Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Heavy Gus. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Heavy Gus, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

We all have managed to make a living off of strictly creative work, but not strictly in this project. Heavy Gus adds to the pool for our resources, but we all keep our hands dirty with many projects. Stelth Ulvang plays in a few bands the most successful being “The Lumineers.” Ryan Dobrowski, the drummer plays in a few bands, his most successful being “Blind Pilot” , but he spends more of his time these days painting than anything.
Similarly, Dorota does quite a bit of visual arts, watercolors to print making, and Heavy Gus is another coin in the bucket for us. Now to look at the different ways we ended up in the same spot really speaks to how much “doing what you love, even if you don’t get paid” helps advance your passions. We have all spent so much time enjoying the arts we create, tied with the fortunate opportunities we have all separately gotten, placing yourself in the path of “right spot right time” seems to work well, in case opportunity calls.
But let me reiterate, we have spent a lot of time sleeping on floors, eating cold pizza, and getting paid in drink tickets, before we were able to find the way to make our arts work for us.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Our band, Heavy Gus, was created with a mutual love for a nostalgic indie rock we all grew up on. We enjoyed bands like Breeders and Pixies, Liz Phair and Pavement. We wanted to make the music that made us feel good. When we all started making music in bands 15 years ago, the most accessible form of touring was acoustic. No sound-guy needed, no official venue even. We thrived in acoustic shows, outdoors, on rooftops, and in the woods. With that our songwriting all advanced but the electric guitar noodles and fun tones were put on the back burner. We were all thrilled to explore this sound as we had left it behind for a while writing primarily folk-rock, folk-punk, or bedroom-folk. But we couldn’t deny the community and tight acoustic sound that we had fallen in love with, and I think that comes through in our records. I think we managed to tie our folk world in with heavier louder songs, and that’s one of my (Stelth Ulvang, guitarist) favorite things about the songs.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I think we have shaped a lot of this band around becoming parents. Though the album was recorded in June 2020, Dorota and Stelth gave birth to their son a year later, before the official release of the album. I think there are a lot of things that work against motherhood, and especially motherhood as an entrepreneur. We are still learning how to navigate parenthood as touring musicians, and some points are very difficult. Most places that musicians play are not built to have children around, even the type of music we play is regrettably loud at times, when it comes to children in the audience. We were able to keep up with a trial and error process learning the easiest way to tour with a baby (now toddler!) We talked to other musicians doing it, listened to podcasts, canceled shows, rerouted drives near playgrounds, and started setting up all ages and family friendly shows. What we learned is there were also fans who could relate to our journey, and our music, and they wanted too to be able to be involved in music community again as parents. Playing family friendly shows not only became nurturing for us, but a feedback loop of nourishment to others, in term inspiring us to keep on this path. I think many things you will find being true to yourself will allow fans, clients, supporters, to come out of the woodwork who most relate to you.

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?

I think often of how people say “I wasn’t born with a musical bone in my body” or “I am tone deaf” or “I truly have no rhythm, the only time I clap is at baseball games, and even then I end up standing up to do the wave seconds before anyone else, because my rhythm is so terrible” to which we say. Everyone is born that way, and we spent a lot of time practicing these instruments, and in turn, absolutely failed Home Economics, or in Stelth’s case regular Economics. BUT, I always urge people to pick up instruments no matter how old you are or inexperienced your musical journey has been. It also can come off as a slight to the work we have put into it, as I would never want to tell our CPA that she has “Natural talent when it comes to taxes” so much is learned, and I really don’t want it to dissuade anyone from doing the thing that changed my life.

Contact Info:

• Website: Heavygus.com
• Instagram: @heavygus
• Facebook: @heavygus
• Youtube: Heavygus

Image Credits
photos by lauren Jacobson