A new NoVA record label has some high-profile connections.
Nashville, New York, Los Angeles … Fredericksburg? This Northern Virginia town may not be well-known for its music scene, but a local doctor with big-name connections may change all that.
William “Andy” Reese, M.D. recently founded independent record label REMU (Reese Music) Records to further his son’s burgeoning music career.
Reese’s 20-year-old son, Tyler, began playing guitar seriously while growing up in Fredericksburg and then spent two years at the Berklee College of Music prior to moving to Nashville.
Tyler began working with professionals, one of whom was Elisa Fiorillo Dease, a current singer in Prince’s Las Vegas show. The two seem like an odd pairing, but Dease and Reese clicked upon introduction by Dease’s former producer, Jeff Silverman.
“After our first collaboration, we decided to fly Tyler out to Vegas to work with me,” Dease recalls. “We spent a week writing, laughing and eating Chipotle and came up with a ton of material.” The two, now known as The Dease & Reese Project, recently recorded “Life in 20” and signed with REMU.
This album is the first for REMU Records, and Andy Reese had a hand in just about every stage. “As I’ve learned more about major record labels, it just seemed smarter to do it myself. … I learned how to do live sound and demo recording, and built a studio in the house. It’s much cheaper and it gives [me] more control and understanding of the whole process.”
“Life in 20” by The Dease & Reese Project will be released on June 3. The album’s first single is “All Over the World,” a track written by Dease while on a private plane with Prince.
According to Tyler, the album is best described as a “quirky pop, R&B, funk album” that puts emphasis on both Dease’s strong vocals and Reese’s virtuosic guitar skills.
As for the future of REMU Records, Andy Reese plans to only work with his son and daughter (Christina, 15, who is also a musician) for now. “We might consider friends, but I’m not in the business of going out and finding artists to sign—it gets very expensive to add artists.” –Katie Bowles
(June 2014)
