid stuff, really.”

Stacy Eisley was born in 1988, so she can’t claim to have a long view of the maturation of artists, but she noted that many of her favorite artists began their music lives years before they began recording. “Maybe they are just getting noticed now more,” she says.

That rings true to Robin Jones, vice president of programming for Radio Disney, who sees changes in the audience but doubts there is something in the technological or societal water of the day that is producing younger songwriters.

Jones ascribes any demographic shift in the making of demo records to the music industry’s habit of pouncing on bandwagons. In this case, the bandwagon is named Avril. “The music business is driven by money, not art -- yes, it’s shocking, I know -- and they see a success, they try to get one of their own.”

Lavigne, like youthful predecessor Fiona Apple and fellow Canadian Alanis Morissette, sings of relationships and feelings with steely candor. The Ontario native, who just turned 19, was signed at age 15 to Arista Records. Unlike the earthy Morissette or Apple’s urbane waif, Lavigne sings her pop songs while dressed in mild punk and skater fashions, which is efficient shorthand for teen rebellion. The three have more in common than not, though. Morissette began a TV career at age 10 and signed a music publishing deal by age 14. Apple began making homemade recordings by age 11 and by 15 had written many of the songs that would make her famous.

Lavigne’s success is not far removed from that of Michelle Branch,, Vanessa Carlton and a number of other young female songwriters. The industry niche that belonged in past decades to the likes of Carly Simon or Sarah McLachlan now is like a master’s program with only freshman students.

FINDING A ‘SOUND’

The new film “School of Rock” presents the indefatigable goofball Jack Black as a scruffy musician who worms his way into a job as a substitute teacher at a private academy and proceeds to tutor his wide-eyed pupils in the mystical teachings of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. In short order, the middle school students have to dress up (or is it down?), write songs and become a pop-rock band with more chops than, say, Good Charlotte or Sugar Ray.

The young actors in the film play their own instruments and were plucked from the ranks of the classically trained. According to some of their parents, they have become smitten with rock ‘n’ roll since their indoctrination.

A lesson in that might be that musical aptitude is everywhere among the young and always has been. It seems surprising to see songwriters arrive in the music industry before they are old enough to drive, though, because it’s such a break with the pop music past.

As the recording industry coalesced and formalized in the 20th century, the songwriting business was considered a specialized craft, and most performers did not write their own hits. The 1960s, with Lennon and McCartney, Dylan and the rock band era, changed that, and the singer-songwriter became a familiar pop staple. With that vanguard came an expectation that the songwriter could explore politics, social issues or deep matters of the human heart -- all topics that, presumably, would require some life seasoning.

Many singer-songwriters of the rock era would refine their skills on tour, where they could reach not only fans but also regional radio programmers who could make or break a career. Radio still plays a pivotal role, but the advent of the music video and cable outlets devoted exclusively to those videos, as well as the incredible reach of the Internet, have made an environment in which very young artists can cut through without a solid concert career.

Take McKee, the Seattle teen who is on Warner’s Reprise label and is hailed by her handlers as a career artist in the making. That, of course, remains to be seen, but the label already has invested two years and a considerable amount of money in a performing songwriter who says she “has been in the studio since I was 12 but never really had that much time onstage outside of Seattle Girl’s Choir.” Essentially, McKee is a stage novice.

Whalley acknowledged that one of the challenges is finding “a sound” for a young artist, which may be especially difficult because teens still are sorting out their personas and tastes. In McKee’s case, months of recording in New York yielded an album that “didn’t make anybody very happy,” the singer said with a laugh. She returned to the drawing board with producer Rob Cavallo and started over. The album now is much more sophisticated, “more of a Portishead, modern, new sound, with some hip-hop,” McKee said. The results will become apparent with the album’s release next year.

McKee paused when asked about the challenges posed by her age. “It’s harder to be female than it is to be young, I think. It’s harder to be a girl, because in this business you have to deal with a lot of 50-year-old men, and if you stand up and say, ‘I wrote these songs myself, it should be like this,’ then they call you a little diva. Look, I have always known what I want to do, and this is it. I never doubted that it was going to work out. I’ve been around the block.”

MIMICRY OR ART?

