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

Daniel , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

So I’ve always felt like I was living a double life. On the one hand, I’ve been a (semi) professional musician for about 10 years and have always loved creating video content. But from the start I knew that it would be very difficult to carve out a living doing so. I’ve had to work any a 9-5 job for pretty much the entire time I was also pursuing my creative outlets. I eventually was able to create a position for myself at my former employer where I could use my creative talents, but during the beginning of lockdown they let too many customer service people go, dissolved my department and moved me back to customer service as we were still quite busy. Since September 2022 I’ve been unemployed, but have been able to maintain supporting my family on what I make from music as well as stitching together several side jobs in the video production field. More than anything, I would love to make my creative passions my sole source of income.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I would say that my interest in video came before my interest in being a Drummer, although I feel like maybe both of them came up at around the same time. When I was younger, my grandfather always had a video camera at family functions and I thought it was the most interesting thing to be able to see myself on TV days and weeks and months after the event happened.

Around that time I got into playing the drums, and from there music and video have been pretty much married together throughout the entire course of my creative life. From growing up watching MTV, I saw how the two would be able to interact with one another and how the two coexisted in this massive creative space.

I began playing in “real” bands around the time I started college, but I eventually discovered that school wasn’t for me. At the time I wasn’t focusing on it the way that I wanted to. I had this urge to go out and play music and play as much music as I could. So after 2 1/2 semesters, I dropped out of college and started working retail full-time while still maintaining several full-time bands.

While I was in college, I was studying comparative literature with a focus on video production. It was during this time that I really learned to love the entire video creation process from shooting to editing to having this vision of a way something would look like in your mind, and then being able to re-create that same thing in the real world. I thought it was extremely interesting being able to replicate those thoughts for others to see and experience. I had always made short videos and comedy skits with my brother and our friends growing up, but nothing really that serious until I had to do a final for a college project. From there I sort of became the documentarian for the band that I play in – trying to record every show that I could acting as an archivist for our time together playing music.

I started with the band that I’m in now called incendiary in 2007 and we’re still playing shows it releasing albums to this day. Our current record “Change the Way You Think About Pain” has been mostly well received thus far. Playing in Incendiary has been the most incredible experience and is beyond anything I could have imagined for myself all those years ago getting kicked out of school band. We’ve played around the country and around the world to thousands of fans. Getting to meet so many great and caring people, experiencing other cultures at the source, being fully immersed in an area or community and developing lifelong bonds with people you only see 5 times a year is something I whole heartedly recognize as unique and rare. Having total strangers in countries I’ve never been to before shouting the words to our songs back at us, people traveling several hours and sometimes overnight just to see us play is not something I take lightly and humbly recognize as an unusual phenomenon.

At the same time, I feel like I’ve really been developing my video editing chops. At my former employer, I would create eye-catching videos for product launches and sales meetings, as well as interviews with designers that we worked with at our company. I would shoot tours of our facility and how-to videos on specific items that were troublesome to our customers. I interviewed former pattern designers from the 60s and 70s as well as owners of other fabric companies throughout the years.

It was working with several different teams of creative people, that I think really deepened my love of video production and editing. Being able to take someone else’s idea, and make that a reality was a true challenge, because I had to interpret their vision the way that they saw it in their mind through the lens of my own, and try to create that same thing. It was definitely an interesting challenge and one that I think I was able to work well with. I feel that I’m quite adept at interpreting others ideas and nuances and translating those into a complete idea just as they had it in their minds.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist for me, is being able to connect with someone on a very different level artistically. You’re able to take their ideas and thoughts that they might not have otherwise been able to get out into existence, and you help them shape them to reality. For me that’s the biggest payoff.

There’s a moment during the creative process where you’re kind of going back-and-forth and just continuously refining the idea until you get it to that diamond clarity for both you and the person you’re working with and there’s something there that just can’t be described. Over time and with more experience, the amount of back-and-forth always get shorter because you learn how to transform what people are describing to you into something tangible. I feel the best artists and creative people have a sort of sixth sense when it comes to that – to be able to pick up on nuance and detail in ways that other people might not be able to in order to get to that “aha!” moment much quicker.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

A book that has substantially changed my outlook on creative work has been “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. There was a time where I felt stagnant in my creative process, and I felt I could never finish anything or getting anything accomplished. This sort of sent me down a spiral of half finish projects and just feeling really bad about myself and the work I was not finishing. After reading this book, and then subsequently listening to it on audiobook several times, I learned to be better towards myself about the creative process and realize that just showing up and trying to produce some thing is more than half the battle because a lot of creative people, don’t even take that first step, or have this fear about taking the first step, which I have been guilt of time and time again. For me, the hardest part was always overcoming that initial fear of taking the first step. To step out of my comfort zone and not be afraid of negative comments or judgment from people who I don’t know. And to just be happy and appreciate the work that I am doing and know that it does have value and meaning – if not just for me then maybe a small select group of people. But at least at the end of the day, I can say I went forward and put something out there.

Contact Info:

• Website: hammertimemedia.net
• Instagram: @Danny_Hammer // @HammerTimeMedia // @incendiaryhc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-lomeli-4824b4208/
• Youtube: YouTube.com/user/killersremorse

Image Credits
Rebecca Lader Matt Miller Gabe Becerra