We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brad Williamson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brad below.
Brad, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?
I was fortunate enough to know very early on that music is what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn’t always sure how I was going to make that happen, but I knew one way or another that I was bound to have music in my life in some way. From the time I started playing guitar when I was 9, I very quickly fell in love with making music, playing music, and writing music. The resources I had access to as a kid (musical instruments, schools with a well funded music program, supportive parents, programs like School of Rock) allowed me to quickly and deeply expand my involvement with music, and by the time I was a teenager I knew one thing for sure: I couldn’t do anything else with my life, nor did I want to.
With that being said, the question of what life would be like if I weren’t dedicated to music rarely crosses my mind, if ever. My career keeps expanding in ways I never could have predicted, and every day I fall deeper in love with music. The love that I have for my craft is more intense than any other feeling I’ve had, and I couldn’t be happier with the path I’m on currently. Sure, certain scenarios have crossed my mind, like “what if I lose my hands/fingers” or “what if I go deaf” or “what if I have some terrible accident that keeps me from doing what I love?”, but every time these have come up, my brain still drifts back to music in some capacity, because I know deep in my soul that music is what I was meant to do.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Brad Williamson, and I’m a 25 year old musician trying to inspire others with my work. I was adopted at birth by an extremely supportive family who has backed me at every step of my journey, which began when I got Guitar Hero for Christmas as a kid and shortly after picked up the real thing at age 9. For my adolescent years, I played in local bands of my own and was a part of the School of Rock program, which gave me opportunities to play with other musicians my age and perform at venues like Red Rocks & Lollapalooza. I then graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2020 with a degree in Bass Performance/Recording & Production, and have since been living & working in Los Angeles, CA.
After moving to LA, I began working at Yamaha Guitar Group as a Quality Tester, and recently became the Quality Lead of Bass Products for Ampeg. Since working there, I’m proud to have been involved in the development of Ampeg’s most recent products, the SGT-DI and Venture Series amps & cabs. I also got to be a part of the official demo videos for these products, which has always been a dream of mine. Having a full-time job as an artist/musician that supports your career and helps you advance in your field is exceedingly rare, so I am incredibly lucky to have this position and love my work. In addition to this, I do hired gun work as a bassist locally which includes cover gigs, backing up artists, session work, and touring. I recently did my first full length tour in October/November with indie group Under the Rug, which included 25 dates all across the US, and I’m scheduled to do an even longer tour with them later this year in September/October. Living in LA has also given me opportunities to work with artists and companies that I’ve been inspired by for years, such as getting endorsed by Felix Martin’s FM Guitars.
In addition to all of the paid work that I do as a musician, I’m involved in several of my own projects. My progressive metal trio Vicarious, which I sing and play bass for, recently dropped our debut album “ESOTERIA” (which you can find on all streaming platforms), a record that I also did all of the mixing & pre-production work on. The album has so far been well-received, and I’m extremely proud of all 60 minutes of music on this record. We’ve spent the past 3 years writing, re-writing, recording, re-recording, mixing, and re-mixing it until we were 100% satisfied with the way it sounded. Lots of work went into making this music a reality, and the fact that it’s out in the world and people are finally hearing it makes me more excited than I can put into words. We are already currently working on new music to put out into the world, and I’m thrilled to put even more music of my own out there.
I’m also in an Australian cinematic-progressive metal band called Nova Incepta, despite having never actually been to Australia! I auditioned for the group back in 2017 when I started at Berklee, and shortly after started working with the band on the album that we released in 2020, “Visions of Arcadia”. The wonders of the internet made this band possible, since I’ve never been in the same room as the drummer and we recorded and released the album remotely. Regardless of this challenge, we continue to work on new music together and will hopefully have another album ready to release in the coming years.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
One of the biggest struggles in my life has been learning to care less about what other people think. For a large part of my journey, I would make decisions based on the interests and feelings of other people, rarely allowing room to express how I really felt about these decisions. The reasoning behind this process was what I recently learned to be “people pleasing”, which I couldn’t really see the issue with until recently. I was so concerned with making other people happy (or, more frequently, worried about making them upset) that so much of what I would do in my life would ultimately be out of consideration for others and not for myself. Whether it was joining musical projects that I didn’t actually want to be a part of in order to appease someone, lowering my rates to avoid pushback from clients, or even something as simple as lying to protect someone’s feelings, this impulse to please others above my own well-being ran deeper than I could have imagined.
