The Genius of Songwriter Colbie Caillat
Photographs by Corinne D. Sullivan
Salem, OR—Saturday, 26 August, 2023: Earlier this evening, I watched Colbie Caillat sing as the sun was setting above the L.B. Day Amphitheatre inside our state’s capital city. She performed during the second night of the Oregon State Fair, courtesy of Umpqua Bank. Mid her melodic set of songs, Caillat spoke about life in Tennessee, her new home. Appreciative of our farming communities, she shared her enthusiasm about seeing our state fair’s prize-earning animals and booths.
In the 2000’s, the pleasantly beaming face of Caillat was an inspirational mechanism that spurred me, in 2019, to form a human rights movement in the music industry. Traveling full circle to the show tonight, it was a joy to enjoy her music after collecting signatures on a human rights petition for songwriters, musicians, and performers during the hot morning and afternoon today at the fair.
I started the Article 27 Music Project in 2019, in the face of the Music Modernization Act. It’s an act of congress concerning various copyright issues in the world of music, passed into federal law towards the end of 2018.
Parts of the MMA are sort of okay, I guess. But the badness is blatant theft of the artistic copyrights of music creators: the songwriters, the musicians, and the performers.
Title I of the Orrin G. Hatch—Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act, the Musical Works Modernization Act, authorizes your federal government to use the “compulsory licensing structure” for making and distributing musical works. Since the word “compulsory” means required by a law or by a rule, creative ownership has already been stolen. The Music Modernization Act was done solely to benefit a miniscule handful of people who are earning profits through streaming services.
Marshall Bruce Mathers III publicly fought against profit imbalance of digital sales in the 2000’s. Sadly, the details never came to public light. His court case against the Universal Music Group was settled out of court. We won’t ever know the details.
Primarily, when strongarm techniques were used against music makers to enable digital streaming earnings such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, to name a few, songwriters and publishers across the United States filed various complaints and lawsuits. But the Music Modernization Act “handled” the lawsuits back in 2018 through annihilation of the rights of the songwriters to complain at all.
The petition I manage is about the relevance of Article 27 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the business world today of songwriters, musicians and performers. After all, everybody has got some human rights!
Article 27
1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
I loved Colbie Callait’s work the instant I overheard a coworker playing her music. He was a graphic designer who played her songs from Coco (2007) and Breakthrough (2009) all day. I followed suit through album purchases for something like $13.99 each, and earphones connected to my tiny iPod Shuffle from Apple.
Caillat’s calm persona and great sound led me to become an immediate Taylor Swift fan. I adored their 2008 collaborations, and in particular the song Breathe. I purchased it for a buck-fifty on iTunes and cried a lot listening to it over and over.
Enjoyment of Swift’s much applauded singer/songwriter status, and watching her bust the boundaries holding women back in music, led me to a most definitely renewed love for female songwriters. And that’s how I eventually developed a devotion-style love for Woodstock-era singer/songwriter Melanie Safka. Like Taylor Swift, both Melanie and I were living in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 2000’s and 2010’s. In 2014, I met Melanie for the first time, in person, and started listening to her story.
I became aware of a frightening counterfeit forgery (plus deception) situation that has been dictating the ownership of her music. She never sold her musical recordings, nor her songwriter copyrights. That’s a big statement in light of the fact Melanie isn’t paid for any music placements in film, television or otherwise, unless she hears of about the deal in time and complains loudly. Melanie wrote as well as performed most of her songs, a fact which means something when it comes to royalty payments from Performance Rights Organizations (e.g., ASCAP, BMI, etc.). Yet, she received nothing for a long time from her PRO, ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). Melanie also recorded her performances in studios paid for and organized by her husband (and her music producer) Peter Schekeryk. Most of those recordings were released through their own independent music production and promotion companies such as Neighborhood Records (New York, 1971-1975).
I saw Melanie’s frustration, along with heartbreak. The abuse of Melanie’s work occurred primarily during the Napster years. Later, those problems were reinforced with forged documents. It resulted in millions of dollars silently directed away.
Each of my favorite dynamic songwriters—Caillat, Swift, and Safka—represent, for me, an enormous movement for peace through music. I feel these people, and many more, should have their human rights protected—not by the law alone, but also by their fans keeping a watching eye on what troubles there may be.
