Business

08/24/2023

Searching social media for Tree Paine and Yvette Noel-Schure’s names reveals their own legions of passionate stans.

08/24/2023

Ambrosia Healy and Dennis Dennehy’s first meeting wasn’t quite storybook perfect.
It was a stormy day backstage at the Tibetan Freedom Concert at Washington, D.C.’s Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in June 1998. Healy and Dennehy were already aware of each other — but they weren’t fans. Dennehy, then handling publicity at Geffen Records, had a roster that included Britpop band Embrace, and the band’s legendary manager, Jazz Summers, had recently suggested bringing Healy, a talented indie publicist he was working with, into the fold to take the lead for the act’s press.

To put it mildly, Dennehy wasn’t thrilled. When an indie is brought in to supplement a label representative’s work, he says, it implies, “You’re not doing your job” — and anyway, he still insists he’d “gotten Embrace under control” on his own.

Meanwhile, shortly before the concert, Healy had called Dennehy to discuss a different artist. Her star client, Dave Matthews Band, was playing two stadium gigs supported by Dennehy’s Geffen act Beck, and she wanted to review photo logistics. Still stinging from the Embrace episode, he rebuffed her. “I was like, ‘This guy f–king sucks!’ ” Healy recounts. By the time Summers introduced them backstage at RFK Stadium, they were primed for conflict.

“You were kind of an a–hole!” Healy insists today. “No, you — that’s not true at all!” Dennehy protests with a bit of dramatic flair. “You gave me the brushoff!” Twenty years later, he hasn’t quite given up on this point, though their circumstances have, to say the least, changed: In what feels like a plot twist out of a music industry romcom, Healy and Dennehy have now been married for 14 years. “It’s like [When] Harry Met Sally, without the friendship,” Healy says with a laugh.

We’re sitting on this July afternoon at Farm Club, a hip farm-to-table restaurant in Northern Michigan, where the couple, who are based in Los Angeles, own a home in the Traverse City area. They’ve been tagging in and out of here to piece together a summer for their 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son; Dennehy arrives a few minutes late, having driven directly from Cherry Capital Airport after flying in from New York that morning, and in a few days, Healy will return to L.A. for work. Understandably, both publicity lifers seem mildly apprehensive about being the subjects of a profile rather than playing their usual roles as seasoned pros ensuring an artist’s interview doesn’t go awry. When we order a round of pilsners, Dennehy half-jokingly quips, “That’s off the record!” Healy overrules him.

Over three decades in music publicity, Dennehy and Healy have guided scores of culture-shifting artists’ careers, as well as those of executives at the highest echelons of the business. “It’s a real name-check of major music industry events,” reflects Dennehy, 56, as he begins to unspool his history with Healy, 55; names like Jimmy and Coran (Iovine and Capshaw) pop up casually as supporting players in the couple’s personal story. From digital piracy to the pandemic, the pair has seen — and helped shape the messaging around — widespread change in the business, even if, as Healy puts it, “what’s needed [from publicists] has always been the same.”

Since 2014, Healy has served as executive vp/head of media strategy and relations at Capitol Music Group. Dennehy has been chief communications officer at AEG Presents since 2019, when he left Interscope Geffen A&M after 20 years. Together, they’ve navigated a turbulent, demanding music industry, and though their relationship has created conflict between them countless times ­— over Saturday Night Live bookings, magazine covers, Grammy campaigns and lots more — working in the same field, and the mutual understanding that has brought them, has strengthened their bond. “It’s not all kill or be killed,” Healy says. “In fact, the kill or be killed, that’s just the nature of what we do. But my greatest ally? I’m married to my greatest ally.”

Technically, Dennehy and Healy first crossed paths three years before their Tibetan Freedom Concert run-in, at South by Southwest (SXSW) in 1995. At the Austin Convention Center, Dennehy, who had just moved to L.A., spotted Healy and asked his then-Geffen colleague Jim Merlis, “Who is that woman? She’s very attractive.” Merlis didn’t know, so Dennehy later “did the brush-by” and saw her tag: “Ambrosia Healy, Ambrosia Healy PR.”

Both had established themselves in music publicity in the early 1990s. Though Healy might’ve seemed destined for the music business (her father, Dan Healy, was a sound engineer for the Grateful Dead for most of its career), she had settled in Boulder, Colo., with plans to become a teacher. While working as a cocktail waitress — and handling publicity — at the Fox Theatre, she saw Dave Matthews Band when it passed through the venue on its first tour west of the Mississippi in 1993; when DMB returned to town a few months later, she met its manager, Coran Capshaw, who asked her to do the band’s publicity. After graduating college, Dennehy had landed in New York with record-industry aspirations, and a short spell doing publicity at an indie German metal label led him in 1992 to the Geffen Records publicity job he would hold for the rest of the decade.

