We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Evander a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Evander, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When I was about eight years old, my parents had me start taking music lessons, but they let me choose any instrument I wanted. I chose electric guitar–I don’t come from a family of musicians or anything, but my dad is a huge Jimi Hendrix fan, and I really looked up to my dad. However, my relationship with the guitar was definitely not love-at-first-strum. For one, I was painfully shy, and I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with my guitar instructor, which was embarrassing. And secondly, I was already super into gymnastics, which felt thrilling and exhilarating on a daily basis. Compared to flying and flipping through the air, guitar just felt like work. So I never really practiced any of my music very much, and I used all my time on the guitar to “mess around”–mindlessly noodle and improvise.

Everything changed when I was sixteen. Suddenly, severe depression hit me like a freight train, and I couldn’t cope. After some extremely dark times, I found myself pulled towards my guitar. My mindless noodling became intentional, emotionally driven, cathartic improvisation. Through sound, my world started making sense again. Music became my outlet.

So, a life for a life. Music saved my life, so I decided to dedicate my life to it. I hope that my music can help people find light in their own darkness the way the music of the artists I look up to did for me. Mental health remains a central topic in my current music today.

Evander, 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?

I’m evander, and I’m a pop singer-songwriter, producer, and guitarist. I derive my inspiration from the twists and turns of young adulthood–heartache, addiction, anxiety, and depression play prominently in my music, and I try to be as vulnerable and authentic as possible in my lyrics. In my production, I blend pop, hip-hop, R&B, and rock, juxtaposing modern elements like trap drums and 808s with vintage sounds like rock guitar and retro synths.`

I have eclectic influences, and I’ve had sort of an unusual musical journey. I grew up playing blues guitar, but my first professional shows at 16 were actually for progressive, fingerstyle guitar–an acoustic, instrumental genre. In 2016, I went to UCLA to study music, and I decided to start singing and writing my own songs that same year, Initially, I pursued a career as a pop-country artist. I got the opportunity to record my debut country singles at the Universal Music studios in 2020, but the Covid pandemic hit partway through the process, and my songs were left unfinished. After being forced to move back in with my parents in Sacramento for my final year of college, I decided to hole myself in my childhood bedroom and learn to produce. I found new inspiration in hip-hop and hip-hop influenced pop and decided to take my sound in a completely new direction. I think that cultivating this new sound is the musical accomplishment I feel the most proud of.

In 2023, I signed a distribution deal with Bungalo Records/Universal Music Group. I’ve been regularly putting out singles since, and I’m currently working with the esteemed Paul Ring to market my releases and music videos.

In addition to producing and releasing my own music, I produce, write, and play guitar for a variety of other artists/bands (notably Megan Jade–check her out!). I always bring my signature musical flair to all my projects.

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

I touched on this in an earlier question, but I think the time in my career I demonstrated the most resilience was during the Covid-19 pandemic. Before the worldwide lockdown, I had a really different philosophy in terms of making moves in the industry than I do now. Basically, I believed in specializing in my strongest musical skills (which I felt were songwriting and guitar-playing) and trading work with other musicians who specialized in my musical weaknesses. Essentially, I thought that if I got super good at certain things, I could find people to be good at everything else, and as a team, we could all ride our way to the top.

Honestly, I feel like that plan was going fairly well, but then the pandemic hit. I could no longer be in the same space as my collaborators, and recording studios shut down. I decided that if I wanted to push forward in my career, I had to overcome my musical weaknesses. So, I chose to treat learning to produce music as a full-time job. I started setting an eight hour timer each day and spending the whole time trying to produce songs. After a year of this, I started feeling confident in my production skills. Through resilience, I turned a weakness into what I now feel is one of my biggest musical strengths.

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

By far the most rewarding aspect of being a musical artist is getting to perform live. As cliche as this probably sounds, it really is a feeling like no other. Live musical performance, unlike many other art forms, is beautifully fleeting. To me, songs feel alive; they morph and mutate over time, changing with my life and with my emotions. As soon as my guitar fades out in a performance, that version of my song is gone forever, and I never play a song the same way twice. There’s sort of an intangible, in-the-moment feeling of understanding, emotional exchange, and (often) catharsis shared between listeners and performers that I think is absolutely impossible to replicate with a recording, and I love to be on either side of that exchange. I feel incredibly rewarded when my listeners tell me that my music touched them in this way.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evandermusic/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPNgtYYlmJ6IVm2-6maaXNg
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@evandermusic

  Latest music video (this is my current song being marketed by my label, but it’s a collab, so it’s on a different YouTube channel): https://youtu.be/SCfiEEQcEgo?si=I2YycwURZYAEa5Aa

Image Credits

David Miller