Impact 50 Fireside Chat: Red Light Management’s Mary Hilliard Harrington And Artist Elle King

The pair talked about their careers in a wide-ranging Fireside Chat with Pollstar Contributing Editor Holly Gleason today in celebration of 2021 Impact 50 honorees.

Harrington, whose vision earned her a spot as one of the year’s most impactful execs, said that too often, women aren’t expected to “keep up” on the road.

“Sometimes women, especially in the touring world, people assume that maybe they can’t tour as hard or can’t take as many days on the road, and maybe we’re treated a little more with kid gloves. But we work hard,” Harrington says. “At least the girls that I manage are killing it and work harder than almost any man I know. You know, going six days on the road and not washing their hair and doing it just as dirty as the men are. And I think that’s a testament to who they are as people. But I think people don’t expect it. And so I think that’s a perception buster for sure.”

King, a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter already defies easy expectations. She’s had a Top 10 hit with “Ex’s and Oh’s,” for which she was nominated for Grammy Awards in Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance categories. Not one to be pigeonholed according to any genre, she’s toured with Ed Sheeran, Train, Dropkick Murphys, Modest Mouse, The Chicks, and Joan Jett & Heart and currently has a single with Miranda Lambert, “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home).” 

King agrees with Harrington about the lowered expectations for women on the road. 

“[People think] the girls can’t handle that because girls are too emotional to be present, or to function through things,” King says.

But she adds that the thing that some consider a weakness is, in fact, a superpower.  

“I think that it’s actually a strength of ours that we’re so emotional because we can feel everything and we can handle a lot more than people give us credit for,” she says. “There would be maybe a perception of like, ‘Well, they are really emotional. And so how can they handle it on the road?’ It’s like we do it just fine. We do it great.”

King does find advantages to being a woman in the music business, though.

“But that might just be because I’m a bit masochistic and crazy,” she says, laughing. “With a woman being a woman, you do demand some attention. People think I’m hard to work with, super demanding on what I want and what I request and having standards for myself, but I think it just comes with the territory. But I think the powerfulness is knowing how to fight through that and be really sturdy and have a lot of structure for yourself. Mary is the most badass woman in this business that I know. She’s the one who helps me figure it out.”

Harrington says that’s because of women’s capacity for empathy.

“I actually think the power of being a woman is how much we care about people and what we bring,” she says. “We show wide open hearts and really take care of the people around [us] I think that also gives a bit of an advantage to a more transactional form of business, which I think oftentimes, you know, men can fall into.”

Gleason noted that King is “genre fluid,” a multi-instrumentalist who has appeared at Bonnaroo rocking ripped fishnet stockings and “throwing down on a banjo” — not necessarily traits that always endear artists to record companies that can often bring a cookie-cutter approach to artists. King isn’t concerned about that — her art is influenced by everything from bluegrass to punk, and her own creativity reflects that. 

“I don’t want to get bored,” King explains. “I want to be constantly interested in what I’m doing because it keeps it exciting. And Mary’s really awesome because she knows that I don’t travel just down one lane. So Mary is always bringing in opportunities and she doesn’t close the door on anything that could interest me or could be cool or could be a different avenue to go down. It’s a really wonderful kind of combination of creativity. It’s also the creative side of management that people don’t give enough credit for. I’m  really blessed that Mary brings to the table her kind of out-of-the-box thinking.”

Gleason noted that Harrington also manages Dierks Bentley, another artist known for not coloring inside the lines, and Harrington agrees there is an art to management.

“I think you just have to follow wherever they’re going artistically and create a narrative that tells what it is they want to say,” Harrington says. “And that does take a certain amount of creativity and vision. But they’re leaving it with the music and what they’re writing. [As a manager,] you try and put the plan around it. And I’m really lucky that I work with such individual artists. None of them are cookie-cutter. And I couldn’t do a cookie-cutter.”

It was clear during the conversation that King and Harrington are a dream team of artist and manager, and their admiration is deeply mutual.

When King was seeking management after an unhappy period, she says signing with Harrington was the result of “a little bit of begging on my part.” 

“You go through the entertainment industry and sometimes it’s trial and error. You work with people and sometimes it works,” King says. “In Mary’s case, it works really awesome. In other cases, it has been like pulling teeth, which is ultimately what led me to the unhappiness that then led me to Red Light and to Mary. 

“I met Mary and I saw the way that things worked and the way artists were cared for, and I saw that artists were happy. It’s a very sought-after thing. There was a bad choice that I made in all honesty but, sometimes, you have to take your own journey to get places. And I ended up where I was supposed to be.” 

For Harrington, signing King was “a no-brainer.” 

“She is such a force of nature; everything about her,” Harrington says. “I am always still so proud of her. When she steps on stage, when she records, the way she handles people, from the inside out, those are the kind of artists that I want to be around 24/7.”