 My jumping off point, people ask me that a lot is like when should you jump off? And it's like when you should jump off is when you're at a point in your career where reclaiming your 40 hours a week would add more value than whatever you have on the job side. So when I hear that from you, a good way I summarize that is, so it's not just, hey, I'm making enough money to live off of, is I'm making enough money to live off of and reinvest back in it. Otherwise, I won't be able to grow. What's up? What's up? What's up? It's Brandon. Hey man, Sean. I'm Kory. And we are back with another episode of No Labels Necessary Podcast here at the intersection of creativity and currency. We have a very special guest with us today, an artist by the name of Nate Rose. It's me. What's good? What's up? What's good? What's good, man? Appreciate you having me, bro. I'm a man. I'm glad to have you, man. Really appreciate you pulling up, you know, in the middle of your writers camp that you were attending. Yes, for no big deal. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was supposed to be there, but... But I think there's going to be a valuable conversation in general, man, insightful for the artists watching, inspirational for other people watching, because you got a story just the time we've been talking, you know, working a regular job, entrepreneurship, music, and you're all in right now. Yep. All right. That's the dream for so many artists. Just getting to where you are right now. I know you want more success for yourself, but that's the dream. And actually, that was how I discovered you, by the way. So it was a comment section. And see people I wrote, I scrolled through comments and I pay attention to people who like say stuff with like coherent thoughts. You know what I mean? Yeah. Not just saying crazy stuff. And a lot of artists disagreed with something. I think it was in reference to streaming. And then you had a comment that you have, because of streaming, have been able to live your career off of music. Right. So it's like, that's the alternative for a lot of people complaining about streaming right now. Maybe it's not perfect, but you saying, hey, look, I'm at a point where I'm living my career off of music just from streaming. I was like, let me check this guy out. And, you know, it's okay. These streams probably aren't fake because it's like, he can actually rap like I'm good. Then I'm going down to rabbit hole, listen to the bars. Let's go. And that's how I got to you. And then I was like, man, let me just do it up, bro, because he's pretty hard. All right. So that's how I discovered you. And I think that's a good place to start before we get into how you got out of the stream, out of your regular career, into living off of your streams and everything. What were you doing? Well, I've been making music since I was 15. Okay. You know, before that, I did a little bit of video stuff just messing around. But I quickly fell in love with it. I was like, man, I want to do this. And so even in high school, I was spent my weekends, you know, traveling to neighboring malls and handing out business cards and trying to get people to listen to the music. And at that time, it was, it was download my mixtape off of live mixtapes or that piff, you know, and then that evolved into SoundCloud and whatever. But I ended up going to college for music business at MTSU and graduated from there. And then I still wasn't able to do music full time, though I had found a little bit of a success in the live space while I was in college. I moved back to Cleveland, Tennessee, where I grew up and got a job as a social media director at a finance company. And then moved from there back to Nashville. I became a digital marketer at a tech insurance company called Asurion. And that was on a contract basis. And by the time the contract was up, I had scaled my music business to where I was like, okay, let me dedicate these 40 hours that I've been giving to, to this company to my own, my own brand. So wait, wait, so timeline out from job to the point where you say, okay, now I'm comfortable enough, scale to the point to where I can comfortably walk away from this. How much time was that? Well, since so I mean, I guess there's before I had my actual career, you know, I was in school. So I mean, the time that elapsed from the time I started taking music seriously was about eight years, eight to nine years where I started making good money, or livable money. Okay. Now was back in, you know, 2019 is when I went full time. So yeah, I'm 29 now. So yeah, yeah, basically eight years to go full time. What steps did you take to get there? Like, were you just, you know, posting or just doing some stuff and all of a sudden, like something hit and just caught viral, you know, caught virality and you're like, oh, I'm good to go because stuff is viral or was it a slow build where you were doing just intentional progressive stuff? 