For a music exec, ‘disorientation’ is the ‘path to growth’

Long before he made his mark as a music executive, Albert was lead guitarist of the decades-old ska-punk band the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which he co-founded with his bandmates at 13 years old. The Bosstones amassed a cult following with their hit single, “The Impression That I Get,” and their 1997 breakthrough album, “Let’s Face It,” which not only earned them multi-platinum status, but also took them on tours around the world.

After his mother became ill during the 1990s, however, Albert began to reconsider his priorities.

“Life on the road did not feel right anymore and Brown ended up being the perfect place to reorient myself,” he said. “I loved that Brown encouraged students to explore their place in the world rather than stay in their own lane.”

At Brown, Albert did just that. He studied political theory, a subject that was interlaced in much of the music he grew up hearing as a kid, from Bob Dylan to Pete Seeger. “In the late '70s and early '80s, The Clash, The Specials, and Stiff Little Fingers galvanized that connection for me,” he said.

His journey came full circle when the Bosstones were honored with a star on the Tower Records Walk of Fame in Boston by the Clash’s frontman Joe Strummer.    

“I was at Brown working on a political theory paper when Joe Strummer arrived in Boston to give us our star on Newbury Street,” he remembers. “Strummer’s philosophical perspectives actually led me to explore John Stuart Mill and the birth of liberal thought in my thesis.”  

While his days of writing papers are behind him, Albert can’t help but refer back to the lessons he learned in the classroom. Many of these lessons have become transferable in his role at Giant Music, an independent record label launched in 2022. 

That includes the philosophy that “acceptance of disorientation” can be “the path to growth.”

“Helping to build a company is a creative act which I find enormously gratifying,” he said. “What I have found is that if you lean into challenges, it can provide a guiding light. The situations that we have not faced before or the solutions that we don’t yet know offer opportunities to learn and to grow.” 

What was it like transitioning from the stage to the classroom?

For the first year and a half of Brown, I was still in the Bosstones, playing other school’s spring concerts, and touring with The Offspring in the summer. I wrote and recorded music on the weekends and during breaks. I also began writing and producing for other artists. While at Brown, I took Marc Perlman’s Music & Modern Culture class, which I found fascinating and extremely illuminating.

What made Marc Perlman’s class illuminating?

I was just coming off a two-year world tour when I took Marc’s class. It was the perfect place to process all that I had done and to understand it contextually. It was particularly fascinating to study the concept of capital as it relates to popular music. For the first time, I understood what I had been through in three dimensions. The takeaways from that course still inform my job on a daily basis.

How does your experience as a musician inform your approach as an executive working on the business-side of the industry?

I look at the teams I work with like a band of musicians and constantly think of each executive in that context. “Who is the lead singer here? Who is the drummer? What is our creative North Star?” Seeing the matrix of the music industry is understanding that it is all about teamwork. We succeed as teams and not individuals, much like musicians do. To have a great band, each member needs to not only play exceptionally well, they need to be listening to what the others are playing to fit in as needed. If you over play or under play, the performance fails. Or in business, the goal is inevitably lost. 

How has this outlook expanded your view of what success looks like?  

I align success with authenticity. I encourage the artists that I work with to chase singularity and I think that our careers, when we are true to ourselves, can be singular as well. In other words, singularity is the destination once we have passed through disorientation. I studied jazz improvisation with Yusef Lateef when I was in my late teens, and he used to tell me not to worry about other musicians and that “you can only sound like yourself in the end.” He had a fantastic quote which he attributed to Thelonious Monk: “A genius is the one most like himself.” Miles Davis has another quote which also speaks to the concept of singularity: “Sometimes, it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”