I’ve now been back long enough to start drawing conclusions from the experiences of the past 5 weeks. The initial goal was to become immersed in the city. I feel this was accomplished. If you want to study the connections between the city and music, what better way to understand than through the eyes of a musician? From this perspective is where we were able to centralize our ideas and it also allowed us to immerse ourselves immediately. Knowing we might have potential show opportunities, everyday consisted of the right amount of work and leisure time to ask questions from an artist’s point of view as well as an audience point of view. (Audience referring to the people watching the city as if the city itself were a performance piece)

From here the second goal was to try and understand while Los Angele is such a musical hub and what was the way so many musicians became inspired in this city. Our listening playlist consisted of many talented Southern California artists such as Tyler the Creator and his team of collaborating artists including: Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt Domo Genesis and others that make up the group Odd Future. Other artists were: Kendrick Lamar (Compton) Pusha T (Compton) The Dirty Heads (Huntington Beach) and many more that I can’t remember.

What we found in LA was a mindset that fueled the ecosystem of the city. People everywhere were working hard to find new ways to be successful and proactive. The people and their common life style choices create an atmosphere the surrounding establishments have to cater to. You’re basically forced into eating healthy or terrible there’s no in between. The places where the gym, whole foods, acai berry stores and “green” stores are, are all together and visa versa for the fast food restaurants and convenient stores. Common interests connect all sections of the town and the people in those areas are working towards common goals.

From my musician point of view the city is like the music. Its what the artist has worked for to show the audience and let the audience observe and understand. There is no real connection between the city and the music like there is no connection between the acai berry and Los Angeles. They may not have acai bowl shops around Washington but its not because it doesn’t grow there – it’s the idea behind eating it and it being healthy – it goes with the mindset of the people in California. The music being played in LA wasn’t grown there; it’s a bunch of bands from everywhere else that play there because the music resonates with the mindset of the people.

The connection between cities and music is the people. Everything else stems from the people.

The image of the city of Los Angeles is not distinct for me; it’s not a skyline or an iconic building. For me the image I think of is a suburbia house with a business being started in the garage. It’s a person seeing the potential in their own dreams and rather than sitting around waiting for the opportunity to arise, they are up the time the suns up making opportunities with the people and resources that their given. The connection is to the audience; Los Angeles resonates with the audience because it’s where it is happening. But it’s made for the right kind of people. If you’re not ready for it will eat you right up. The connections ive seen between all artists – Steve Jobs to Kendrick Lamar – is that you’re going to get knocked down, but you gotta pull yourself up and keep going, because that’s what being successful is all about.

Last week we put what felt like four days of work into two days. Not only had we not finished the songs prior to accepting to play, we also had to look at this opportunity as the first chance to establish our name. In All You Need to Know About The Music Business Donald Passman talks about establishing a team consisting of you – the artist, a personal manager, a business manager, producer, mixer and an agent. Kory is someone who has looked out for me and help establish who I am today and is consistently guiding me to help better my career, I couldn’t be more thankful and honored to call him my manger. Steve is the business head; his mind handles the things that regard the affect of the company in a way I wish I could understand. We have established he will take on the roll of business manager and producer/mixer.

Creating a brand was the next part. Passman and the authors Dan and Chip Heath from Made to Stick have helped lead me to understand what a successful brand looks like. Building off of what makes an idea sticky; simplicity – what hooks an audience, unexpectedness – what keeps people’s attention, a successful idea also needs to be concrete, credible, emotional, and you need to have a story. Concreteness – puts a picture in our head and help people understand and remember. Credibility helps people believe. Emotional aspects make people care and stories get people to act.

