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Marcus Bell: Producer and songwriter for Nicki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, and Timbaland on music and creativity in the age of AI
00:33:01
We chat with Marcus Bell about the ethics of AI-generated music, his creative process, and how he manages to fit in creative time amidst raising a family.
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- [00:00]
Aaron Walter
Hi there, Aaron Walter here. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers Enjoy weekly episodes, four episodes per month in total rather than two. All ad free and invitations to our monthly AMA's with the smartest folks in design and tech. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. It's just $7 a month and it supports not only your personal growth, it also makes our work at Design Better possible. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription, email us@subscriptionsecuriositydepartment.com and we'll help you out.
- [00:50]
Marcus Bell
My view on myself and my life is that I am creativity. Everything is a part of the creative Everything that I do, every interaction, every book I read, every YouTube video or podcast I listen to is a part of my creative being.
- [01:16]
Eli Woolery
There aren't many kids who start a record label when they're 12 years old or play piano professionally at the age of six, but our guest today, Marcus Bellringer Bell is the kind of polymath that did just those things and went on to create a successful career in the music industry as a producer and a composer who's worked with musicians like Nicki Minaj and Snoop Dogg.
- [01:35]
Aaron Walter
Marcus has also created one of the first AI driven artists, fusing his own musical skills with Gen AI Persona Raven Light. We talked to Marcus about what inspired him to do this, as well as the ethics of AI generated music. We also discuss his creative process and how he manages to fit in creative time amidst raising a family and other domestic duties.
- [01:57]
Eli Woolery
This is Design Better where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [02:04]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. You can get ad free episodes, discounts on our workshops, access to documentaries like Design Disruptors and our growing library of books, as well as our monthly AMA's with big names in design and tech. By becoming a DesignBetter Premium subscriber, it's also the best way to support the show. Visit designbetterpodcast.com subscribe to learn more. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. And now back to the show. Marcus Bell, AKA Bellringer. Welcome to Design Better.
- [03:01]
Marcus Bell
Great to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
- [03:05]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, Marcus, you've been doing some really fascinating work with AI creating an artist using AI, and we want to dig into that. But it's always fun to start from the beginning. You've been involved in music since the very beginning. You played piano at a very young age, I understand. And you grew up in a family where excellence and achievement, they were just sort of like, this is what you saw, this is how life is. Tell us what life was like as a kid. What's it like in your house when you were growing up?
- [03:37]
Marcus Bell
Well, the first thing is that I grew up in one of the most impoverished areas in Virginia. And I didn't know that until later when I saw affluent areas in my life. And it was a unique thing because even though the neighborhood was underserved community, that isn't the way the experience of my life. And like you were pointing to, the surroundings were. So my mother was a national tennis champion who had played in the US Open back in the 60s, and she used to travel the country with Arthur Ashe, and they played in a bunch of different tournaments, right? So she was a tennis prodigy. It was two years from the time that she had a racket in her hand to becoming a national tennis champion. In order to do something like that, you have to have some practices, right? And that's one of the things that I learned from her early on was that if you want to become excellent at anything, then focus attention. What I like to call intentional imbalance, where you're kind of moving other domains of life out of the way so you can focus on that thing. It is that you're either learning or creating or launching or like periods of that. What I had as a unique ability was the ability to focus for long periods of time. And so as a kid, I could sit there and just like play with pennies and play with rocks and marbles and all of this for hours. And my parents noticed that and they said, hmm, why don't we try them on piano? So they got my grandmother's piano and brought it into the house. And like most two year olds, they usually go to the piano and start banging away. Right. I have a nine year old daughter, and when she was two years old, I saw how she interacted with, you know, instruments, right? That's not what I did. What I did was go and touch the key intentionally, the other key, and they're like, whoa. Huh? Okay, let's try them in lessons. So that led me into like having a discovery that I was like a child prodigy musician. And that just kind of started a pathway of a deliberate practice and having aims that were worth waking up for and creating from.
- [06:19]
Aaron Walter
I'd love to learn more about your practice. So you talked about this imbalance, this intentional imbalance that you create. What does that practice look like for you as a child? And then today as, you know, someone who's constantly creative, what choices do you make? Are there specific routines that you follow?
- [06:37]
Marcus Bell
I remember sitting at the piano with phone books under me and practicing, and I remember hearing the kids outside running up and down the street playing. Right. And my father said this a few years before he passed. We were in a conversation, and he's like, yeah, you know, when we started you on piano, like those kids, they were out there running, and a lot of those kids ended up in jail or dead. You became bell ringer. And that is the advantage of intentional imbalance in certain situations. Right. Because I had certain amounts of time that I needed to practice before I could do any other activity. Right. And so that trained me, having a discipline around study. And it was fun for me. And I realized later on what happened when I was practicing. So it became meditative. My practices became meditative. I didn't know what that was about until later on that when I played and really got into it, that I would constantly and consistently be achieving flow state. So when I listened back to recordings of when I was a teenager, for example, like, I was playing way beyond my level. Right. Because I was in flow state in performances. And so I'd be able to do things that I normally wouldn't be able to do in practice.
