We recently connected with Scarlet & Geoff Gross and have shared our conversation below.

Scarlet & Geoff, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

Our path to a Merlot Embargo was long and winding. We had both been musicians since college, “professional” to one degree or another. Both of us realized music was something we loved and gave us great personal satisfaction, and, importantly, was also something we were individually good at. Singing and playing guitar in bands, casual gigs, and church, all of that was part of our income and craft. From that angle, I think we both knew we wanted some kind of career in music from early-ish ages.

But it wasn’t until we’d been married for several years that we wanted to start our own project together. Scarlet had always been a songwriter, and Geoff had been learning music production during the previous several years in his own bands as well as yearly Christmas project they were both involved in called The Jingle Boys.

The JBs were a collective of music-minded friends who banded together each year to make a Christmas album of quirky arrangements of classic holiday tunes, to give away to our friends and families as a Christmas present. It was here that Scarlet and Geoff really learned to work with one another in a songwriting/arranging/music production context. Which needs a totally different set of skills than performing live.

Merlot Embargo as its own entity wasn’t conceived until we walked away from what should have been a very injurious car accident. We were driving to visit Scarlet’s family in South Texas in our little Toyota Yaris, when, outside of San Antonio on a stretch of I-10 with an 80mph speed limit, Geoff reached down to turn up the radio (which we believe was playing the latest Jingle Boys album), and we found ourselves careening off the south side of the highway. Miraculously avoiding the scattered trees and gulleys, we came to rest sideways after maybe a hundred feet or so. The front windshield of the car was totally crushed and sat inches from Scarlet’s face. We escaped our little car through the now smashed rear window. As you can imagine, we were in shock as we examined ourselves and found nothing broken or bleeding. Some good samaritan passers-by helped us calm down and maybe they called 911, or maybe we did. In any case, at the ambulance’s encouragement, we went to the ER to get examined – Scarlet had a couple of knocks, which fortunately became nothing more than a bit of swollen eyebrows over the next few days.

We, and especially Scarlet, began to ask ourselves what our regrets would have been if we’d died in the accident. The immediately apparent answer was that we’d never seriously pursued our own music. Despite being a singer her whole life, songwriter Scarlet had never seriously pursued getting her *own* songs out into the world, although she’d been writing on and off since college. Post-accident, it was clear to us that this was something we needed to pursue.

Since then, the path to making a career out of this has been anything but straightforward. For example, a year after the accident, Scarlet quit her day job to pursue Merlot Embargo full time, only to discover that we were pregnant with our daughter Joanna a couple of months after. Kids, pandemics, and our own ages are some of the challenges we’ve had to overcome on our path to making this sustainable and profitable in what’s already a very tough industry.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Yeah – our band has a few different facets. One is the songwriting/music production side, which was the original idea behind Merlot Embargo. Our creations are in the indie/pop/folk/rock kind of space, and they often tend to have a sort of melancholy, or at least, serious, undertone. But that’s often paired with a breezy, lighter sound in the song itself. For example, our latest song, All Wrong, deals with feeling like you aren’t fitting in, and aren’t fooling anyone about it. The song itself has a sort of light, pop/folk aesthetic that gives a bit of whimsy to the whole thing, certainly more than the somber lyrics would make you think.

Another facet is Merlot Embargo the cover band. As you might imagine, making a profit from your own original music is a challenge, to put it lightly. Performing at private events, weddings, and other functions is one of the ways we supplement this and keep the original music coming. It also gives us the ability to occasionally pay our band decently, which doesn’t always happen in the original music world at our level. It’s also really fun. Helping people have a good time and celebrate is just a blast. We pretty much do it all: little acoustic gigs, cocktail hour jazz combos, and full-on top 40 pop band.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Honestly, the most rewarding aspect is creating things that will be here long after I’m gone. Whether it becomes popular with anyone else, publishing songs that will exist well beyond my years is immensely satisfying. It feels like you are building a legacy for future generations to discover someday.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

There is no overnight success and it has taken a huge amount of our own resources to get even to where we are today. There’s not really a cheap or quick way to create quality music. This is a job that takes hours and hours a week to accomplish not only in the writing and recording process but in post-production, publishing, and then following up with advertising and posts and content creation. It’s a full time job in addition to our regular jobs, which exist, in our minds, to fund Merlot Embargo. People can dismiss creatives as if it’s not a real job or is just a whimsical fantasy, or they can look at it as a viable option they can successfully pursue on a whim as long as they have a creative flair, but there is a lot of labor and skill involved in the background that no one sees. It’s worth it, but there is no doubt that this is a hard work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.merlotembargo.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/merlotembargo/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/merlotembargo/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merlot-embargo-0bb63b183/
• Twitter: www.x/merlotembargo/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/merlotembargo/
• Soundcloud: https://www.soundcloud.com/merlotembargo

Image Credits

Angelo Vasquez
Phil Eastman