Kory helped put some of these concepts into perspective of myself. What’s stuck with me since being here is the nick-name everyone has been calling me – “tuna” whether its got the prefix “lil” or “yung” or just straight Tuna Boy, its what it is. And it’s so hilarious. I’m a white rapper from god-knows-where Washington who looks like a surfer punk from So-Cal who plays guitar and should probably be in a Ska-band writing songs about woman and weed. Yung Tuna sounds like he’d probably fall right in line. It’s an easy name to remember and everyone calls me it anyway. Yung Tuna is simple and it creates mental “hooks,” like the Heath brothers mention, to grab people’s attention. You don’t just hear Yung Tuna is about to play a show and not start thinking of all the possibilities of music that he’s going to be playing (or she!?). Being unexpected makes people pay attention. I’m coming down to a shared level of understanding by establishing first and foremost that, yes, I am a rapper, and a concrete idea like this helps coordinate people to a better understanding of what I do.

After establishing the name it was ironic what the next people that we met had to say and offer.

Prior to our performance Hannah and Cindy asked me what our name was and I said Yung Tuna, and they said it matched perfectly with my style and we hadn’t even performed yet. (Steve goes by Dusty but the stage name for both of us falls under Yung Tuna). After hearing our music the credit they gave us seemed unbelievable. They said that they could see us playing festivals, and coming from two street musicians who just have a genuine love for music that meant a lot.

But what was really uplifting was the advice three people with established careers had to offer us.

The following Thursday we met with Robbie Crawford who is an “insta-famous” instagram photographer sponsored by GoPro, and a good friend of Kory’s. We got to hang out with him and his wife and play some games; converse and he also showed Steve some tricks on mixing vinyls. When we played him the song in the video below he asked us to play it two additional times, and he enjoyed it, but this was the first time we realized our music was credible. Not only did he give us his opinion on what he liked he also instructed us on how to spread our product, and offered to promote it on his personal page.

Unbelievable. Blessed. Blessed, blessed, blessed.

The support kept coming, on Saturday, while we were in Long beach, Cathy, a hairstylist for Kory, was the mother of OC’s best female rapper. When she listened to our music she immediately gave Steve the number to a Venue owner she knew personally and said we would be able to play there for sure and wouldn’t need to be a warm up band, rather someone should open up for us. Turns out she grew up with a lot of artists who were big in Long Beach during the 70’s and sounded like she was either the agent of, or managed a few of them. Her credibility reassured us of our goals and aspirations.

When I picked up Kory’s friend Berrick, who is a pro surfer from South Africa from the airport, him and I started talking about what I was doing in LA and I told him about our music. He was interested, being that his primary listening was hip-hop, I played him the same song as the one below. His response was “I got nervous because when I hear someone is a rapper and has a goal and is pursuing it I get excited but a lot of people don’t have what it takes, when I heard your songs it sounded fresh the production was great and you were good and new, I believed it.”

By being emotional in our songs and creating a story we have made people care, and inspired people to act. Robbie wants to promote our song, Cathy gave us the resources to get in touch with venues and Berrick wanted us to make a song for one of his surfing videos. It is so rewarding to feel the support we’ve been getting from these amazing people and reinsures me that we are on the right path and making the right steps moving forward.

I really can’t believe I’m only writing my third update. This week has been insane and is really still happening (why this late), so it is important to understand I haven’t had the time to fully reflect on the events of the past week.

It started with the street fair in Huntington Beach on Tuesday, where fish tacos are $2.25 and Main street hosts live music and a farmers market. Kory introduced us to two girls who are apart of the Good Vibes Tour, which is a group of people who put on shows for free or ask for non-perishables as an entrance fee to give as donations to the food bank. We got to see their “spot” for the street fair, which was at the surfing museum on a side street that connects with Main. They had some live music and a table selling shirts and pictures as well as a local shaper’s selection of surfboards. We let them know about our trip and talked about the possibility of playing the following Tuesday for Cinco de Mayo. We didn’t know for sure if we’d be playing or not.