100% the slow build. I haven't really had a viral moment. In fact, I've only been on a few Spotify editorials, like I didn't, you know, I'm recently coming into more industry connections, but I've kind of always been a DIYer. You know, fortunately, I have learned the skills that have allowed me to create content, or, you know, market my own music and stuff over time. As far as specifically what I did, there's a lot of different eras where, you know, there's a goldmine and then it either becomes oversaturated or the platform disappears or whatever. So there's been a lot of different stages. There was a time where in high school, there was an anonymous question site called ask.fm. And this is crazy because this is even back in high school. So it's kind of spammy, but roll with it. So basically, on ask.fm, I found out that a lot of people on Twitter had their Twitter synced to the ask.fm. So whenever they answered a question, it would post a tweet automatically. So I'm like, okay, cool. So I started basically searching ask.fm in the Twitter search bar. And I downloaded this Google extension called link clump. And I basically could open up, draw a square and open up all the links that had ask.fm in it. So it opened up a bunch of tabs, right? And then I would go through and I would just drop like, Hey, my friend, you know, saying my friends got a song that I would love for you to check out or whatever. And then when they would respond to it and get posted to their Twitter. So when I did that initially, I had a song in high school called 100 bars of holy water, which is super old, but it actually got picked up by like hip hop DX and stuff when I was in high school, because of because of like some of the momentum that was gaining as a result of doing that. I don't recommend the spam tactic, but you know, I was green. Hey, man, don't be one of those guys. You're trying to turn people away after you benefit. Yeah. Did that early, that little bit of early success give you like the encouragement, even though it didn't maybe move as fast, you probably thought it was after that moment. But did that give you a little taste that kept you going? It did, man. I feel like I didn't really need much encouragement because I felt like it was just, it was my passion. Like, so for me, it was always like, I'm going to make it. It's just a matter of like continuing to keep my head down and just do the thing. Like, it's just what I like to do. I loved making music and the marketing part of it was like a tangible progress. You know, if I had data to look at or whatever, that was how I was able to judge whether or not I was moving in the correct direction. But I mean, as far as the, I'd never really second guessed it. Yeah. Oh, so like you said, man, it was intentional slow build. What did that look like? Like, especially, you know, of course we can't go through all of it, but if we fast forward to, you know, let's say Spotify is around and that's the main platform, social media starts to become a lot more of the space to go to for music. That era enter. What was what strategy have you been using? Well, initially, I was a little bit late to Spotify later than I would have liked. I think I'd been much bigger, you know, hindsight's 2020. But the reason for that is I had, I was really heavily focused on SoundCloud a lot of times in college because they had the repost feature. And so I was like, okay, cool. Like if I can, if I'm able to, you know, build a strategy around reposting, then I get to that's that's easy organic eyeballs. But then my friend Mowgli the iceberg, he was a college friend of mine. He's an artist. And he said, he was like, yo, like I'm making like a couple hundred bucks a month off of Spotify. And I was like, yo, really? So I had distributed my music on there. And it was just there. I didn't even have Spotify or whatever. But the two songs that I put up there had like 70 80,000 streams just without even ever plugging it. This was early. So this is when this is in that area where like Russ was releasing a song a week. So there was so much more organic potential at that moment. But then I rebranded and started to have started to build it up from there. So off of his advice, I started focusing on Spotify, then I started seeing some money from it. And so I started building strategies around that. So yeah, it was I think that was that was like 2016 was when I had my rebrand and started really focusing on Spotify. Yeah, that was that was the timeline there. So what did rebrand look like for you? And what does it like as an artist? Yeah, even get to that decision to say like, I need to rebrand. Oh, it was it was tough. But I my high school rap name all the way up until that point, it was was illuminate. You know, my name's Nate, but it was, you know, it was like, yeah, right. And I was like, first off, it was some people for whatever reason couldn't spell it to when you would search me in the SEO, you know, it would be like a Luminati rapper, you know, I'm saying that I was still building traction. But I got that big man, he was like, they hiding it in plain sight now. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, 100%. So for me, it was it was a combination of things that that made it to where I'm like, man, I really need to shift this this direction. And so, you know, I went with Nate Rose. And then that it was out of necessity because I kept running into these issues where people couldn't find me. Is this you? Is that you? There was another rapper name and illuminate that like was competing for that space, even though I was a lot bigger than him. But it was it was still like, you know, slight, just slight, I mean, he said, he said, I remember he told me on Twitter one time he was like, you need to change your name because like in a like anything to happen or whatever and I didn't I don't know where he's at. I guess I mean, that's winning. I mean, I'm on the podcast. Should have took his own advice. Oh, man. No shade. No shade. So