Misley - Fashion for Women

                      Misley - Designed and Made in Spain

Recently, Riveting Riffs Magazine sat down with Jeanette B. Milio who depending on the project she is working on sometimes wears the hat of producer and sometimes she dons the executive producer’s hat. During the course of her career Ms. Milio has garnered significant respect from her peers, networks, film studios and distributors for her keen business acumen and her knowledge of how to finance and produce a feature film or television and streaming series that will put people in the seats in cinemas or have their eyes glued to their television sets at home. We asked Jeanette B. Milio if she would be gracious enough to take us behind the scenes and explain the business side to us.

Jeanette B. Milio’s story begins in a small town outside of Cologne, Germany, where she was raised by a single mother, who was a hairdresser. At first glance this would appear to be an inauspicious start and far removed from the life she built as a movie mogul, but she credits in part, her success to lessons learned from her mother (more about that in a minute).

“I didn’t have any idea of what this industry would be like.

The one thing I remember that drew me to storytelling even as a child, is that I would come up with little stories and I would engage all the children on our street to perform the stories in Saturday morning theater pieces on the stairs in front of our house. I invited all of the other neighborhood kids to come and watch the plays and to pay ten pennies. I think I was ten or eleven when I started doing that.

I liked to tell a story and I liked to play with kids on the street, so I thought maybe we can do something here that everyone benefits from. At the end of the play that we performed we shared the money and we bought candy with it.

The storytelling was always in my brain, because I was a bookworm and I liked to write. I have always done that even as a child.

I studied business and I never really went into the entertainment industry. My first exposure was when I worked for a temp agency, while I was studying. The temp agency placed me as a secretary to replace a secretary who was going on vacation at RTL television, which is a larger German network that is located in Cologne. While I was there it gave me the first sense of what it was like to work in this type of environment. Lucky for me I worked in the entertainment department where we produced all of the shows that we had bought as formats from the U.S., like Price is Right, Family Feud and so forth. We produced those formats for the German network, as German game shows. As the secretary I was the hub for all of the producers. At any given time, we had between thirty-five and forty producers working on these different shows.

I was there for five years and then I was offered the (opportunity) to run a show for another network station that was a German sports channel. That was a daily health magazine show that ran every day at noon. It was the first time that I produced a show on my own, with a team of segment producers who were working for me.

I started working in Germany, first with network stations and then I was hired by a production company in Munich to be a film producer. I started working on a television series for ARD, which  Read More

Maia Sharp - New Album

Maia Sharp’s new album Mercy Rising takes the listener from the highs, of the beautiful, seductive and romantic “You’ll Know Who Knows You,” which may be the ultimate love song of this century, to the reflective and picturesque “Things to Fix,” about a relationship that has ended. The former, burns with passion, mixed with ‘I want you and nobody else,’ and the latter uses the metaphor of fixing broken and worn things in a house for what the individual failed to address in the relationship, that perhaps would have made a difference. The words, “What I should have said / And what I should have done / Ya’ I keep skipping over number one / On my list of things to fix,” will take anybody who has been in that moment back there again.

The person in “Things to Fix,” stands in contrast to “John Q Lonely,” from Maia Sharp’s 2008 album Echo, and he was also dealing with a relationship that had come to an end.

She explains, “It shows that I have been doing it long enough that we can compare the end of a relationship thirteen years ago compared to the end of a relationship now.

“John Q Lonely,” is just a crab and his reaction to being hurt is just takes his football and he is going home. He is not going to play this game anymore. He closes himself off. His reaction is to pout. If love didn’t like me then I’m not going to like love.

“Things to Fix,” is a pretty different mindset. It is open and she is aware enough to see that there is something at the very top of my list that I’m avoiding, but the crux of the song is procrastination. It is when you have something in front of you that you should really be prioritizing. All of a sudden, the screw in the doorknob is the most important thing, because you will do anything to distract yourself from the most important thing you should be working on.

The biggest difference between the songs is “John Q Lonely,” was a title that I had, and I brought it to my co-writer Mark Addison who I had been writing with on and off since my first album. It was from a phrase that we liked, and we created a character. “Things to Fix,” is real. I moved to Nashville at the end of 2019, and I found my place a couple of months later. Anytime you move into a new house there is always something. There are little things that…as cool as the previous owners were, there are always little things.

My marriage of twenty-one years ended in 2018, so I came here as a single person. There were things I said to her that I wish I hadn’t and things that I didn’t say that I wish I had. Since then, I have had the opportunity to write those things. We are really, really close and there is a ton of love there and there always will be. At the time I came here, and I thought well I don’t know how to fix that yet, so I am going to paint this room and I am going to clean the baseboard. I occupied hours of my time on the house things. The song is more literal than you might suspect.

