What do you do if you’re in a critically acclaimed rock band that manages to score a deal with a major label, releases three highly rated albums and positions itself on the brink of a huge amount of success, and then splits up? Well, you could do it all over again. That’s what Chris Turpin and partner-wife Stephanie Jean did after leaving British alt-rock band Kill It Kid. That band was signed by Seymour Stein to Sire/Warner Bros. when the whole project fell apart. “We were underground, did a load of records, signed a few deals,” Turpin says. “Ida Mae came at the end of that, after we got sick and tired of being on the road with a rock band and wanted to get back to what we really love, which is roots, songwriting, Americana country-blues really.”
“We recorded most of it live, straight to tape.”
Ida Mae relocated from England to Nashville eight months ago, and they’re now signed to Thirty Tigers Records, but a lot happened before that. Two, again, TWO major label deals fell through.
“When we left our old band, we ended up signing to Decca, Universal,” Turpin says. “Long story short, we fell out with them but they did us right. We ended up doing half the album and then we got given the album back. Then we ended up getting signed by Seymour Stein to Warner Bros. and Sire Records, who we’d known and worked with in our own band. We did a deal with him, finished the record and then as we moved to Nashville after they got us the visas, Seymour Stein left Warner Bros. So after all of that, we landed in America and they said that they can put out the album, but in actual fact we should step aside and take the album with us. So we left Warner Bros.”
So, the band started the album on Universal, finished it on Warner Bros, and were now in a position where they owned their own record and were able to work with Thirty Tigers, the label Turpin says they wanted to work with in the first place. That album, Chasing Lights, will finally see the light of day in June and Turpin is over the moon.
“There was no compromising with the record,” he says. “We sat down and recorded the record exactly how we wanted. We recorded most of it live, straight to tape and we tracked most of it in three or four tapes. It was an amazing way to work because we’d never recorded that way before. Even for us, it’s still full of surprises.”
Date Signed: January 2019
Label: Thirty Tigers Records
Band Members: Chris Turpin, Stephanie Jean
Type of Music: Americana/Rock Management: Vector
Management Booking: Buster Phillips - WME for US/Canada; Oliver Ward - UTA for UK/Europe/ROW
Legal: Kent Marcus - Marcus & Colvin LLC
Publicity: Missing Piece Group
Web: idamaemusic.com
A&R: N/A