The protection is offered in a simple way: through education of Article 27, specifically as it can be used to protect songwriters, musicians, and performers.
The child of a genius can be genius, too.
Caillat is the daughter of music producer and expert sound engineer Ken Caillat. His professional credits in sound engineering begin with a comedy by David Ossman entitled How Time Flies (1973). Later, Ken Caillat handled the sound-work of Lionel Ritchie’s Dancing On The Ceiling (1986), Michael Jackson’s monster 1987 studio album Bad, and all of Fleetwood Mac’s substantially remarkable albums, such as Rumors (1977), Live (1980), Tusk (1982), Greatest Hits (1988), and 25 Years—The Chain (1992). He engineered Colbie Caillat’s debut album Coco (2007), as well as her second album Breakthrough (2009) which debuted at No 1 on the Billboard 200 and won a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album. He also engineered All of You (2011), and her first Christmas album, Christmas In The Sand (2012).
The beauty and joy of watching Caillat perform tonight for thousands is really what The Article 27 Music Project seeks to protect. Everybody at her show was very happy. Afterwards, we all walked away. We rode home in our separate cars.
I ask myself and you: do the children and do the grand-children of my peers see a need to preserve safety and peace, like we did back in high school, in the nineties?
Earth travels in a circle. Does it carry us towards and away from insanity, again and again, to face never-ending war and brutality that increases and recedes. Ideas passed through the arts—and specifically by the men and women in music today—might counter-act something that feels to be ingrained inside the universe.
Even the United States legislative system can be improved by the people on streets. Our governmental system has been set up to enable the individual people to decide what should and shouldn’t be our state and federal laws. My petition is about protecting the human rights of songwriters, musicians and performers, without regard of any money interest.
What is it about parents passing torches to children in America? In my head, I would like to say to myself, “Of course you do care, you music makers, about protecting you own music!” In reality, the question balances on my mind.
The people who own the best musical catalogues in the United States have very definite political plans. And I am guessing that the kids are even cuter than the adults! The best example is the purchase of the Taylor Swift armored musical catalogue through Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, LLC, which she protected by re-recording her songs and then selling them for her own profit.
But, with a blanket licensing system now in place through the Music Modernization Act since 2018 for digital music providers to make and distribute digital phonorecord deliveries (e.g., permanent downloads, limited downloads, or interactive streams) without the straightforward authorization of their creators, I ask one and all who cares?
Entertainment lawyers cut a diagonal swath across America’s commerce dealing with the arts. Outright protection of Article 27 has never been made a fact in the United States courts. For example, one of the first entertainment lawyers I spoke with, in 2020, told me she took offense. She said the human right of copyright protection exists in other countries, but not here. In America, where she built a multi-million-dollar career, human rights protection has not been any issue in court. And she told me she has been to court a great many deal of times.
Most men and women who are bar-approved have no qualms negating against a human rights movement for songwriters, musicians, and performers. Their arrogance is in the face of rights atrocities such as the Britney Spears conservatorship.
In this year of 2023, experience alone has stolen the answer from the bar-examined socialites: the people DO care about the American songwriter, musician, and performer, and they are signing a petition when I’m out there in the daylight hours, the sun blaring bright overhead.
Regular, sane, adult men and women consider music one of the most important experiences in their lives. As a fellow regular dame, I see the relevance of the Music Modernization Act in today’s political crossover for the sole benefit of well-paid attorneys and leaders in money markets who strive to dominate American free commerce.
Rather than scribbling notes throughout tonight’s performance, I took a few pictures of Colbie Caillat from whatever angle I could get from my seating assignment. I just enjoyed an hour or two of sheer wonder at how she does it all.
It was a pleasure seeing you on stage, again, my dear, and I hope you do well in whatever adventure you find for yourself, next.
As for me, I’ll be out in the heat, again, tomorrow morning and throughout the afternoon. We will be collecting petition signatures in support of Human Right #27 for songwriters, musicians and performers in the daylight hours, then heading into the L.B. Day Auditorium at night for more live music!
Article written by Corinne Devin Sullivan