I had the first verse and the concept of the title. A wonderful songwriter, Read More

Doug "Cosmos" Clifford - New Album

The album Clifford / Wright: For All the Money in the World opens with the title song and it sets the table for a fabulous collection of never before released songs from the 1980s recorded by Doug “Cosmos” Clifford and featuring guitarist Steve Wright who like many of the fabulous musicians who appear on this album, was once a member of the Greg Kihn Band. Keith England’s vocals lead the way and are well-suited to straddle the genres of Rock and Pop.

Doug Clifford is always a welcome guest at Riveting Riffs Magazine and he sat down with us from his home in Nevada to talk about this new / old album or if we may a record that should quickly become a hot collector’s item, not just because of the people playing on it or the fact Doug Clifford produced it, but the songs are also very good! Keep reading and we will soon reveal why this album took so long to see the light of day.

He says, “There are some really talented guys on this album and needless to say I’ve got some pedigreed guitar players. Clifford / Wright started with Steve Wright and I writing songs together and then all of a sudden, we were pretty prolific together. I said we better record these things or we are going to forget them. When I do that, I do what I call a finished master that would be put out in the marketplace. I was making records that sound professional and sound like what this record sounds like with the intention that someone is going to hear it (editor’s note: instead of an unfinished demo, that is usually very bare bones). I never wanted to put it out with just an acoustic guitar, dry vocal and say use your imagination. I don’t want people using their imagination, I want them to say wow that sounds good. Well yeah, we are making records here, we are not putting out junk. That has always been my modus operandi.”

Doug Clifford continues to talk about the album, “We had a terrific singer in Keith England. He is great. Steve Wright is an amazing bass player, but he is no longer with us. There are a couple of keyboard guys (on the record) who were in major bands.

I did my singer / songwriter album with Magic Window and I thought I did a pretty good job on the record and certainly with the vocals. I was proud of that and there were only three guys on that record, Russell DaShiell, Rob Polomsky and Chris Solberg (and of course Doug Clifford). I released that right when the pandemic hit, so the timing was off.

This record is happy, good time Rock and Roll. It makes you feel good. There are love songs in there and Creedence never did love songs. When I have the chance that is the subject matter that most songs are written about, so I might as well join the club on that. Right now, we need happy and groovin’ music. There are good grooves on this record. I would have to attribute that to the rhythm section being from El Cerrito, California. Steve is from El Cerrito as well. I knew his brother in school.” Read More

                                                 Cozy Rebel

Recently Yassmine Othman completed the short film, The Future Awaits, in which she is one of only two protagonists, acting opposite Kike Torres, a wonderful actor. In five minutes and twenty-one seconds under the direction of Roberto Pérez Toledo, both actors turn in a heartfelt performance and Yassmine Othman’s character mirrors the woman she is in real life, caring, insightful, a polyglot, and someone who both pursues her own dreams and inspires dreams in others.

For those of you who have not yet discovered the world of short films, you would do well to set aside some time to do so. Recently we have interviewed, directors, actors, actresses, screenwriters and directors of some incredible short films and The Future Awaits is one of them.

Yassmine Othman brings up to date concerning her other film ventures, “Also, another feature film which I worked in Tomorrow We’ll Be Dead directed by Michael Steiner premiered at the Zurich International Film Festival and the short film in which I was lead The Cake, directed by Andrés Eguiguren will premiere at the end of October on The Mill’s website and YouTube.”

Where Yassmine Othman finds the time to balance all the various aspects of her creative career, as an actress, a language and dialect coach and the host of her own podcast, Cuentamelo con un Café (Tell Me Over Coffee), in which she interviews people from all aspects of television and film, would at first glance leave one wondering how? Yassmine Othman however although beginning her acting career as a teenager pursued a very successful career in international business.

“I was working as a sales manager in Spain for an American company via a company from Gibraltar. It is a window company called Marvin. I was responsible for sales in Spain, because I lived down south near Gibraltar and my boss, Ray Llufrio was from Gibraltar. A friend of mine said this weekend I am going to be shooting as a stand in for a short film, would you like to join. I said I have never done this before and she said it is not that difficult, just follow his lead.

It was really cold, because it was February, and it was 6:30 in the morning. All we had to do was to walk side by side. The next day we had to continue shooting and I will be really honest, we shot from seven in the morning until seven in the afternoon. On my way home I stopped at a (sports store), and I bought thermal jumpsuits and I bought myself a thermos for tea. I got myself good and warm boots. The next day I was there, and I wasn’t cold. Despite the weather I had such a blast. I loved it and from that day I told my friend, listen I want to be a professional actress, I don’t want to be just a stand in.

Because my father was Read More