WaterTower Music, Warner Bros.' in-house music label, was launched in January 2010 as a reimagining and rebranding of New Line Records to create music assets as diverse as the films, television shows and interactive games they support. 

Housed on the Burbank lot, in the offices occupied by Warner Bros. Records during its heyday in the 1960s, the WaterTower Music team works to discover the most compelling music possible to broaden consumers' awareness of a brand or project on a visceral level. They believe the right music can engage a consumer's imagination in an entirely different way than a commercial or billboard. A truly successful soundtrack is one that inspires fans to invest both in the music itself and in the film, television or interactive content on which it's based. 

Each project requires involvement, creative input and collaboration between music supervisors, composers, directors, producers, musicians and the WaterTower team. Being located on the lot in Burbank allows the team to easily and efficiently communicate with colleagues across any Warner Bros. division. 

From comedies to dramas, action adventures and everything in between, the talented and resourceful team at WaterTower Music helps make sure that Warner Bros.' projects sound as good as they look.

"adam&steve" is the new project from songwriter and internet personality, Elijah Daniel and Billboard charting producer Sam F.

In the last months of the 1990s, in the years after she graduated from Evergreen, Mirah would regularly walk from her apartment on 4th avenue in downtown Olympia five minutes up the block to her friends’ place, the Track House. On one such occasion, she holed up in their garage all night long with her four-track cassette recorder and their broken, out-of-tune piano. “It’s a small town,” she sang, over crackly, creeping keys. “I’ll see you around...I wish you’d move.” 

It’s sweet but sharp, like much of her expansive, decades-long catalog of beaming pop songs. And it’s apt intro to the songs she was writing around that time, all laced with snapshots from small-town Oly: the railroad tracks that run through town, transient friends who’d come and go on tour, the feeling of being a million miles from the city. 

“I didn’t know I was making a record,” recalls the singer, songwriter, recording artist and producer, twenty years later, on the brink of the reissue of her now classic debut full-length, You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This, released in 2000 by K Records. It was just that freedom, following her first couple of EPs and tours, that made the record gleam with possibility: the excitement of beginnings, of unfiltered long-distance longings, the miniature everyday epiphanies of becoming yourself. 

When it was written, Mirah was in her early 20s, immersed in a life of cheap rent, constant art-making, “distracting [herself] with the guitar and microphones” (as she sings on the album) and helping to run DIY cafes like the Secret Cafe at the Track House and the Red Horse Cafe out of her own apartment. Some days, she’d be at home experimenting with four-track home-recording. Other days, she’d be over at Dub Narcotic’s giant warehouse space, in its wide open second floor studio, the Big Room, meeting up with friends like Phil Elverum (who she had collaborated with in The Microphones, and who co-produced the record), Khaela Maricich (of the Blow, who sings on some of the songs), and really, whichever cast of friends were around and wanted to play music. 

“Calvin had incredible equipment and was so generous and trusting,” Mirah reflects, mentioning vintage gear like an old Hammond B3 organ with a Leslie speaker used on “Of Pressure”. “He gave us all keys. Sometimes we’d go in there to record and Arrington [de Dionyso] would be asleep on a mattress on the floor because he had been recording all night. We didn’t even have a schedule. We were all involved with each other’s projects. If I needed a choir, we’d just call everybody up and they’d walk over. And a couple minutes later, 10 friends would be there.” 

Elsewhere, there’s also one of indie pop’s most sweeping and visceral crush songs, “Sweepstakes Prize,” a perfect encapsulation of Mirah and Elverum’s collaborative ability to build sparse minimalism into clattering noise, to make the tension of the lyrics utterly inescapable. For its hooky drumbeats, Elverum set up two kits on opposite ends of the room. “We both played drums at the same time,” Mirah remembers. “And had them mic-ed so that it gave a natural room delay. We just had a lot of fun.” (It was written about the same person as “Small Town,” she recounts, laughing, a testament to the album’s rollercoaster of emotions.)

Two decades later, You Think It’s Like This... brims with timelessly necessary feelings: of dreaming in the moment, of not having expectations, making art because it’s fun, unsupressable exuberance even when the songs are not joyful. “I just hope people can get there again,” Mirah says. “My biggest hope with making music is that the music I make can do for other people what all the music I’ve listened to in my life has done for me. It helps me be alive. It helps me be a person. It helps me feel things. It helps me connect to myself and to other people.”

To hear the game is to know the game! 
CATCH THE THRONE: THE MIXTAPE: VOLUME 2, NOW AVAILABLE
LISTEN TO VOLUME 1 BELOW NOW. 

Catch up on Seasons 1-4 of Game of Thrones on HBOGo and tune in on April 12th for the Season 5 premiere. 



 






Volume 1: All songs sampled from Game of Thrones Original Soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi. All songs produced, mixed and arranged by Darius Leon, Samuel Gilbert and Miles Felix of Launch Point Records. Executive produced by Samuel Gilbert and Janina Lundy on behalf of HBO.

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