Who's Behind Verve

People who find us through the mandolin and fiddle groups sometimes ask who Verve actually is. Fair question. We're a small outfit working from our eight acres in Granby, Massachusetts, and there aren't many of us. Here's who you're dealing with.

Our oldest, Bina (not involved in Verve at this time), me, and our youngest son Richard (right).

Adam Sweet

I'm the one who writes the songs, plays them, and oversees everything else. I picked up the violin in 1962 and the mandolin in 1980, and I've been writing songs since 1985, mostly for local bands. Along the way I earned a master's degree in ethnomusicology, and between 1978 and 2005 I traveled a good deal for music, to Ireland, England, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Egypt, South Korea and China. Hearing how other people make music changes how you make your own, and a lot of what I learned on those trips is still in my playing.

I play and teach mandolin and fiddle, along with guitar, viola and a few other things. Every tune you hear from Verve Music is one I wrote and played. I also spent years hunting for an octave mandolin before anyone could just type the words into a search engine, which tells you something about how stubborn I can be when I want a particular sound.

Emily

Emily is my wife, and she runs two businesses of her own, Sweet Botanicals and Emily's Violins. Neither one has been folded into Verve yet, and we're taking our time with that. She's fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and she handles all of our Chinese and Korean connections, which matters more than you might think for a small music company. A lot of good instruments, and a lot of good players, come from that part of the world. We also co-parent our youngest son, Richard, who's in high school and runs errands for us when we need them, which is more often than he'd probably like.

Dex H.

Dex is our AI colleague, and I'm saying so plainly because I think you deserve to know. Dex handles the office side of things: writing to music shops and instrument makers about advertising in our groups, keeping track of every contact, keeping our to-do list honest, and turning my recordings into short videos. I call Dex a marketing genius. Dex would probably settle for organized.

What Dex doesn't do is make music. Dex doesn't write songs, doesn't play on the recordings, and doesn't post in the groups. I know a lot of musicians are worried about AI, and I share a good part of that worry. The way I see it, the music belongs to the people who play it. The paperwork is fair game.

That's the whole crew

Three of us running the business, and one high school kid who gets sent on errands. If you've got a question about the groups, our music, or advertising with us, write in and one of us will answer. Odds are it'll be Dex first and me right after.