Community Corner

Father, Son Bring Music to YouTube [Video, Photos]

A shared passion for music brought a Westwood family from their basement studio to the Internet.

It wasn't always that Paul Hatfield and his father, Brad, collaborated musically. In fact, the last thing on Paul's mind growing up in a family of musicians was to follow suit.

But now, the 20-year-old Westwood resident and Berklee College of Music junior has taken his inevitable love for music and worked with his father to produce a studio-quality video for YouTube.

The inspiration for the idea came after Paul, 20, discovered a world of musicians recording and producing their own covers of songs and posting them onto the world-famous video website.

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"It's fairly recent that it's gotten so popular," said Hatfield as he sat next to his father in the family's basement studio on Hartford Street. "There are hundreds of singer-songwriters who go up there and just upload covers of tunes, and some of the covers and up doing better than the original."

He cited Boyce Avenue, a group who has been able to make a living by tallying up views of their covers on YouTube.

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"It ranges from these guys who are professional in the studio to the stuff I do, in my apartment," he said.

The father-son collaboration recently resulted in the production of "Storm," a song they covered from the band Lifehouse. The video was produced by Paul's friend Jake Williams, also a Westwood resident.

But next up for Paul is a project that extends past the Massachusetts border. By the middle of next month, he plans on finishing the production of a cover song by a band called The Civil Wars. That collaboration will be with another YouTube artist, Noelle Bean, who posts her own original music to the site. Both Hatfield and Bean will sing on that track, and they are producing it over the Internet and through the mail, eventually posting it to YouTube.

Initially, Hatfield said he didn't even want to get into music after watching his father work incessantly as a professional composer and musician.

The decision to head to Berklee wasn't overly difficult, though. Like Brad, Hatfield's mother, Gaye Tolan Hatfield, is an educator at the college in addition to being a professional arranger, and through that outlet he was able to head to college without having to worry about high tuition fees or student loans.

Hatfield is now pursuing a music business degree from the Boston-based college, and says the combination of the two are ideal.

And, after learning the ins and outs of electric guitar through tablature, he eventually dabbled in piano and bass, and wound up learning from roommates and friends at Berklee.

"I met my roommate, who's a singer-songwriter, and I immediately figured a lot of what music is, is getting out and expressing yourself and being able to have a medium you can communicate with," he said. "After seeing the songwriting thing, and seeing my roommate doing it and being able to channel all those ideas into one vehicle was really cool."

Brad Hatfield, who works mostly from his basement studio, is a longtime professional musician and composer, as well as a music educator at Northeastern University. He's won an Emmy for a piece he composed for "The Young and the Restless", and was nominated for a piece he composed for the FX show "Rescue Me", for which he's written frequently.

"It's all songs," he said. "Dennis Leary hates underscore. He doesn't want it to sound like a TV Show. My gig was, every week, to give them whatever music they needed. It could be a string quartet, it could be a rock band, it could be reggae, it could be show tunes."

And, though he works with his own students at Northeastern on more traditional aspects of the music business, Paul's father says the utilizing of YouTube is innovative and refreshing.

"I'm interested in what Paul's doing with the YouTube stuff," Brad Hatfield said. "It's a new fronteir, it's a new revenue stream. We're really in this huge birthing process. There's a lot of mess involved, a lot of pain. But there's opportunity, and people need to sell stuff and buy stuff."

To see more of Paul Hatfield's videos, visit his channel on YouTube.


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