As Dennehy puts it today, he and Merlis “thought we knew everybody. You know, you’re in New York, you’re young, you’re…” “Full of yourself,” Healy deadpans. When he saw in the SXSW guide that she was from Boulder, his spirits fell: “I just closed it, and I was like, ‘Aw, I’m never going to meet her.’ ”

But by the late ’90s, Dennehy’s and Healy’s social and professional circles began to converge. Healy moved to New York in 1997, and though Dennehy was out west for his Geffen job, he kept his apartment in Manhattan, where he regularly spent a week per month. “All of a sudden, we’re having lots of mutual friends in New York, and so our paths started to cross,” Healy says. “Every time I’d be like, ‘Ugh.’ Like, ‘That guy is so mean. He’s so rude. I don’t want to be around him.’ ”

“And that’s what I thought about her,” Dennehy says. “ ‘What is her deal?’ ”

For professionals in other fields, a shared occupation might well be the perfect grounds for a meet-cute — but the very nature of music PR prevented that for the two young publicists. “Even your best friends, in what we do, are your competitors,” Dennehy says.

One of those best-friend competitors was Sheila Richman, then working in publicity at Island/Def Jam, who rented a house with Dennehy and longtime Rolling Stone editor Jason Fine in La Quinta, Calif., for Coachella 2001. Healy, also a close friend of Richman’s and Fine’s, was in town, too, and they all met for dinner the night before the festival.

“I get there and that mean guy” — Dennehy — “is there,” Healy says. “And over the course of that dinner in April 2001…”

“And into the evening,” Dennehy interrupts.

“No, it was the dinner,” Healy says. “It started with dinner.”

“I know,” Dennehy says. “We sat around talking for…”

“I was like, ‘Oh, no. I — I love him,’ ” Healy says. (Dennehy: “I was like, ‘Wow, this is awesome!’ ”) “We were sitting next to each other. I asked him for one of his shrimp from his shrimp cocktail as a flirting move and he let me have it. Cut to years later, I know he really doesn’t like to share his shrimp cocktail.” (On the other hand, when Dennehy plucks a crouton from Healy’s salad shortly after they tell this story, it goes unacknowledged.)

“I remember them talking all night and really hitting it off,” recalls Richman, now executive vp of publicity at Atlantic Records. “As the weekend progressed, it seemed like they were falling for each other. It seemed like it made total sense.”

Austin Hargrave

Even so, the weekend didn’t cement their romance; they would date on and off for two monthslong stints before encounters at a fortuitous Big Hassle Media holiday party in December 2003 — where Dennehy recalls thinking, “I need to get back together with Ambrosia Healy,” when he saw her — and the subsequent Grammys brought them together for good. Following short periods at Shore Fire Media and Marty Diamond’s Little Big Man agency, Healy moved to L.A. to run publicity for Capitol Records, where clients included an ascendant Coldplay. Dennehy, meanwhile, joined Interscope Geffen A&M following Geffen’s 1999 merger with Interscope, where, among other things, he was soon running point on PR for one of the world’s biggest artists, Eminem; by 2002, he was head of IGA’s publicity department.

“Think we were competitors before?” Healy says. “We now have identical jobs.”

Saturday Night Live is a sore spot for the couple. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s — with Dennehy at Interscope and Healy at Capitol, then an indie, then Capitol Music Group — they would often compete for the same bookings. For years, he says, “For one of us to win, the other one had to lose.”

“If I call Dennis, Ambrosia will typically let him do his thing and obviously hear what’s going on,” says SNL coordinating producer Brian Siedlecki, who has worked at SNL since the mid-’90s and booked the show’s music for almost that long. “If I call Ambrosia and he’s sitting there, he’ll be screaming the names of his artists in the background while I’m trying to have a conversation with her.”

In early 2014, Healy got Bastille on SNL before Dennehy scored a booking for The 1975 (“Made me insane,” he says), and in fall 2018, she booked Maggie Rogers, then just bubbling up and without an album out, over Dennehy’s priority, Ella Mai, who had scored two huge Billboard Hot 100 hits in the preceding months. “We were in a full-on brawl,” he says.

“It was quiet around our house for a couple days,” Healy recalls. “That was the time I was like, ‘If you don’t get it, aren’t you happy I get it?!” “And I was like, ‘No, I want somebody I don’t know to get it!’ ” Dennehy retorts. (Ultimately, they both got their SNL wishes: Mai played the show just two weeks after Rogers.)

