RED LIGHT MANAGEMENT

Starting with Terry McBride and Nettwerk 24 years ago, Janet Weir moved from assistant through the ranks, as well as physically moving to L.A. from Vancouver. A witness to the start of Lilith Fair, Sara McLaughlin’s hits, Avril Lavigne’s demos, Dido as a female voice on Eminem’s “Stan” and the Coldplay EP Yellow, seen and heard a lot of music. Finding—and signing—Old Crow Medicine Show to Nettwerk after hearing them at a Vanderbilt frat party, her eventual move to Nashville was inevitable. But it took Red Light’s Will Botwin and Bruce Flor to hasten the inevitable, moving the young manager into their fold. Now managing Sony’s breakout girl Maren Morris, Weir has plenty of leg to stand on—and the boots custom-made for walking to do it.

How do you shift or swerve around the classic management model?

I think we did a lot of things differently, though Maren did come from the publishing side of songwriters. We wanted it to be organic, so based on the other projects I’d worked on, I wanted to have a way to put the focus on music first. We did our own record, putting it out ourselves through Spotify. I wondered, would it hurt us with the majors? But I’d seen her social numbers. Knowing how much work needed to be done, I knew this was a way to do that. So if Maren wasn’t initially ready to release music on a major label, by the time she got to a major, she had momentum.

What’s your greatest triumph? How’d you pull it off?

“My Church” is a little bit of an outlier, but it’s where she is as an artist. With Country radio, and the way people react to it, we saw from the very beginning we had something. She played London at the O2 Arena and only had two songs on a side stage and pulled the audience in with no one really knowing who she was. A year ago, we released this song on our own to see what would happen to her. This week is my birthday, Maren’s record is #1, and I’m moving my family to Nashville. Sure, I could go sign a huge act looking for a manager, but I just really love being in the trenches. She’s doing so many things for the first time, and to be part of that? It’s incredible.