okay, you get to rebrand to just straighten eight rows immediately. Yep. Yep. Okay. Why Nate Rose? Nate Rose, you know, it was my first name. It was short and sweet. It was four four letters a piece of visually. It worked well whether this is like just nerdy graphic design stuff or whether yeah, exactly whether it was side by side or on top of each other, it would be four letters, you know, could fit in a variety of different ways. It was easy to say easy to spell all my URLs are the same. So Nate Rose music was available on all platforms. Yeah. And I thought it had like a nice kind of classy punchy sound to it. So that's why I ended up going with it. Oh, no. So was it just a matter of updating all your platforms or was there like a fan base that you like had to migrate over or did you just like literally just say I'm gonna start over? I didn't know I did have a fan base to migrate over and luckily, you know, a lot of people were were hip to it. So I had a little bit of help initially, but then also I was moving platforms, you know, coming from SoundCloud to Spotify and those, you know, people are gonna listen where they want to listen where they feel comfortable listening like I'm not moving people to a new app. I can do that for, you know, the top 1% bottom funnel people, but that's that's it. So yeah, I did have to kind of rebuild, but when I, you know, based on how Spotify would do the auto follow off the presaves, I started getting really into just gaining followers because Spotify is really transparent about, you know, how to get in the release radar playlist. So, you know, I know exactly when, you know, first first day, first week, what my baseline streams are going to get, even if I don't post it on socials. And so, okay, that's because why for people? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, if you if you submit your music on Spotify for artists a week or more in advance, then you guarantee that the song gets in the rotation of all of your followers release radar playlist. So it's basically guaranteed algorithmic playlist placements. And that was that was one of the predictable things. So I always want to go where there was like a way for me to actually analyze whether or not what I'm doing is working and not just, you know, shooting shots in the dark, but going, okay, here's something tactile, this is not can build a strategy around this. So knowing that the followers were there, I'm like, okay, if I have 400 followers, and let's say 10% of the people are listening on release radar, you know what I'm saying? Cool, I have I have 40 streams first day. Okay, what happens if that that becomes 40,000? You know, 40,000 followers like, okay, now I'm starting to see a pattern that even if the other marketing channels are falling apart, I still have I still have this like baseline and then then it's just a matter of output and demand and things like that. So I focus heavily on building those up and then also presaves for, you know, for spiking the Discover Weekly algorithm. So those were like two organic strategies on Spotify. I was also early on pretty got pretty big into to seeking out playlists. And so I would do, you know, I tried my best to stay away from like, you know, body type playlists, but I'm sure some of them landed in that space. I don't do any of that anymore. But, but what I did do is I searched all my favorite artists that I that I feel like were upcoming the artists that were in that space and I would go down to discovered on playlist and I'd expand that and I would look at all the different playlists that they were on, knowing that they weren't added there just because they were a mainstream artist, knowing that these taste makers were adding them because they were also hip to stuff. And, you know, I would I would click and try to find their bios and made spreadsheet, you know what I'm saying? And reaching out to as many people as possible, trying to get placements. So I did actually get in, I had a song where I was rapping fast, and I got like a fastest rappers playlist. This was like the first thing the first thing that I ever did like 2017. That was when I first started to get any traction on Spotify. I started doing a thousand streams a day off of just this playlist at that time because it was just in between Tech Nine and Yellow Wolf and whatever and like all these different people. So let me take a quick second to say if you're looking for a music distributor that cares about educating their artists so they can get in a better position, you should check out Two Loss because every single Monday they have office hours where they bring on dope people in the industry to hop on calls, give artists insights on the future of the music industry and answer some of the questions they have going on in their personal careers. So if you aren't a user of Two Loss or just want to have a little bit more information about them, go to Two Loss on Instagram. That's T-O-O-L-O-S-T Two Loss on Instagram and it'll take you to everything you need to see, inform you about the sessions and more. Back to this episode. The things that you said man, in terms of just thinking out your strategy, and I love the fact that you said that you like to focus on something predictable because people miss that part of Spotify so much. The followers, the pre-saves, I hear people talk about against pre-saves and things like that, but it's because they're not thinking long term. It's like well pre-saves not going to make me go viral, right? Or a couple of other things they'll say against them. But if you're using it for the right reason and understand the expectation that you're supposed to have from it, doing what you did over time, nothing is a guarantee, right? But at least pretty much, highly increases the chance of progress and if not even eventual virality versus I'm doing all these short-term strategies that might make me go crazy in like a week, but probably not. Now I'm a year later and I'm still probably at ground zero, maybe level one and you've slowly crept up to level five being your baseline by the end of the year, just by doing something simple. So where do you get that mentality? Where do I get that mentality, man? I don't know, you know, perhaps. Discipline to be able to see that through. I feel like I've always been kind of an entrepreneur at heart. Like if I really look back at it, like I was like eight years old, seven years old, going to my neighbor's house, knocking on their doors, asking if there was anything I could do to make a little bread, you know? Or like I tried to start a skate team and got t-shirts made and stuff when I was in sixth grade. So I kind of always had that in me. I don't know where that came from. Shout out God, I guess. But I mean, I would say maybe I could attribute some of it to my dad who just kind of showed me the value of hard work. We had a pretty turbulent relationship and he passed this past September, but that is one thing that I really do give him credit for is like I used to play basketball and I mean, I was, you know, he would come and we would do extra workouts on the back end, you know, I would get into lessons or whatever with different people that he would find in. He was basically showing me that like, yo, you're going to have to be, every one of the people on your team is going to the same practices that you're going to. So you're going to get better at the same rate. Now your natural talent might take you a little bit further, but like, you're going to the same practices, you have the same amount of inputs. So if you want to progress beyond that point, you have to do the extra. And so, you know, those types of things I think might have stuck with me in some real way because I did see the effect of how much better I was getting in relation to my teammates in that same span of time. But yeah, outside of that, man, I don't know. I think it was just my, I just wanted to make music my full time thing. It was what I love to do. I was like, I want to do this forever and I want to do nothing else. You know, I don't want to work these odds and end jobs. And yeah, man, I was like, this is just necessary. Like if I want to do this, I'm only relying on myself. Oh, here's another quick anecdote. I was in a few different bands when I started out making music. And I was like, real serious about like, we got to get photo shoots done, we got to make songs, we got to do this. And, you know, we'd have band practice once a week. Well, you know, one week, you know, the guitar player wouldn't show up. Okay, well, we can't write songs now. And it over time, you know, these bands broke up in it. And I was just like, man, I'm pouring all this effort into something that I don't have control over. And so when I ultimately decided to go like the solo artist route, that was a big part of that was like, my success will be only, I can only blame myself, you know what I'm saying? It'll be only on that front. So So I hear all that. But I also feel like the fact that you worked the jobs that you worked gave you an advantage against a lot of other indie artists. Because when I think about a lot of the indie artists that I see having a certain level of success, when they have a little bit more like, you know, maturity in them, because they've made some age on them, which mean they had time to work regular jobs, like the Russell, when we were talking with him, he worked at, I think it was like an aerospace company and somewhere on like, I don't know, management or something like that, or admin side. And just quite a few other people had like experiences. And I think a lot of times, in this era where you become your label, you become your first investment for your career, people will also discount the actual skill set that you can get in the process of getting that money from a regular job. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the actual revenue from the from the job, you know, so in a period of space where ads were really going before Apple reduced the amount of data that we could collect, you know, or through Facebook, there was a period of time where I was like crushing it with conversions on, you know, story posts and things like that. And during that time, I was just funneling money from my other job, any expendable income that I had, I was just putting it into the music career. And I mean, I was a digital marketer. So, you know, I was, I knew how to build marketing funnels and, and, and, you know, A-B test creative and do, you know, do lookalike audiences and custom audiences. And, you know, and I had, I had marketing strategies digitally for, for all the different levels of the funnel. So, so I would, I would, I would remarket certain things or even content that was specific to my, my bottom funnel fans. I had that going simultaneously while I was gating in new people and the people that watched it for, you know, 75% of the time or whatever, I would then