The next morning Kory had a casting audition in LA so we decided to head out with him. We got the full LA traffic understanding this time. The past trips we’ve made it in about 45 minutes to an hour, but when its hard picking songs that you haven’t already played, you know it’s been a while. I think it took us two and a half hours to get there but we eventually made it. Kory’s agency was in Melrose, which we later found was the fashion district, and understood really quickly our wallets weren’t going to be of any use here. Every store was so uniquely designed and furnished you couldn’t actually tell what anything was, and then just around the corner there was so many signs for each building you were just as easily confused. It was like walking through a page of Invisible Cities.

We left and picked up a friend of ours from WA who had just gotten back from a tour with the YikYak app team. We brought him to Newport, Keaton, Tyler and Brandon came down too because Keaton’s mom had flown down as well from WA for her daughter’s baby shower. And on top of it all Haley who is also from WA and who was with us the first week we were here drove over from Vegas and we all had an awesome reunion back at the surf shack with a fire, food and Steve DJ-ing til 4 am.

After a second night of partying, we got a call from our friends asking to perform at the show in Huntington for Cinco de Mayo. We accepted. The following two days were spent compiling all the song skeletons we had and turning them into a performable half hour set. Of the forty-eight hours we had, half was spent entirely on reading or writing the lyrics a quarter was spent sleeping and the other quarter eating and keeping level heads. We performed well, had a small audience, but the important thing was that we showed exactly what it is we are capable of and explained why we do what we do and had a fun time doing it. Kory got some good film of it and I want to have it ready before I talk about everything I’ve learned from the experience.

In the meantime, I’m writing this and relaxing after such a crazy week and watching game of thrones. There has been a powerful storm swell that came up from the south and created XL waves at the wedge which is a local big wave surf spot here (symbolic of my weeks intensity.) The footage as been amazing but saturated. instead of maybe seeing 1 or 2 good shots of someone dropping into a huge wave, it was all over the place. People’s ability to have a camera on them all the time has created a tolerance for how great things really are, or maybe we just get so focused on one thing we ruin the ability to enjoy anything else. This week I started focusing to directly on wether or not I could memorize my lyrics and I exhausted myself forcing to work on it. But as soon as I messed up my first lyrics on the first song I knew that it didn’t matter because its just about enjoying the moment.  I took this picture last week and it reminds me that even when the waves get gnarly and huge and the wind stirs up, its usually when the sky looks most beautiful

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Feels like we’re officially in the second “part” of this trip. During the initial two weeks we were still settling in. Also, Steve and Kory both left the OC for a few days at the same time, so I had space to feel everything out, read, recover from the initial blast of traveling. Now that we got what we need, know where the basic necessities are (including knowing where the closest açai bowl, taco, and coffee places are), it feels like every day’s hours are valuable.

This weeks readings were from Made to Stick by Dan & Cheap heath. The book talks about how to make your ideas “sticky” so that they are successful in the world. Even the authors say it’s a little corny, but it walks the reader through the S.U.C.C.E.S’s acronym and so far I’ve learned that a sticky idea is simple, unexpected and concrete. “If you say three things, you don’t say anything” a simple idea is not a short sentence – sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We can use surprise, to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our ideas to endure they must generate interest and curiosity – be unexpected. For an idea to be clear it’s got to be explained in terms of sensory information. We cant picture an abstract idea like truthfulness because not many pictures pop into your head when you hear it, but we can understand a concrete idea like a watermelon because we tie taste, feeling, places we bought it, people we were with, all together to remember idea.

So, I started to take some of these concepts out past the walls of the surf shack up to Huntington Beach pier yesterday. We wanted to get a feel for HB especially because Steve hadn’t really had a chance to check it out. We skated for four hours and watched some surfers – from the pier – for about 30 minutes. It was a terrible day for surfing except if you were right up along the North or South side of the pier, which implies you’re either a local or a really talented ripper. I was watching one of the two, or both. I asked Kory and he thought based on my descriptions the surfers name was Kyle(?)