By the ’10s, Dennehy and Healy — who bought their house in L.A.’s Hancock Park in 2006 and got married in early 2009 — had established a clandestine but (mostly) compassionate rhythm. “There are times we’re on the phone and the other one’s listening and you’re like, ‘What are you doing here? Get out of the room,’ ” Dennehy says. “Especially before we had kids, there were like two silos in our house. We always had to be two rooms away from each other.”

“It’s a mutual understanding,” Healy says. “These are our livelihoods. We have to be trusted by our employers. There were things we couldn’t talk about.” Or, as Dennehy puts it, “It’s a little cloak and dagger. It’s a little Mr. & Mrs. Smith in our house sometimes.”

Finding that balance took trial and error. In early 2008, a lawyer working with Dennehy needed to contact a prominent magazine editor (even today, they can’t share specifics, but Healy calls it a “cease-and-desist situation”) who Dennehy knew was a personal friend of Healy’s. Without explanation, he asked her for the editor’s number — “Back then, you didn’t have everyone’s cellphone number,” she clarifies — and, assuming good faith, she gave it to him. Backstage at a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Healy received a call from the editor explaining a lawyer had just called.

“We hadn’t just been dating, we had been dating for a long time,” Healy says, adding that Dennehy explained himself at the time by saying he was under pressure from his colleagues and was willing to do what he had to — even betraying the trust of the person he shared a home with — to get it done. “That was a big line crossed,” she continues. “We haven’t had many of those.”

“But you learn from that,” Dennehy adds. “You figure out how far you can push things.”

Their periodic conflicts make for good stories, but the couple are emphatic about the overall benefits of their shared profession. In no small part, that’s because while their styles differ — they agree that Healy is more methodical while Dennehy is, in her words, “a vibe guy” — they see the job similarly.

“What both of them share [is] they don’t do press. They tell stories,” says Jim Guerinot, who as manager of Nine Inch Nails worked with Dennehy (before the band left Interscope in 2007) and later Healy. “Some people just carpet-bomb the press. Both of them were always very clear about forcing the artist into having a vision for the story that they want to tell and then telling that story.”

That extends to the demands of the gig itself. “We understand what the pull of the job is and where you need to be at a certain time,” Dennehy says, recalling an ex who “couldn’t comprehend why I was at CBGB’s until three in the morning every night.” When his and Healy’s newborn daughter was just a few weeks old, she understood when Dennehy had to fly to Dublin to shoot a U2 magazine cover: “She’s like, ‘Yeah, you have to go.’ ”

Both now laugh about their years facing off in label PR. Dennehy’s pivot into the live space was unexpectedly tumultuous — less than a year after assuming his AEG role, he ended up navigating the biggest calamity that sector has ever faced, the coronavirus pandemic. But they’re noticeably relieved that his new gig has helped ease their professional tensions.

“We’re not competing anymore,” says Dennehy before Healy cuts in: “Actually, it’s kind of more fun than it has ever been.” 

This story will appear in the Aug. 26, 2023, issue of Billboard.

One recent Sunday, Shore Fire Media founder and CEO Marilyn Laverty was paddleboarding when she experienced a publicist’s worst nightmare: She dropped her cellphone in New Jersey’s Shark River inlet and watched it slowly sink, rendering her incommunicado. “Carrying a phone when you’re paddleboarding isn’t really necessary or advisable,” Laverty admits now. But as a publicist, she adds, “I’m more comfortable with it on my person.”
Consider it an occupational hazard. Laverty has navigated the often murky waters of public relations for over 45 years — expanding from handling iconic artists like Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt and Elvis Costello to representing venues, tech companies, streaming services, documentaries, entrepreneurs and even athletes.

After trying her hand at journalism — her first job out of Cornell was as an editorial assistant at the Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal — and deciding it wasn’t for her, she joined Columbia Records’ publicity department as an assistant in 1977. She briefly jumped to RCA before returning to Columbia in 1979, ultimately rising to vp and running the publicity department. In 1990, with assurances from Springsteen’s and Wynton Marsalis’ managers that they would continue working with her, she struck out on her own, starting Shore Fire in her Brooklyn Heights apartment.

Like most publicists, Laverty is much more comfortable pitching her clients than talking about herself. She answers questions cautiously and deliberately and suggests specific angles — like focusing more on Shore Fire’s present (say, exciting new clients like best new artist Grammy winner Samara Joy) than its past, or highlighting her 45-person staff rather than herself (including her executive team of senior vps Mark Satlof — her second hire in 1990 — Rebecca Shapiro, Matt Hanks and Allison Elbl, all of whom have their own high-profile clients and oversee various staff or operations in Shore Fire’s Brooklyn Heights headquarters or its offices in Nashville and Los Angeles).

