Mom’s in the pop business

Indian Hill woman’s career as songwriter and composer gets her noticed from L.A. to New York to Nashville

By Lauren Bishop

About four years ago, Margie Hauser of Indian Hill was sending the youngest of her four children out the door to kindergarten. At the same time, she was opening a door for herself.

Hauser had been playing the piano and writing songs since she was a little girl. A family story holds that at the age of 3, she climbed onto her mother’s piano bench and began playing Bach, mimicking what she heard on the radio.

But outside of her family and a few close friends, few people had heard any of the songs she wrote.

“This was kind of my little secret for a really long time, me and my piano,” she says.

Now, thanks to her own determination and a local connection that got her music into the right hands, Hauser’s secret is out.

Everyone from ’80s hit queens Tiffany and Taylor Dayne to one of the young stars of “High School Musical” is singing her songs, and Hauser has become an in-demand songwriter and composer in Los Angeles, New York City and Nashville, while maintaining her home in Cincinnati.

Hauser says she always knew she’d do something with her music. It just took her a while.

After she graduated from Ursuline Academy, she moved to Chicago to study communications at Loyola University and continued the modeling career she began as a Cincinnati teen.

She’d play the piano and write songs every chance she got.

Hauser doesn’t write her songs by putting notes on paper. Despite taking some piano lessons as a child and learning she had perfect pitch, she never learned to read music well. She’d compose songs simply by playing them and committing them to memory.

When she and her husband, Mark, started a family, she stopped working outside the home but continued to play music. After their youngest, Katie, started kindergarten, she decided to record 26 of her own piano tracks with a local recording engineer, Mike Duffey.

“I would listen to songs on the radio or I’d go to a movie and I would just be so frustrated,” she says. “I would come home and I’d be like, ‘I can do better than that.’ … I really wanted to get my work out there.”

Mark recalls eating dinner at Trio in Kenwood in fall 2004 when Margie told him she wanted to start a music-writing career. She said she thought she could get songs on the Billboard charts and in movies and win Grammy Awards. Once he recovered from his surprise at the confidence expressed by his usually modest wife, he told her to go for it.

Margie says she was happy when Mark, CEO of the Hauser Group, an insurance, merchant banking and capital markets firm, told her he didn’t know anyone in the music business.

“I didn’t want this to be about Mark or what doors he can open for me,” she says. “Because, really, this was my thing, and I wanted it, and I knew I could do it on my own.”

Mutual friends introduced Margie Hauser to Mark Liggett, a Cincinnati music producer whose credits include managing Cincinnati-based pop-rock group Blessid Union of Souls. Liggett sent Hauser’s instrumental ballad “The Journey” to Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Jason Dauman, founder of Dauman Music, which represents songwriters and record producers and places their work with recording artists.

“The first thing that strikes me is Margie’s sense of melody,” Dauman says. “That’s harder and harder to find in this digital age. At the same time, she’s adaptable to the marketplace.”

Dauman connected Hauser with ’80s teen idol Tiffany and another songwriter, Jay Condiotti. In a couple hours, the trio wrote the single “Higher,” a 1970s-inspired dance track that, last October, landed Tiffany on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart for the first time since her hit “I Think We’re Alone Now” 200 years earlier.

Hauser’s been working continuously since then. She’s writing music as well as lyrics for artists of all genres, from pop to alternative rock to hip-hop.

She travels to Los Angeles, New York or Nashville for three to five days every month or so.

“It’s not uncommon for Hauser to leave L.A. after three or four days with 11 or 12 songs, and all very good songs,” Dauman says. “It takes a special kind of person to be able to come out here and really focus in so many different areas.”

Hauser also works from home, writing lyrics, composing melodies on her Yamaha grand piano and recording onto CDs that she takes into the studio. She communicates with her fellow songwriters and Dauman by e-mail and phone while her children are at school or after they’ve gone to bed. The Billboard magazines fanned out neatly on the coffee table in her living room provide another subtle clue to her burgeoning career.

“It doesn’t interfere with family time,” she says. “I won’t let it.”

In fact, Hauser’s family has jumped into her career with her. Her children, all musical in different ways, won’t hesitate to tell her she should pick a different vocalist or change a song, she says

And Hauser now gets to brag to her kids that she’s worked with some of their favorite stars, and she can be the first to tell them who’s behind that new song on the radio.

“I feel blessed that that cool factor is still up,” she says, laughing. “I hope it stays.”

About Margie Hauser

Occupation: Songwriter and composer.

Home: Indian Hill.

Age: She declines to reveal her age, saying, “I feel 28.”

Family: Husband Mark J. Hauser, CEO of Kenwood-based insurance, merchant banking and capital markets firm the Hauser Group; children Missy, 15; Eric, 13; Nikki, 11; Katie, 9.

Education: Graduated from Ursuline Academy in Blue Ash; received Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Loyola University in Chicago.

First job: Modeling for Familiar Faces modeling agency in Cincinnati; later modeled for two agencies in Chicago.

First concert: Peter Frampton at Riverfront Coliseum when she was about 16.

Upcoming projects: Writing songs for new Tiffany album due out this year; wrote 13 songs for children’s movie “Alice Upside Down,” starring Lucas Grabeel and due out on DVD this spring; asked to write songs for upcoming Sandra Bullock movie and for Russian version of “High School Musical.”

Would love to work with: Nick Lachey, Timbaland, Stevie Wonder, Celine Dion, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Lopez, Josh Groban, Sara Bareilles.

Website: www.margiehauser.com

Margie Hauser has worked with…

Tiffany ’80s hit queen, “I Think We’re Alone Now”

Taylor Dayne (wrote ballad “The Fall” on Dayne’s album “Satisfied,” due out Tuesday)

Lucas Grabeel of “High School Musical”

Eliot Sloan of Blessid Union of Souls

Ace Young of “American Idol”

Antonia Bennett (daughter of Tony Bennett)

Satellite Party (band featuring Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction).