We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful HVXLII. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with HVXLII below.

HVXLII, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

Being a creative and artist these days is surpringily difficult. It takes time, money, connections, resources, dedication, ambition, drive, and so much self-motivation it’s almost crazy. And when I started this journey nearly 12 years ago, I had no idea I’d have to wear the hats of every member of a musicians team at the same time while learning to be a full-time content creator on top of a full-time music maker. It’s a lot of pressure, but I can’t imagine myself doing anything else. In fact, for the past year I’ve been working the front desk at a local tattoo shop and in two days I’ll be leaving that job to go back to making music full time.

See, one year ago my financial situation was bad. The very little money I has was very generously coming from family and a few pretty decent royalty checks sprinkled through the year from past higher profile collaborations. I very quickly realized that music alone wasn’t going to cut it, so the job hunt began and I found myself in a new position working reception for what would quickly become some of the coolest people I have had the privilege to know.

For a decent amount of time, things were pretty good. But slowly this nagging feeling started to creep back in. A feeling that I didn’t belong here. Not in the sense that my coworkers were bad and insufferable, but in the sense that it was hard to watch so many artists do what they love every day while I had put the art I loved on the back burner. That’s when things started to change.

Over the next few months the ideas and melodies and lyrics started pouring back into my head, but I’d have to let them go since I didn’t have the time to sit with them and guide them into new projects and it killed me. I hated that feeling. It had been so long since I’d had such consistent inspirations and nearly every single one was being sent back into the ether of my mind. So I made the choice to leave and set back out on my own with new perspectives and renewed sense of confidence.

I guess what I’m trying to say is; sometime it takes stepping away from the things that we love to make us appreciate them again.

HVXLII, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Hej, hi, hello! My name is HVXLII (read: Huxley) and I’m an electronic musician and songwriter based out of Salt Lake City, UT. Like a lot of others in my industry, I sort of just ended up here on accident after a very long series of restarts, detours, and happy accidents. The journey could best be summed up like this though. Musical theater kid realizes its more fun to write his own songs, leverages his knack for technology and quick learning to pick up music production and songwriting, gets lots of help from mentors and friends along the way, and here we are! Where it gets interesting though, is that love to write heartbreak songs that don’t feel sad. I’m working on branching out more, but if that’s your vibe…come find me on streaming platforms all over the world!

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Support your local artists! Every big artist in any industry you can think was mostly likely a small local artist at some point in their journey, and if you want to see a thriving creative ecosystem globally and locally, we need to be supporting the artists in our communities. Find your favorites and become ride or die stans. Buy their art when you can. Share their posts. Annoy your friends by sending them that artist’s new work. Support them in any way you can.

And if we zoom out to a larger level, we need to pay our artists more. Speaking as musician who makes fractions of a cent per stream ($0.003 to $0.005 from Spotify) we need to push for a change. Musicians cannot and will not survive if we don’t push for companies like Spotify to pay a fair share, and we need to push for songwriters to get their fair share as well. If you’re wondering what you can do to help, a great way to start is by looking into the credits of your favorite songs and keeping tabs on those songwriters! The more we champion them like we do producers and artists, the more we can start to push for change starting with the people who matter most, the listeners.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

For a lot of people, music is viewed as a hobby, not a profession. Which is fascinating, because those same people would turn around and say “Well, it’s different for [insert their favorite artist here]!” That disconnect always amazes me, because at some point their favorite artist was likely a nobody chasing after their dream career too. But if they could realize the amount of work it takes to make their favorite pieces of media, be it music or otherwise, that idea would right out of their head.

Being a creative at any stage, but particularly one that’s making an income, is a full time job. You not only have to make your art, but you have to get it in front of people. That means applying for opportunities to put in front of new people (in my case, that’s shows). You now have to be content creator on social media, and photos don’t cut it anymore, so you have to shoot and edit your own videos. If you choose to run ads, you’re now an advertising agency making ad creative and monitoring metrics like your Cost-per-click, cost-per-conversion, CPM and then adjust accordingly and hope those numbers go down. As a musician I’ve had to become my own audio engineer, playback engineer, and Ableton programmer. I’m also my own photographer and videographer and content house because I don’t have the money to outsource these things to other people right now. I mean, the list is endless. And yet, I still have family who can’t comprehend the hours it takes to prepare one song for release and still call it a hobby.

So to any non-creatives out there who are speaking to or about someone who is going into a creative industry as a career, do yourself and them a favor and don’t call it a hobby unless they themselves have called it that first. And if you want to go the extra mile, roll up your sleeves and join them in learning a skill like running ads or applying for showcase opportunities and offer up your help as a show of support. I promise it would mean the world to them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://hvxlii.komi.io
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/hvxlii
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/hvxlii
• Twitter: https://x.com/hvxlii
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@hvxlii

Image Credits

HVXLII