We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Crashed Out a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Crashed, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
Wanting to breath air is the same drive anyone should have if they want to be successful. Air gives us life and the same way we need air for life, should match your drive for success. Willing to make the sacrifices in your life, dedicate yourself to a new mindset, research, research, research. Studying is vital to the field that you want to excel in. The culture, trends, rhythm, flavor, all play a part in any field of work especially when it comes to creativity. The work behind the scenes that the people don’t see, learning from previous mistake, learning how to turn “no” into “yes”. Not being afraid to fail, failure is one of the most important pieces and lessons to success that people often tend to avoid, which ultimately you are avoiding success. Wether it’s being scared to take that 1st step, afraid of losing something in the process, afraid of changing. We can only grow and learn more which leads to changes in our lives, learning from the mistakes that we did wrong the 1st time, and making the mental adjustments and disciplining ourselves so we don’t make the same mistake again, which will lead to turning our losses into wins. We can all be successful once we learn how to embrace failure, it makes for an even better success story.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
My name is CrashedOut, and I’m a music producer and software developer. Music has always had an impact on my life and I enjoy being around it. It was never my intentions to be a music producer growing up I started off as a songwriter. I was informed about a school that teaches people about music and the industry so I applied for it. The school is called Media Tech, it was the perfect situation for me it became a hands on experience working with the studio mixing board and recording the vocals through pro-tools. I never realized the importance it held until I realized I could be in a position of supply and demand. The demand for studio time is high, but the supply of good audio engineers and music producers is limited, and I fit into the role perfectly. I’ve always been told through my years as a music producer that I have an ear for music. Music is art at the end of the day and when I’m in a creative process, I like to create an emotional experience for the listener and once I feel that special feeling in a song, that’s when I know it’s ready. Working on a song that gives me that certain feeling is my favorite past time. It doesn’t feel like work anymore at that point. Music is what led me to being a software developer. I’ve been working in a technical field with audio engineering with years of client facing skills, I figured it would be a great asset to my skill set to learn how to code and create websites. It puts another world of creativity right at my finger tips I recently graduated from a school called Flatiron to learn coding websites through Javascript. That is where I learned the term, being comfortable with being uncomfortable. It takes massive critical thinking skills starting off but definitely worth it overall once you put in enough time and effort into your craft. The main thing that I want people to know about is I have 2 full time jobs. Music production, and software development. I’m continuously learning, expanding my knowledge, and working on my craft as a creative artist and great with communication so anybody that is ready to work, let’s work.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Before I had my own studio, I was working out of different studios around Dallas and Fort Worth looking to stay consistent as an engineer and visions of becoming the premier studio that everyone in the city wants to record and do work at. Some situations were good and some bad, but all learning experiences none the less. Some good situations were being able to work with so many great artist and establish good relationships along the way, I got to work with Erykah Badu, Bone Thugs N Harmony, and NBA Youngboy just to name a few. I got to learn from great producers who worked with UGK, Paula Abdul, B.B. King, Vanilla Ice, Kirk Franklin and many more. Thank you for those lessons Tim Kimsey. I’m always a student of the game and had a lot of ground work to do in order to prove myself as a music producer and establish great connections with many different artist. But sometimes, not all business is good business. Through my journey of being in different recording studios, I’ve had people calling my phone threatening to shoot the studio multiple times from another artist actions that had nothing to do with us, people breaking into the studio breaking the glass out while an engineer was still inside, shootouts that started on the highway and ended up in our parking lot, me and a co-engineer almost getting into fights with artist from their lack of communication and not understanding how this individual likes to record, shady deals behind the engineers back, working in a studio with no active water running with the toilet not being able to flush with multiple promises that it would get fixed, multiple artist informing me that they personally don’t like the management and didn’t want to come back to the studio, getting locked out the studio because upper management didn’t pay rent, and me sitting through it all simply because I felt like I wasn’t ready to run my studio and gave my loyalty to someone else willing to stick through it all and keep working to win with them. Silly me. At one point, I was working as a security guard and I like to listen to Curren$y a lot for motivation. He said in one of his songs, “Scared to play how could you ever win, make the mistake then the revision.” That phrase stuck to me and made me realize I didn’t want to take that 1st step because of so many what if factors. But I left my job, became a full time music producer and learned a new skill set in software development and haven’t looked back since. You are witnessing the journey now as I get ready and prepare for the next chapter in my life and I can’t wait.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Going through life, you can’t experience joy without pain. It makes the joyful experiences mean so much more once we accept the pain and not let it change who we are. Everyone has a certain escape they partake in wether it’s working out, going out with friends, being in water, site seeing, sports, the list goes on. Me, I like to create. When I’m in a creative mindset, my mind goes completely blank. I don’t think about the past, I don’t think about any current situations, only thing on my mind is, how can create an emotion. Music is art and when played correctly, it can make people dance, sing, come together, forget about their issues and just have a good time. Good energy and great music makes everlasting memories and if I can make other people feel a great emotion and come together to forget about their problems and they have that special moment that will be apart of their great memories, then I’m happy.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crashedout93/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CrashedOut93
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/crashedout93
Image Credits
Tim Kimsey standing next to me I’m in the back shirt red shorts, Caine sitting next to me in chair, can’t remember the interview lady’s woman or names of people in group picture.