The new film “Thirteen” has been rattling parents with tales of other teens who’ve been around the block. It was co-written by Nicki Reed, whose age at the time of the writing was used as the title. The film presents a hyper-sexualized and pressure-filled world in which young girls deal with modern times by piercing or scarring their bodies and embracing excess and nihilism in all forms.

At an early screening of the film, 16-year-old singer Katy Rose of Tarzana was beside herself or, more accurately, was in front of herself and staring in pained recognition. “It was me, it was my life, all the things I went through,” Rose said in the languid, world-weary tone exclusive to teen girls. It all hit so close to home that Rose had to escape the screening room to compose herself. “I just had to go outside and smoke a cigarette,” she says.

Rose is a young singer-songwriter whose lyrics will make parents gulp hard. (Sample: “I’ve lost all sense of navigation, but got my Californication/ If I miss my graduation/ I’ll have one [expletive] long vacation.”) She was viewing an early version of “Thirteen” because she contributed a song called “Overdrive” to the soundtrack. She says she spent the last few years caught up in self-destruction and self-loathing and that her music will speak to those her age and gender who are “sick of that pop crap” popular a few years ago.

“My music is what it’s really like, what life is like, for girls now,” Rose said.

Scanning the lyrics of these young songwriters is akin to snooping through a child’s journal and finding that nursery rhymes have given way to melodrama and angst. Stacy Eisley wrote a song called “Blackened Crown” when she was 9 with these lyrics: “Did you hear me holler at you/ To come save me I’m in danger/ My pearls have fallen into the mud/ And you were too late.” It’s parental salve that, on the band’s Web site, the songwriter has posted those lyrics with a message to her fans: “Note: Sometimes it’s good to identify with people, listen with them, cry with them.”

If Rose is the sullen kid cutting summer school, Eisley is the thoughtful counselor at a summer retreat. In both cases, though, these are kids sounding very much like grown-ups.

Where, though, is the line between mimicry and art? Dry, the Fanscape executive pores over mountains of data about today’s kids, their tastes and their consumerism. He knows that a 9-year-old asking “pleasepleasepleasePLEASE” is a powerful force in record store aisles, but he also recognizes kids’ power as creative individuals. A recent Fanscape contest to design a Web site for the rock band 311 took Dry’s breath away. “These entries we were getting were better -- a lot better -- than the ones I have hired companies to make. It was amazing. The kids now are so sophisticated it’s staggering.”

Dry was uncertain how that ability to absorb and distill fits into the songwriting of very young music acts. “That’s the subjective thing, isn’t it? Is it art, or are they just able to put it together because of the things they have heard? But I guess you could say that about anyone of any age.”

Especially in the karaoke-minded scene of American pop today where good pipes and extreme vocal gymnastics usually trump individual nuance or artistic statement. “American Idol” unearthed a staggering gold mine of ratings, and in the predictable horde of prospectors following it were “American Juniors” and “America’s Most Talented Kid.” The first winner on the latter, however, was no Kelly Clarkson clone. Cheyenne Kimball, 13, not only sings but also has written, by her mother’s count, 188 songs since she was 9.

A young blues singer named Susan Tedeshi was nominated for a Grammy as best new artist a few years ago. Although all agreed that she was talented, a middle-aged record executive at her label offered a wry observation: “If someone is barely old enough to drive, how are they going to sing to me about the blues?”

Lavigne and Branch have proved to a certain extent that grown-ups will buy thoughtful music written by youngsters. But to Jones, the programming chief at Radio Disney, there are ominous realities in the lyrics of singers such as Rose. A parent herself, she prefers youngsters like Branch, whose music is thoughtful but also self-affirming and high-minded. “It shows girls that they can be whatever they want to be, and there’s a lot to be said for that

“It makes me sad to see it. Michelle hasn’t done it and she might not, but I have seen it. They hit this point where they look behind them at kids coming up and, like all kids, they say, ‘I don’t want to play with you because you’re a child.’ Suddenly don’t want to be singing to kids or have their audiences seem so young. They have become role models but they have all these age issues going on. It’s a shame, really, because, you know, when you think about it, the kids are the ones that put them where they are.”