- [08:15]
Aaron Walter
That's fascinating.
- [08:16]
Eli Woolery
Yeah. So I mentioned before we started recording that we recently spoke with Kamasi Washington, who's a jazz musician, and he had a similar story, both about the level of focus he was able to achieve, but also how he grew up in South Central la and a lot of his peers may have ended up in places that he said he could have ended up there if it wasn't for music. And that way that it just kind of centered and focused him. And I'm curious if the kind of mindset and the focus that you have is that something that while with music, it's a net positive thing, and it's helped you achieve many things you have. But are there other areas of life where it's challenging where you're like, oh, gosh, I'm fantastic at music, but I'm terrible doing my taxes or. Or, you know, like, other areas where, like, a challenge is that there's these particular abilities kind of surface?
- [09:02]
Marcus Bell
Yeah. The thing that comes to my mind is that there's this kind of narrative in the world about if you're not good at something that you have to, like, learn that skill to do a thing. And I used to be that way. And so I would put myself through all kinds of hoops doing things that didn't really make sense for me to do until I realized that, well, actually, if I double down on the things that I'm good at, then I can hire someone to do the other thing. I can get an intern or get, you know, a volunteer or some help to do the other thing, or I can find a technology to help do that thing right. And I call those time multipliers. So it's more, for me, about the best and highest use of my time, my energy, the resources that I have, and not do the things that I am terrible at. And so this is where collaboration with others comes into play. And even though I believe that I could develop an ability in a particular area, doesn't mean that I should. And just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should do something. I share this all the time with some of the participants in my programs. Like, I have a program called Wealthland Pat Bootcamp, where things like time multipliers is a big thing because of what I notice, not just with myself, but with others, how time is something that is not necessarily farmed in a way that produces a great crop of people. So I've done exercises like doing time audits, for example. This is a quick kind of tip, if you will. Like, if you measure what you do half hour by half hour, or 15 minutes by 15 minutes or hour by hour, whatever makes sense for your world. And then you make a list of those things and then evaluate that list and say, okay, what are the things someone else can do for a less expensive price? Whether that's free or just, you know, like that versus how much your time is worth? Then there you are. Now, all of a sudden, it's optimizing our time resource in the most positive way.
- [11:28]
Aaron Walter
We were talking before we hit record, you managed to fit in creative sessions in between tasks. And I think that's fascinating because a lot of people think about the creative process as like, I have to have the right setup, the right situation, the right space and time. And we've even heard that from folks like John Cleese and how he blocks off time for the creative process and protects that. But I found it fascinating, like in some of the videos on your website where you're writing music in your studio, your daughter comes in, she's asking you some questions. You've just picked her up from school. Or from camp or something like that. You're just sort of like squeezing in a session and still able to be productive in, like, I'm making a thing. This is sort of interesting. I don't know if this is going to be like a hit song, but it's. I'm making something and I'm going through that process almost like a calisthenic. Talk to us about that. So you're doing these time audits. How do you fit in these creative sessions into small time blocks?
- [12:35]
Marcus Bell
Let me create a little bit of context for this. My view on my self and my life is that I am creativity. So everything is a part of the creative process. Everything that I do, every interaction, every book I read, every YouTube video or podcast I listen to is a part of my creative's being. And what I've discovered is that all of the experiences throughout a day all kind of come into. Whether it's the music or whether it's writing or whether it's putting together some presentation, all of these things end up coming out in the products, whatever the product may end up looking like. And so when I wake up in the morning and I have like a creative idea, like, oh, I wonder if I could create an AI that does this and does that. Like, that could write a podcast script. Okay, So I jot that down. If you look at my phone, you could just scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. The song ideas, the ideas, the tech ideas, the business ideas, and so forth. Like, as long as I've been doing this, thousands. If I wake up in the morning with a seed, by the end of the day, there is a plant that has been created. So my daughter coming in and getting ready for school. And my daughter, by the way, she's nine years old, little Mellie, she is a part of my creative process because she is also a creative, right? Her energy coming into a room ends up in the music. And in addition to that, she's learned from me that the creative process is something that just happens as a lifestyle, right? Well, it used to be a time where I would do like the person that you mentioned, which is like, set aside time, okay? This is my focus. Time to whatever. But now, once I came to the realization that I can be creative all throughout my day and work on a song or many songs throughout the day, right? So we would maybe start something here, or I would start an idea here. Well, I'm driving her to elementary school. You know, I'm playing it on repeat and I'm playing around with ideas, and she's in the back of the car, like, oh, and if she likes it, then probably a whole lot of other people are gonna like it too. So when we recognize that we are creativity and that everything that it is that we experience as creativity, as opportunities for growth, as life experience that we can incorporate, then there's no bounds to how to be able to create.
