Hayley Taylor – HuffPost 8.26.10

[Note: This is n excerpt of my interview with Haley Taylor that contains information that might be useful for new artists.]

Mike Ragogna: There are a lot of singer-songwriters out there. How do you–especially when you have an independent album–cut through the din?

Haley Taylor: I think the first thing is really having passion for what you’re doing, and doing it for the love of doing it, not with an agenda because you never know what’s going to happen. In art, there’s just no direct path. If I went to medical school, studied hard and did all the steps, I would become a doctor. There is no set path for any art, really. One day you can be on top of the world, and the next day, people won’t return your phone calls.

In terms of getting my album out there, I saw a trend in America or, I guess, in TV that they were using a lot of music. They weren’t using songs so much back in the day, they had theme songs and scores. Then slowly with shows like Felicity, and The O.C., they started using more actual songs in the shows.

MR: Right, many times, as part of the plot.

HT: Exactly. That’s how I was finding a lot of new music; I would go look up the songs and see that other people were looking up the songs. So, I just realized that was a really great asset, and it was almost the best promotion that I could possibly get. I just focused on trying to do a lot of music placement, and just making songs that I believed in, and working with great people, and…yeah.