Mastin & Brewer’s man at Columbia, Alan Stanton left Columbia to take a job with a new record company being formed by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss called A&M Records.  With Mastin & Brewer going nowhere, Stanton brought Michael with him to A&M and he was hired as a staff songwriter. 

Shortly thereafter, Tom Shipley arrived in L.A. and rented a house around the corner from Michael’s.  Tom first recorded a song with Ruthann Friedman for A&M  released under the name of The Garden Club.  Tom was collaborating with Friedman who was writing "Windy" for The Association," and also collaborating on songs with old acquaintance Michael Brewer.  Soon Tom was also hired by A&M as a songwriter.  Michael recalls, "Tom looked me up and rented a house near mine. We started hanging out and writing, and it clicked.  Since we had the same folk background, it wasn't hard to come up with stuff." 

So in 1967, three years after they first met, Michael and Tom's first partnership was not as "Brewer & Shipley," the duo that they would later become, but as staff songwriters for A&M's Good Sam Music song publishing subsidiary. 

One of their jobs as pitchmen for their songs was to record demos of the songs being pitched.  It was something they never felt quite comfortable doing.  Shipley: "We saw ourselves as singer/songwriters and performers in the model of Vince Martin and Fred Neil.  We wrote a lot of the songs but never had much luck pitching them.  We were very stylized and never figured out how you go about pitching tunes."

They also didn't enjoy the corporate songwriting process.  Brewer: "A&M signed us as songwriters.  They wanted us to go into an office and crank out songs, like a regular office job, but that wasn't our cup of tea.  In fact, it made us hate tea.  I had a large closet in my house with a window and a sawed off tree stump table.  We wrote all the songs for our first album there."

Recognizing that Michael & Tom had developed their own unique sound, and probably sensing their displeasure with the process of writing songs as a 9 to 5 office job, someone at A&M had the good sense to green-light them to record their own songs for an A&M record album.  A&M brought in Stanton and Jerry Rioppelle to produce them.  Michael & Tom asked a couple of musician friends including neighbor Jim Messina to help out.  A&M hired a group of wonderful L.A. studio musicians later famous within the industry as The Wrecking Crew.  Some of the recording was done at the home studio of keyboardist Leon Russell (known as Russell Bridges at that time). What resulted was Michael and Tom becoming Brewer & Shipley and of course their wonderful lost classic debut LP Down In L.A..