- [15:42]
Eli Woolery
Just rewinding to your own childhood again for a minute, it sounds like you have something of a rare combination in that you get the creative side, but you also understand the business side. And this may or may not be true, but from what we've read, you started a record label when you were 12 years old. Now, Aaron and I were talking, like, I don't think either of us knew what a record label was at that.
- [16:03]
Aaron Walter
Age, or like, I don't totally understand the domain of a record label.
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Eli Woolery
Something to do with business and music, though. So there's some overact there.
- [16:12]
Marcus Bell
And.
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Eli Woolery
Yeah, talk us through a little bit. That path you took, which is there's this intersection of understanding both the creative side and the business side, which isn't always the case for artists.
- [16:22]
Marcus Bell
Yeah. I like to think from what's possible based on whatever's in front of me. Right. And I didn't know that I was a futurist until I met some futurists and became friends with them, and they're like, oh, Marcus, you're a futurist. I'm like, oh, that's what that was. Well, when I was a kid, my mother, you know, when my parents divorced, she being the futurist that she was, recognized that my father wasn't going to necessarily be around and participating. So what she did was she reached out to people to become my mentors. And so I had, like, the president of the family Channel. I had executive at Eminem, Mars, and she would read about somebody in a newspaper and reach out to them. She would see them on television and reach out to them and say, hey, will you mentor my son? So early on, I had these powerful African American men in my life that were, you know, businessmen, they were politicians. I would play at politicians events and so forth. So I was getting exposed to a lot of people with specialized knowledge in different areas. And those mentors became my first investors. And the what's possible came out of. I was doing a lot of performing when I was, you know, 11, 12 years old, and I started touring. I did this school tour one time, and it was like thousands and thousands of kids that I was seeing. And. And by that time, I was already writing songs and whatnot. And I started integrating them into my performances and so forth. And I said, well, wait a minute, if I'm going to be in front of all these thousands of people, then that's an opportunity for me to sell my music. Right. That's an opportunity for me to do that. So how do I do that? And it's like, oh, well, there's a record label, and so forth. Well, okay, well, what's possible? How could I have a record like you bowl? Right. So I didn't know what I was doing. So from 12 years old to the end of high school, it was all about, oh, I walk into a record store and I see posters, and I'm like, I think I need some posters. Reach out to my mental. I think I need some posters to go into the record store. Right. And so I would get a budget and go get some posters made, you know, with the help of my mom and whoever else was around, and we found a designer. And so I understood, like, the design process and. And the considerations and having to do photo shoots. And so there were so many different aspects of artist development that I was experiencing with the. What was possible. And then I later discovered that when I went into the record stores back then, they would pull down and make space for my stuff. So I started doing, like, in stores and signing autographs, and my songs were on the radio and everything. Right. And what I realized later when I started working with major record labels was that that space is paid for. The record labels would pay for the space in those stores. But here I was at, I guess those stores were investing in me. And so a lot of times there are things that have happened in my life where people have invested in me, but I didn't have the context that they were actually making an investment and they were taking a risk in me. I'm so grateful for, you know, having all of that.
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Eli Woolery
Yeah.
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Aaron Walter
So you've got a pretty unique and impressive creative process, but you've also had the unique opportunity to work with a number of other people and see other people's processes, too. Wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. Talk to us about the different approaches that you've seen with working with folks like Nicki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, Timbaland and others.