retarget with a second video, same song, different setup. So I was doing stuff like that for, for a period of time. And that was really helpful. And, and, you know, any downtime, I had to work honestly, like it was, you know, I could just run the ads and do the ad stuff while I was at work. But yeah, I think that's another, another thing though is like, I probably spent $20,000 over time on social media ads, maybe more during that, that span. And having a consistent job helps relieve some of the stress. It does. It does. Because, because if I would have tried to go too early, then I would have been, first off, it would have felt a lot more like a job. And secondly, I wouldn't have expendable income to do the things necessary in order to move my career forward. So my jumping off point, people ask me that a lot is like, when, when should you jump off? And it's like, when you should jump off is when you have enough revenue coming in that reclaiming your, or you're at a point in your career where reclaiming your 40 hours a week would add more value than whatever you have on, on the, on the job side. So When I hear that from you, a good way I summarize that is, so it's not just, hey, I'm making enough money to live off of, is I'm making enough money to live off of and reinvest back in it. Otherwise, I won't be able to grow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, there's, there's this thing where it's like, so I mean, if you want to talk specifics, I'm cool with that. Like, at my job, I think I was making 52 a year. This was in like 2019. And I had ramped up for making 30 K a year off of music to 50 K, you're off music by the time I left. So there was a period in a time though, in that window where I'm making 102 grand a year, you know what I'm saying? At 24 or 25. And I'm like, now I have tons of expendable income. Now I can take just all that 50 K, I can live off of this and I can take all that 50 K and reinvest and it speeds the process up. So if you have, if you have more of that flexibility, then though, when you leave the job, now you're back down to not having that same level. So it's like the longer you stay, the faster and faster you can ramp things up. I can outsource my mixes now. Cool. Now, now like my workflow has improved so much more, my output is better. I can stick to just creating without getting bogged down in some of those things. And so those are some of the type of decisions that I was looking at. But at some point it made sense because I'm like, oh, if I had 40 more hours a week, I could make, I could do all of this with it that would, that would speed it up even more than the bread. With that being said, as someone who's indie and you seem pretty adamant about like indie, I'm gonna stay indie when I spoke to you earlier. Okay. So one, why are you indie? And why do you seem so adamant about staying indie? And then I'm gonna get into my second part of it. Yeah. I mean, I'm really passionate about this. I'm not anti-label, I'll say that, but I don't think any label offer that's come my way has been silly. And it's because they're not used to talking to people that have a business perspective on it. And quite frankly, the more that I interact with those people, the more often I get those kind of deals that just pisses me off because I know that artists are being put in that situation. Now, if you're an artist who doesn't have that, then maybe that does make sense for you because you might need someone to pick up the slack. So maybe that's more of a partnership. But for them, they're looking at catalog buyouts or something like that with no interest in building a real partnership or a relationship. They just want to give me bread up front to capitalize on what I've built. But the reason I'm really passionate about this is because we're at a point where creativity is being and having a creative job is being more and more democratized, which is awesome. I know I'm on the same platform as Drake's on. So if you're on there, all I gotta do is just convince you to listen to my music. But in the old music business, I have to rely on gatekeepers to get into a label to have the distribution to have my CD and Walmart. And it's like, okay, so now I'm just relying on other people. But the reason I say independent is because you signed to a label today and they're going to be like, we need a bunch of TikTok videos for this. Yeah, you don't go crazy on content. You create solid content and you have a videography company or video production company. Media company. There we go. I'm not offended. So you could do the craziness on TikTok if you wanted to. You have the skill set and even the resources at this point. But you choose not to, which is another part of label deals. It's also a personality aspect of it, like finding a deal that allows you to move in the way you need to move creatively. And you've, the way you were talking earlier, I told you this. Indie artists, I was surprised because the way you were talking about like a writer's camp that you were going to have for your album, right? And then the people you mentioned were like some pretty credible people that you just collected to now be at your writer's camp. There's not a lot of indie artists who are doing it by themselves. Do you have management or anything like that? No management. And you're up there talking about, yeah, I'm about to have a writer's camp for my album. Where does all that come from? Like the, what specifically? How