From my Journal:

“I knew he was consistent, first, because he was got two waves on the walk out, but he was more attentive too, on a poor condition day he was aware of a shift in swell. He paddled away from the line-up even before I was aware of a more northerly pushing set. By being aware he allowed himself more time prior to the set to position himself perfectly on the peak of an incoming wave, minimizing the amount of paddles and maximizing the amount of time on the wave”

I was trying to synthesize the ideas from Made to Stick and apply them to single idea of standing up on a wave. I figured there were three things that made this idea successful: Awareness, Consistency, and Positioning. But, like the authors say, these are abstract concepts and in order for them to relate they need to be explained so that they evoke our senses. I was thinking as if I were to teach someone how to be a good surfer when I came to my conclusion. A good surfer is like an owl. They’re aware always have their heads on a swivel. They’re consistent, self explanatory, they get what they want… often. And they always have precise positioning. Picking mice out of the field at night.

All these ideas sprouted from one sensory image of an Owl. It was a very useful lesson in helping me try and find ways to make my ideas, songs, brand, etc., stick in the worlds of music and marketing. I could be a little self-righteous of my lyrics right now, but I also don’t want to share anything too early, but there is some major progress happening in my writing game. I’m filling up my notepad with skeletons to songs that Steve and me are collaborating on (Steve’s Website) and wish to compile together the last week, when we are in Olympia before returning to class.

It’s eighty something degrees out right now. I’m so blessed. There has been so much progress, good food, laughs, intelligent conversations, meeting new amazing people, … and there are three weeks more of it. This is ridiculous.

-btw second time writing this, had no internet and deleted the first one…

We arrived Tuesday at LAX and I immediately ran into my Aunt and Uncle on their way to France for three weeks, ironically they had just got off the same flight as us. But as you’ll find out irony is starting to lose its effect, its got me thinking I have some ability to be at the right place at the right time.

My good friend Kory picked us up thirty minutes later. He’s originally from New Mexico but moved to California for surfing and marketing business with some modeling (I say surfing because down here it’s a trade in itself.). I know him through a mutual friend of ours, who ill talk about in a minute, and every since we met about 3 years ago, have always had a great time together.

We drove with him from the airport down to Newport stopping by a Costco to pick up some food for the week as well as handfuls of free samples. Driving down here would scare the Hell out of half of the drivers in Washington. Up there everyone drives in suspense that something is going to go wrong, but down here every one just does what ever they want so they made a few more lanes and decided to let everyone haul A** down the freeway. But K.’s got a V8 Chevy Tahoe, and I know you Greener’s will complain, but id rather be safe amidst the chaos than to lower my emissions.

And by the way, we’re carpooling. We got to the secret surf shack whose location will remain anonymous, laid out our stuff, breathed out, arrival: Check.

We surfed twice in twenty four hours, listened to a band play at a restaurant, Packed our recording gear and went back up to in to LA to stay with my childhood best friend where we have been for the past four days. He is a producer that started writing and recording his own music when he was thirteen. He has been on X-Factor and his bedroom-produced-version of their audition song Sunset Blvd sold over 100,000 copies on iTunes.

Him and his brother Wes and their roommate Tyler share a house that sits in West Hills with an amazing balcony to watch the sunset (I’m gonna put a picture right here of it). It is a always full of pop artists, fan girls, and social media celebrities working on music or videos or sitting around smoking hookah. The first afternoon we met a singer/songwriter named Spencer who had an amazing voice. He would have a final take in his first three takes, and his vocal rolls unbelievable. We got to watch Keaton do his work and how the creative process is approached in the pop genre.

Although Pop isn’t my favorite genre there is always so much you can learn in the studio from every single person in there. What I’m learning about how these artists draw inspiration is from all the things we used to listen to when we were naïve and just liked a kind of music or didn’t. When people really let go and let the music resonate with them, out comes these old styles and things you can hear from previous inspirers.