- [20:19]
Marcus Bell
Yeah. So when we talk about creative processes, I'm one of the unique music industry people that I've never done drugs, I've never drank alcohol. I've never used some type of external anything to try and open up my creativity. Not that I have anything against anybody that does that. But I've seen, you know, firsthand the dependencies that are created from the feeling or the impression that, okay, this substance makes me more creative. Okay. And there may be some truth to that based on what I've learned with some of the neuroscientists that I've been collaborating with. You know, there are some truths that people get free of themselves and are more open. Right. As a way. But I don't believe that that's necessary. I believe that we have unlimited access to creativity. And so coming from that, I've played around with so many different ways to create by myself and with others. So whether that's, oh, let me just open up a book and then just randomly point to something and take this sentence and turn that into a song, or let me start first with the lyrics and then create a song around that. Or let me start with just a piano and then build from there. Or let me just beatbox something in a microphone and then create the whole song around my voice. Or let me just open up one of the music programs and just go through and just pick a sound, any sound, and try and turn that into something. Let me just sample something and see what happens with that. And then, oh, well, wait a minute. If I'm working with others, what if I wrote a big band arrangement or I've written orchestrations, right? Like, what if I have the orchestra dude, These dramatic swells and what would that sound like? And so when I work with different artists and other producers and songwriters over the years, I've seen a wide variety of creative styles and abilities. So I'll give you one example. So I'm working with an artist right now. She's a big star in Europe. Her name is Gala. She's one of my long term collaborators and songwriters that I've produced. And she had a big song called Free from Desire, which has been, you know, she did the Olympics this year. It's like classic across Europe. Everyone knows the song. Like, it's like one of the biggest songs in dance music history. Right. So we've been working on a new song, right? Cause she just got a deal with Sony and so we are working on this song. Well, her process, for example, with the song lyrics, she spent about 14 hours on the song lyric before coming to me. And it's a song that we wrote about 10 years ago. Okay. That we're bringing back. Okay. And so last night, while my daughter was getting her hair done, or hair did, like they said, in some places, she was getting her hair did, I was out in the car, on zoom, you know, going back and forth and reworking the lyric and saying, okay, that's not quite the right word. Or, how does that sing? Okay, that's a great line. But how does it flow? And how does that sing? Because when we think about how it sings, I'm thinking about her in a stadium, right? And having to project that out in a stadium. You know, I've performed in front of, you know, 80,000 people, and so I know what that's like, and being able to project that energy. And so that experience impacts even the lyric writing, because I'll choose an open word so that more can be expressed. I know it's a podcast, so you can't see my mouth. I'm opening my mouth, as opposed to the mm, It's a different thing. And so there's that, and then there are creatives that I've worked with that you put the microphone on and a beat, and they can freestyle a hit song, right? They can freestyle something that sounds like a hit, and all you have to do is just record it and then create the environment for that hit song possibility to be realized. So these are completely extreme, different ways of creating, and there's everything in between. And I realized a long time ago I'm able to create music very quickly. Because I've been doing this so long, I have, like, these processes that make it easier for me to move quickly. And because I want to get the artist in a flow state, I want to be in a flow state with the artist so that we can create something exceptional. So one of the things that I was doing at one period of time, which is why I've written over 5,000 songs in my life, is there was a period of time where I was doing, like, 10 songs a day in multiple genres. And when I was building that muscle, it was a very useful muscle to build because it allowed me to be able to. I can perform in whatever environment as a producer and songwriter, right? So I'm able to pull from my experiences in that way. But here's the thing. When you have a hit song, it's like that one piece, like an example of my friend Gala, that one song has been a career, and so it's as valuable working slowly as it is being quick.
- [26:32]
Eli Woolery
Marcus, I'm curious if you ever find yourself having different modes or approaches to work. So to get some context, we've talked to, say, a film composer, like a Brian Tyler, who he's executing on a very specific vision that he's maybe collaborating with the director on or back to Kamasi Washington, he might kind of see himself in more of a self described blue collar role, like playing the saxophone or composing something again, executing on another artist's vision. And in some cases an artist might find that a little stifling and want to go out and do their own thing. Certainly he did, and I believe Brian Tyler did too. So do you see that at all or is there more sort of like transparency between your modes of working?
- [27:13]
Marcus Bell
Yeah, I operate from a place of abundance with all things. It's not a either or, it's a both and. And as someone who is an artist and works with other artists, when I'm collaborating with someone else, whether that's in business or whether that's in music creation, a third thing emerges. There's the acknowledgement of where someone else is and then that just becomes a part of the whole thing. This is part of the jazz musician. But you know, way back in my past, even though I've done a lot of pop music and hip hop and you know, rock, had K pop hits and all that kind of stuff. Right. That jazz training really prepared me for life. Being flexible, being able to build upon a situation, being able to see possibility and like they say, is not where you start is where you finish. So it might be messy in the middle, but as long as we end on a good note, then it's not going to create dissonance for those that are watching.
- [28:23]
Aaron Walter
I love that reference to jazz because it really is like this open mentality. It's discovery and excitement of what you could stumble upon together. Do you think about that? Is that a fair definition for you of how you think about jazz and that approach?
- [28:40]
Marcus Bell
Absolutely. Even like this conversation that we're having, right. We're stumbling into things as this conversation evolves and sometimes they're stumbling in the places that we want to stumble out of. Right. So I've been in situations where fortunately I was able to stumble out of those situations. I remember I was in a recording studio one time working with a hip hop artist in New York and he came in to the recording session and you know, he was intoxicated and so forth and I don't know what he took, but he was exhibiting very unusual behavior. It was creating a block in our process. His manager was there and intervened and basically pulled him out of the vocal booth and said, okay, you know, we're going to end the session here and walked out with him. What I didn't know is that he was carrying a gun.
- [29:43]
Aaron Walter
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- [31:56]
Unknown
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