What helped me to realize the damage that this kind of thinking causes was finally starting to take a hard look inwards. I realized that I have a very deep seated fear of upsetting other people, and that fear was driving me to make these decisions. While they may have provided a sense of short-term relief that comes with avoiding or postponing hard conversations, those decisions inevitably created problems further down the road. Some of these problems include deterioration of my health (mental, physical, or otherwise), massive hits to my self-worth, or the building of resentment that overtime would cause massive rifts in various relationships in my life. Additionally, I realized that giving in to my people pleasing tendencies meant that I was indirectly trying to manipulate the emotions of other people by giving them selective or untruthful responses, thus controlling the outcome of our conversation.
A massive amount of therapy work in conjunction with surrounding myself with the right people has begun to undo a lot of this damage, but fighting the impulse to fall back into my old tendencies is nothing short of an uphill battle. Every day forces me to face this fear head on, which is definitely an uncomfortable process. It feels like every conversation I have now (especially the hard ones), I have to battle that tendency of altering my responses to please the other person or control their reaction. It’s not a battle that I win all the time, but I certainly win it more than I have in the past.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
The road to where I’ve gotten to with social media has been an incredibly long, difficult, frustrating, and dare I say toxic one. I began seriously (meaning having an account dedicated to videos of me playing) posting to social media in 2016, after having a bout of success with my YouTube channel the year prior. I had posted an informal cover of “Uptown Funk” in my parent’s kitchen, and it garnered several hundred thousands of views in the following weeks and months. This lit a fire in me, as I had never experienced exposure on this level; I remember just months after the video came out playing a show in Denver, a mom and her kid came up to me and recognized me from the video and wanted to get a picture with me! The level of virality that I had reached was something I would chase for years to come by starting to build my presence on social media.
For several years, I posted as often as I could and started to see slow but steady growth. However, it was during this period that I started to develop anxiety around social media. I would see my peers taking off in ways that I wanted for myself, and then berate myself for not posting often enough or not working “hard” enough. At the time I viewed this feeling as a desire to improve and “do better”, but it was actually taking a toll on my mental health in ways that I’m still healing from. My perfectionism would flare up every time I posted, thinking “oh I don’t look good enough in this video to post it” or “I should’ve gotten a better take, that’s why the post isn’t doing well”. What I failed to realize was that all of these negative thoughts were self-perpetuated and held little to no value in reality, as I only began to see major success again when I got out of this mindset. I would post videos that I didn’t think were good enough, only for them to get millions of views and prove that these thoughts were just that; thoughts. Therefore, I can change them.
Nowadays, I post on social media when I want to and when I feel like it instead of following some imaginary cadence that is guaranteed to work, because I learned something else about social media on my journey: posting is akin to gambling. You have zero clue if the algorithm is going to favor you, and you will never know what might go viral. To anyone that is just starting to build their online presence, I want to tell you that it really is a numbers game. That doesn’t mean make the easiest content you can and spam it 24/7, but rather don’t be too precious about what you post. Highlight what you’re good at and find a formula that works for you. For me, that formula was simply playing in front of a camera and pushing the boundaries of my instrument until people started to take notice. But above all else, STAY AUTHENTIC. If you start blindly following trends and creating cookie-cutter content that isn’t something you truly believe in, people will smell it from a mile away. In today’s world, being genuine and staying true to yourself is a rarity. It might take time to see results, in some cases years of work, but these results do not define you. They are merely a part of your career, and mistaking them for the full thing can really mess you up.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.btwbassofficial.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/btwbassofficial
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/btwbassofficial
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BradWilliamsonMusic
- Other: [email protected]
@btwbassofficial
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3f8DAagPICsfUK3tzRa8tN?si=ed81f39dfe024ee9 (Spotify discography)
Image Credits
Sergio Petraccone, Felix Martin, Lucas Horne