did you even learn that flow, right? For yourself or even how to gather a writer's camp for yourself? I mean, honestly, the writing camp concept for me was relatively new, man, until I had an album called Pie at the Party. And that was the first time I ever did it. And that was back in 2021. I used to produce, mix, master, do my own single covers, do everything. Like start to finish was all me, nobody else. And at some point I had this kind of realization, this went in tandem with how I was feeling. I had just gone full time. I spent seven months full time. And it really felt like a job. I was, I was like, I started to feel like I was losing the passion for music because it was like every, you know, every two weeks I got, oh, I got to hurry up and finish this mix so I can get this song scheduled so I can do this, I can do that. And I had a realization where like, I'm like, I had a song called No Stuff, which talks about this in that moment. But it was, it was like, well, I have what I wanted. I got the thing. I'm doing music full time. Why am I like feeling totally unfulfilled and drained? And I had a change of heart where it's like, okay, perhaps it's my ego that's preventing me in this because I am saying everything, I have to do everything. I have to have control over everything. Maybe that's also what is preventing me from reaching another level of success, which is reaching out to people that have skill sets that are different than mine or more specialized or better just in general. And I think I was hesitant at that time to, you know, split off percentages or have, you know, be in a situation, I've been burned a lot of times in the past with, with, you know, I used to manage a producer, I have all these different things that kind of blew up in my face. So I was real hesitant and not trusting of anybody. And so I didn't want to give percentages because then I can't maneuver with this way or I can't do that. And I think ultimately I was like, well, you know, I want, it was, it was, that was a big moment for me where as a shift from like the, the business being in the forefront to the art being at the forefront. And I think I've been just so happy ever since then. You know, just because I feel like I'm living fully in alignment with where I'm trying to go and all aspects of my life. And like that's, I feel like that's an ideal place. What's required to put on a writer's camp for your own album? And then how do you convince people to show up? Yeah. Well, what's required is that there's pie at the party, which is you got to, you got to split some people off. Either you're going to pay them to show up or you're going to say, Hey, there's back end money. I do my camps a little bit differently. I want to make sure that, that the people that are coming have a great experience. So I cover all expenses. I go, look, we're just going to tap in. I cover flights. I, you know, I think this camp is going to cost me around 15 grand, you know, but it's like, okay, look, I want to do that. I want to be able to have a chef. You don't have to worry about meals. You don't have to worry about flights. You don't have to worry about any expense. We're going to make music. And then everybody's going to get back in on every song we create from there. And so that's sort of the proposition. And then then you can look at, I guess, my music and the platform that I built and you go, you can, you know, figure out whether or not that would be worth it for you to do. I think producers are on the same kind of grind that artists are on. So they're, you know, they're like, okay, well, I mean, I go out here for a week and I make some music and perhaps some of them blow up and I got, I've added to the floor of back end money that I get. Let's do it. That's dope, man. Yeah. Just thinking about that, like the mentality to make that investment as an artist, like is, is, is rarer than we want it to be. But obviously, that's a part of why we do what we do, putting out the information we're, we do having you on the conversation we're about to have right after you. It's just like trying to like click an artist to be able to see their business that way to continue to invest in something like that. That's not even like I'm investing in my marketing. That's investing in the relationships and the structure in it. And that's, I don't know, man. I love like everything you broke down just from that. And I hope that helps somebody. Can I throw this out there real quick too? As far as I'm giving specific numbers just to give context, but I do want to say that I spent a long time not having any bread to do anything. You know, there was a period of time where I spent all my bread for an EP on a feature for $750 and the guy just never gave me the feature. King Los. Yeah, dude. So like when you, if you hear like 15,000 for a camp or something like that, if you're in that position, just know that like I went through every stage of this. I went through every stage from having no money selling CDs to eat lunch, like period in college. Like I did that, you know, in order to keep, you know, I don't know, keep things moving. Like I did, I mean, the first time I got a $1,000 check from a, from a frat show, it was like eight years into making music. And I just broke down crying as soon as I saw it because it was, it was just all this bottled up. Like I was just head down and I didn't really realize like that was, that was a little bit of validation after eight