The leisure trade stays deep in mourning over the dying of Robin Kaye, the longtime music supervisor for American Idol, who was discovered murdered alongside together with her husband, Thomas Deluca, of their residence in an obvious double murder.
Kaye’s contemporaries are remembering her as a consummate skilled who had a eager expertise for working with creatives, and for her stewardship as an advocate in championing the music supervision career as an entire.
“She was a fierce advocate of supervisors, she was a clean, pragmatic and calming presence to all of us,” veteran producer and a founding member of the Guild of Music Supervisors Jonathan McHugh tells The Hollywood Reporter. “She was working with the Guild early, she produced our award present, she believed within the objective of serving to enhance the craft and ensure the larger supervisors had been serving to the smaller ones.”
Jill Meyers, who spent over a decade as music supervisor on rival music contest The Voice, mentioned she shared a detailed bond along with Kaye and Ginsburg, including that “it felt like we labored for one another, three folks from competing exhibits who liked one another and continually did our greatest to assist and increase the others up.”
Maureen Crowe, the Guild’s founding president, referred to as Kaye “such a vivid gentle in our neighborhood,” lauding her efforts as an early Guild board member and vice chairman, and for her work on constructing out the Guild of Music Supervisors Award present.
“She was empowered with an unimaginable ability set to make nice issues occur, and she or he put these expertise to work within the service of others to empower them and assist them succeed,” Crowe mentioned. “Her legacy will proceed encourage. She and Tom will extra sorely missed.”
Whereas Kaye’s attain within the enterprise was vast, these successes she’d cultivated for others is most obvious with Idol, which had imparted her with extra affect in comparison with the extra typical music supervision task. Except for the extremely excessive variety of clearances she needed to get completed for the present, whereas a extra typical program selects songs merely to soundtrack a specific second, on a singing contest, these clearances can resolve an artist’s profession.
“In the event that they get the correct music, that may be the distinction in having a profession or not,” McHugh says. “In a manner, Robin’s work was a gateway for nurturing artists’ careers. Typically artists received 30 seconds, a minute to get a thumbs up or down, Robin was the sort of particular person that might all the time go to the wall and be sure that if that’s the music that somebody needed, she would attempt to get there if she might.”
Idol host Randy Jackson mentioned on Instagram this week that Kaye “constantly went the additional mile, meticulously making certain songs had been positioned and cleared for the present.”
One in all her extra well-known circumstances was securing Led Zeppelin’s “Complete Lotta Love” for Adam Lambert in 2009, a notable success given how notoriously protecting Zeppelin is about allowing its music to be used on movie and TV.
“We all the time had been speaking about Led Zeppelin as a result of all people knew that we couldn’t do Led Zeppelin,” Kaye recalled in an interview in 2009. “I feel Adam introduced it up and I mentioned, ‘no, you’ll be able to’t do it.’ Once we began actually seeing how proficient Adam was, I had a sense they’d think about him. I couldn’t have requested them simply on the whole ‘allow us to do it this yr.’ They wouldn’t have mentioned sure, but it surely made sense with Adam.”
“It’s all the time value asking,” Kaye continued. “I by no means take a ‘no’ from anyone as a everlasting ‘no.’ This enterprise adjustments an excessive amount of and conditions change.”
As Kaye’s longtime buddy Jacquie Perryman, a guide for Paul McCartney’s MPL Music Publishing, remembers: “She was notably good at advising artists and creatives. She might actually assist discover music for the youthful youngsters who possibly didn’t know the older songs.”
Perryman says Kaye was like a sister to her, including that they first labored collectively within the ’90s after she employed Kaye at PolyGram to construct out the label’s licensing division. Kaye, Perryman says, was “utterly revered and preferred as a result of she was an genuine one that didn’t placed on airs.”
“I screamed after I heard the information, it’s so devastating,” she says. “Robin and Tom had been within the prime of their lives, they had been beautiful individuals who had been good to everybody round them.”
Each McHugh and Perryman emphasize that it was Kaye’s unmatched relationships with music publishers that gave her an edge within the enterprise.
“She might really clear superb songs for the present as a result of her repute and her relationships had been parallel to none,” Perryman says. “The enterprise has a number of egos, however she was in a position to work with all people. She wasn’t a self-promoter in any respect, she didn’t make it about her. She simply believed music supervision was a job that individuals ought to acknowledge and respect. And he or she liked artists, and she or he liked music.”