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It's All Good

Updated: Sep 30, 2018


vintage white convertible collaged over monet water lillies image

Valerie thinks she can drive us back to my house from Ikea without using Google Maps - bless her heart. Thank God she had such misplaced confidence in her navigational abilities;


this is how I met Rita.


Three wrong turns out of three and we’re driving past Gringo Jones - a garden sculpture menagerie of a gift shop down the street from the Missouri Botanical Gardens. Parked out front is a vintage white convertible that is….stupid beautiful. I had been thinking about convertibles a lot recently because I was conceptualizing a music video for a cover of “Hold On, We’re Going Home” I had just released. The concept was to fill a convertible with dogs and reframe the context of the song to be serenading said dogs…but aesthetically, obviously. So, yes, the car was gorgeous, but as we roll past I gasp when I see that her license plate reads “RITA,” plain and simple. I tell Val to pull over, she scribbles my “business card” onto a hot pink post-it we find in the glove compartment, and I hop out of the car to run down the street.


An older couple is wrestling a newly-acquired sculpture into the back seat of Rita. I pretend to look at some of the merch out front, then nonchalantly turn around and make my sudden amazement impossible to miss on my face. “Excuse me, but your car is absolutely stunning,” I say to the woman as she opens the passenger door. She laughs and says thank you. “I promise I’ve never done anything like this before, but I actually am a musician looking for the right car to use in a music video, and I never thought I would find a car like this that fit my vision.” Before I can continue, she says that I’d better get talking to Dave, her husband, because this car is all him. Dave circles around the back of Rita wearing what I would later learn is his daily uniform: a pale blue hawaiian button-down, jeans, and off-white tweed newsies cap. I pitch my proposal to him, throwing in “you can totally say no” and “no pressure” every other sentence, and hand him the post-it with my phone number and link to my spotify page. He says he’ll check out my music, then asks me to give him a thumbs up. I smile inquisitively as I raise my thumb, and he reaches out his thumbs up to bump fists. “Now didn’t that just make your day? That’s the thumbs-up-fist-bump!” He then hands me a tri-fold business card which, when closed, brings together two fists bumping with their thumbs up.


A week later, I get a call. “So, here’s the deal: people I know ask me to use Rita a lot. I would love for her to be in your music video, but I’m sitting here thinking, “Jeez, I usually charge people good money for her!” But you’re a student, I get it. So how can I make this a fair deal? Then it hit me: If you're up to it…” Oh god, here we go. “ I’ll let you use Rita if you try writing a jingle for my company.” I paused. “Well Dave, I’m intrigued,” I said, feeling like some 40-something Mad Men character out to golf with Dave. “Tell me more.” What am I doing?! Dave tells me he founded and owns a brand promotion company, My Brand Promo. Their slogan is “It’s All Good,” and they have branded their thumbs-up-fist-bump logo onto everything under the sun. “I consider myself a bit of a musician and gave the jingle a shot. I’m gonna email you what I came up with. It’s a spin on the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” but it’s “My Ba-rand.” The inspiration hit me when I was in my hot tub with a glass of red wine and a cigar. A buddy came over with his laptop and we made it in garage band. See what you think. You can use it as inspiration if you’d like.” I get an email that afternoon with the subject: ‘my guess is that you can do better than this.’


In order to be fully “It’s All Good-ified,” I visit Dave’s headquarters a few weeks later. Yes, he’s wearing a variation on the blue, vacay-vibes uniform. His clients include Fireball Whiskey, Barefoot Wines, The St. Louis Blues, and a handful of casinos between Missouri and Texas. I am introduced to every single one of his employees, who all smile and say, “you’re the girl from the Rita story!!” Jesus, Dave. He sits me down in the conference room and tells me about Rita, his mother, who passed just before he got the car we were there to discuss. he hands me a bookmark he had printed out for her funeral (he is a merch man through-and-thruogh, afterall). The bookmark vertically fades from blue to pink and has a portrait on one side, a list of her punchiest quotes on the other (I recall something about Pocahontas and the fact that she called the farts of children “shooting bunnies,”).


We share abridged life stories. He tells me he wants people to feel at home when they work with him, like family. “It’s All Good” makes you feel relaxed, familiar. He’s a merch man, he puts logos on whatever you ask him to, and he doesn’t practice any sort of thinking around sustainability and the environmental impact of his business, apparently. I have my concerns, but something about him reminds me so much of my grandfather that I’m actually pretty spooked. He shows me his desk, and I see my hot pink post-it pinned above his computer.


You can watch my music video, featuring Rita, here.

And, I saved the best for last: Dave’s website.

By Laken Sylvander

Images by Laken Sylvander

sunset drive in saint louis missouri with girls driving vintage convertible collaged

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