years of doing it every day. But, but you know, that, that's the type of journey that you need to do in order to get there. And you know, I tell artists a lot of times like when, when they ask me for general advice, like, I'm like, man, if you want to just make music, like treat it like a passion, because if you're not willing to put in a decade worth of everyday work and potentially not make it, you know what I'm saying, but put in a decade of everyday work and spend your own bread and, and, you know, make all sorts of sacrifices. If you're not willing to do that, that is perfectly okay. Just make music for fun and let it be that, you know what I'm saying? Let it be that, because then it can just be pure. You don't have to, you don't have to think about all this business shit, you know what I'm saying? You can just work your job and you make money and, or make music on the side and you can still release it. But anyway, I don't want anybody to be discouraged about the figures or the timeline or whatever. Like I feel like if at any point in my career, you could see, you could see yourself and your journey in that. So the last topic I want to touch on real quick is your song level up. You were breaking down just a meeting behind it. Can you go through that again? Yeah. So I wrote this record about, you know, I had found some success and the people around me were dealing with very difficult things and it made me feel uncomfortable. You know, the alt title for level up is survivor's guilt. And so in the first verse, I'm talking about issues that are going on in my family. My dad got diagnosed with cancer. My mom's, my stepdad just left my mom after a decade of marriage just up and out of nowhere. And so she came and lived at my house and, you know, just different things. You know, I talk about my cousin died at 17. And then his dad killed himself on Easter. And so it's like all these things that are going on around me. And I'm, I'm like winning. You know what I mean? I have, I've got a, I've got a beautiful wife. I've got like a great house and like I'm doing, making music for a living and all these things. And I was just feeling like, man, I don't, you know, I don't know how that's supposed to make me feel. So the second verse is, I, the opening line is they say money corrupt everything. I wonder if it's true. So I had to get a bunch of it to see what it could do. And basically I'm asking myself the question, am I becoming a worse person as a result of having more success? Like is this guilt basically justified? And, and so, but throughout that second section, I realized that no, like my character development happened alongside getting more money. So then why the fuck am I tripping? Used to feel the littest that some shit was popping for me. Now I'm just feeling convicted. And then now the third verse, I'm talking about friends. I got friends. I grew up with that, you know, you know, pop prescriptions and that did this and all these different things. So it's really just kind of a question of what is my, what is my place in finding success while other things are going on around me? And I think ultimately this will end up probably on the writing camp, but I plan on making a response to that song, a song that's a reference to another song with the same violin motif in it, but a different beat entirely that, that addresses that answer. Because I think I have the answer, which is that the price of privilege is service to others. And so now I mean, I'm heavily focused at this stage in my life on how I can pour into other people, how I can be the best husband I can be, how I can be the best, you know, friend that I can be to my friend group, how can I be the best leader for my employees? How can I be the best? I mean, just community, you know, you just kind of expand that sphere of influence. What can I be doing as a human being to pour into all these other people? And, you know, whether it's advice, whether it's like just being there to help them, you know, change a tire or pick them up for something or anything like that, like, how can I pour into these people and help elevate that based on the lessons and the comfortability and the peace and the stability that I have gained. So that's more or less what it is. Love a lot. That was perfect. I don't even have any follow-up for that, man. That's beautiful, man. Well, look, we appreciate having you and we're definitely going to have to have you again. I'm with it. I'm with it. You just let me know. Say the word. Well, everybody, this is yet another episode of No Labels Necessary Podcast. I'm Brandon Shawn. You know, I'm Colbert. And I'm Nate Rose. And we don't forget No Labels Necessary for real. Yeah. Appreciate you for watching. If you like content like this, you'll love seeing our amusing marketing strategies that we use as an agency to actually blow up artists to millions and even billions of streams that are available for free at nolabelsnecessary.com. And the cool part about it that's going to really make you love it is we don't have to be all entertaining and add all this fluff just to get some use that we do on YouTube. We get straight to the information. There's play-by-play and courses that give you a breakdown of every step that you should do to get success. And you have the ability to have communication with us. We get on live talks, a lot of cool things for members. And it's free just to hop in. 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