That same strategic focus and attention to detail has made Shore Fire one of the leading independent PR firms of the last 30 years and Laverty the only indie publicist with whom Springsteen has ever worked. “We and Marilyn have been a match for the last 40 years,” says his manager, Jon Landau. “She has no agenda except for the artists, is a master communicator, is entirely networked, is respected in all corners of the industry and is not shy when — tactfully — disagreeing with management. In fact, she can be incredibly stubborn, but she’s usually — not always! — right.”

How soon after you launched Shore Fire in 1990 were you sure you would make it?

From the start I knew it would work. We had a lot of great artists and we grew slowly. We never had to have layoffs because we grew too quickly. Starting in my apartment was definitely cost-conscious, but within two years we moved to an office in Brooklyn Heights, and after a few years [we] moved to our current space and have been there now for 25 years.

What is something you learned in your early days from a client or mentor that has stuck with you?

Being able to work with [Springsteen] at the beginning of my career was the greatest lesson in knowing yourself. He’s not only one of the most incredible artists of our era, but he knows who he is like no one else. He doesn’t focus on what other artists get. He is really pursuing his own vision and his own way. It has been a lesson that I’ve taken to everybody I’ve worked with, to try to get them to articulate their personal vision and try to honor it with everything we do.

Last November, his comments to Rolling Stone about dynamic pricing for his current tour, and how high some prices were, generated some controversy. Do you prep him for such interviews?

We always let Bruce know in advance about the overall content of an interview, and Bruce always answers questions entirely on his own. I think the thing people love most about Bruce Springsteen is his honesty, his realness. He’s like that in interviews, too. He says what he thinks. It’s honest, not tailored to get a certain response. It’s direct. I respect that.

How has your evolution into so many different areas of PR come about?

One of Shore Fire’s greatest strengths is our brainpower with all 45 staffers. There’s a lot of variety within our roster, and it’s constantly changing because it really reflects not just me and my tastes, but the whole collective. There are so many staff who’ve been with the company over 10 years, over 20 years, but it’s very exciting when the new staff are telling us what they care about and bringing in clients. We’ve developed the roster around the interests of the staff.

Marilyn Laverty photographed on August 15, 2023 at Shore Fire Media in Brooklyn Heights.

Meredith Jenks

Addressing allegations of misconduct is common for artists now. How does Shore Fire handle those situations?

I think all of us publicists are facing some cases of cancel culture on an individual basis, [but] my idea is to try to work with artists who are — it may sound Pollyanna-ish — really good people. We focus on artists who are more known for their artistry than their behavior.

In 2019, Dolphin Entertainment, which also owns PR firms 42West and The Door, purchased Shore Fire. Why was it the right time to sell?

I met [Dolphin founder] Bill O’Dowd through [attorney] Don Passman, who has been a [Shore Fire] client. Bill shared his vision for building a great supergroup of companies. As PR changes more each year, we really become marketers as much as media hunters, and I felt that there would be something very dynamic with working with Bill and with these companies.

How has your role changed since the acquisition?

How we handle our campaigns [and] how we shape our roster are entirely up to us. I’m still bringing in clients, but at the same time, I’m devoting a lot of energy building collaboration within the companies right now, figuring out how we can work together and how our artists can benefit from their clients and vice versa.

Does a positive album review still matter at a time when everyone on social media can weigh in?

Holy cow. I remember when every campaign you had to get a review in Stereo Review and High Fidelity. A great review or an appearance on a morning or latenight TV show are still goals, but nowadays, we’re also putting together ideas for promotional events and partnerships. We call publicists “storytellers” nowadays and maybe that seems like a funny term, but by creating opportunities for artists to be seen at events or creating partnerships, you’re also telling their story.

Speaking of telling stories: Shore Fire differentiates itself from other PR companies by generating intriguing storylines on pitches, like, “This ambient artist gave NFL star Aaron Rodgers tips for his dark retreat.” [Shore Fire used this subject line recently in a pitch for artist East Forest.] How do those come about?

We have a Slack channel devoted entirely to subject lines. We frequently will put subject lines up to a vote, and we share success stories because it’s very competitive getting your message out there. Our success with artists is built over the course of months, but you can only build a story if people are paying attention.

This story will appear in the Aug. 26, 2023, issue of Billboard.