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

Jonathan , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

Music has always been a big part of my life, growing up I played instruments ranging from piano to trumpet to even learning how to play the drums. When I entered college I was pretty focused on my professional career but always had music in the back of my mind. With my housemate in college being the president of a pretty large organization, we would always have people over at our place and for I would somehow end up on aux. I was abruptly introduced to the world of mixing and DJing when there was one party in particular in which the spotify ads came on and everyone started laughing and I decided at that point to get my first controller and just learn how to start mixing. Eventually I found myself playing small gigs here and there and after college I decided to start diving deeper into music and began uploading my music on Soundcloud where people began to listen to my music and from there the rest was history!

Jonathan , 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?

For people that don’t know me, I always try to bring energy and positivity wherever I go and really try to instill that ideaology into my music and my sets. The beautiful thing about music is that it is a universal language, no matter where you’re from, whether you’ve had a good day or a bad day, whether you’re alone or with friends, my hope is that with my music you’re able to forget about the stresses of everyday life and just have fun. Being a DJ and playing shows in cities across the country, I genuinely love just sharing my love for music with people and seeing the crowd dance and cheer during my sets just always gives me the biggest smiles. I don’t solve problems but I’d like to think that I help people forget about their problems even just for a little bit.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me one of the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the people that I’ve met through music. Early on in my career, it was a lonely path and I didn’t really understand how to navigate the music industry. Luckily for me soundcloud mixes at the time was on the rise and there was a DJ collective by the name of BTO founded by my now good friends DJ Ramen and Neszlo. BTO stood for Better Than One and the idealogy of this music collective was to find a group of peers with similar goals and journeys and instead of competing with each other on Soundcloud for likes we would support and repost each other. BTO really became a family for me and I’m extremely proud of the success that we were able to reach as a collective hosting shows in different states and selling out almost every show that we’ve ever hosted. Being able to be part of this collective and put in the work to host shows and have people that genuinely enjoy our music and come out and support us is something that has been extremely rewarding as an artist.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Covid 19 obviously hit everyone hard, but being a DJ and being in an industry that relied heavily on people to gather made it almost impossible to gain any momentum. During this time it was quite difficult and I genuinely lost a lot of motivation to continue with no end in sight to the pandemic I was losing hope. Luckily live streams became a way for artists to continue showcasing their music and myself along with the rest of BTO decided to host streams to raise money for frontline healthcare workers and was actually able to raise over $20,000 towards providing masks and other essential needs towards frontline workers. Despite having a worldwide pandemic I was really proud that we were able to utilize our platform to help others in times of need.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://soundcloud.com/m3ngo
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_m3ngo_/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/M3NGO_Music

Image Credits
PC: Alex Hong, Tommy Huong, Ram Vista