I can really start to feel the momentum now, and I love how much surfing has taught me about music and the process to building success.  So much is based just on whether or not you can continue to paddle out, but if you do every time you’ll see progress.  Just like in surfing you get thrown around in the waves to become comfortable enough with where you’re at, and with the music business it’s going to be the same way. But if I can continue to take the right steps, the way I manage those moments of chaos will make all the difference.

We have been reading All You Need to Know About the Music Business by Donald S. Passman and it’s ironic (again) that everyone we were meeting at Keaton’s place had been told by those in the industry to read that book. Its been very influential in helping me to see where I want to go with the brand that I am and the way I want to handle my business, especially in the “How to Build a Team” chapter. There are strong talented people that I choose to surround myself with, people with creative souls and lots to teach me. It’s important to keep these people around and be apart of what they do and have them be apart of what I do. This is really much bigger than I could have imagined, but all the pieces have continued to come together and I thank the people who got me here.

We are back Kory’s place enjoying a sunny April twentieth enjoying our veggies and waiting for the wind to die down a bit to go surf. Expect some posts of music we have been working on as well as a possible video or two down the road. …things are in motion…

Currently a month out. Still waiting for a response from a connection in Chicago. Still trying to fit the trip into a budget ill be able to manage. Still wrapping my head around the fact that Im getting credit to travel and experience a place I’ve never been to in a way I’ve always dreamed of. Madness… but I have high hopes.

This field study can give to me as much as I put into it. That needs to continue to be my mindset in order to get the most of my research. Chicago is the third biggest city in the United States, my momma’s birthplace, and my current favorite musical city (next to Seattle of course) and a city rich in Blues, Rock, Jazz, and Hip-Hop as well. Im thrilled I have the opportunity to live there for a month and take in fully everything it has to offer. I expect to be bombarded with opportunities to experience live music, learn about the history, and engage with people who have a love for both. I think the Columbia College will be able to provide a majority of these opportunities, but I crave the experience of the street as well. Ive heard of the many Jazz clubs and have an interest in seeing and better understanding the history of Chess Records, that I read so much about when I took a History of Rock n’ Roll class at community college. I expect that the opportunities will be endless, but that may not be true. I’m looking to find out where, like so many other genres have done before, the exotic that Chicago’s cutting edge musicians are drawing inspiration from. Im sure it will cross over multiple mediums so It’ll be important to stay aware of the full art movement in Chicago, wether its music, art, architecture etc..

I am going to be bringing some books about Blues and Rock to see how the styles came to be so greatly appreciated and created in Chicago, and how the musicians of 1900′s were inspired, and by whom. Another book is a history of Chess Records which was crucial to the creation of Rock n Roll and allowing black musicians into the studio. It will serve (I hope) as reference place to go to and from with questions and inspirations regarding my research questions.

Because I will not be in Chicago during the months of summer, some of the bigger festivals will be unavailable to attend but there are two that are scheduled that I will be attending. The first is the Urban Arts Fest, and the second a pop/rock fest which will be held at Millennium Park during its 10th year anniversary.

As far as living expenses and arrangements  go, I will need to be saving as much money as possible. Ill save most my money for food and transportation being that they are my heaviest expenses.Though I do consider myself a food connoisseur of sorts I will not be researching the food in Chicago so its not my priority to fine dine every night. That being said it’ll be important to know where to eat or wether or not to pack food while in the field.

Through couch surfing we (being me and Steve) are looking to stay with 2 or 3 hosts over the time that we are to be in Chicago. If location is a choice we will try to organize our research efficiently around the places we are staying. We are avoiding a rental car and hopefully by paying for a 30 day pass and having our longboards we can get around the city effectively.

My hopes are high, and I think in the next month before we leave I will be able to get everything I need in order to get the most out this experience. There is still more to be done regarding our itinerary, housing, and getting my expenses paid for, but I still have more resources to check out and time for my connections in Chicago to find some help for me. This is a month long endeavor, it wasn’t made out to be a walk in the park to get everything hammered out. But when I’m walking through Millennium park, I hope it feels like it is.