Summary: In the 60s, he cowrote ”My Boyfriend's Back" and "I Want Candy” and cofounded Sire records with Seymour Stein. But Richard Gottehrer isn’t one to dwell on the past. Six decades on, he’s still a guiding force in the music industry. Over the years, he’s produced Blondie, the Go-Gos, Richard Hell and, more recently, The Dum-Dum Girls. In 1997, Gottehrer cofounded the forward-looking digital distribution company, The Orchard. His latest project, Instant Love, is the brainchild of New Orleans native, Allison Zatarain, an employee of The Orchard and GM of its subsidiary label, Instant Records. The project pair female performers with songs traditional sung by men about women. Now 17 tracks deep, the pair regard the work as a “living album,” a growing collections of songs that lives on streaming services like Spotify, that will one day be collected in a more permanent form.Thus far, the project includes legendary performers like Irma Thomas, who performs Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love,” and less established artists like Erin Durant, who takes on Buffalo Springfield’s “Kind Woman.” Zatarain and Gottehrer regard the project as a kind of on-going conversation with female, as well as a experiment in music distribution in a time that’s been fairly tumultuous for both.
