We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Josh Goldstein. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Josh below.
Josh, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
Thank you so much for having me, excited to be here! Being a musician today means a lot of things. Primarily, for me, it’s meant being flexible while not bending to the point of breaking. It’s a fine line. Starting out in the music scene I had the idea that things would come my way if I just did my thing musically. This isn’t necessarily true. It has taken a lot of changing up expectations, going with the flow, and making the best out of situations. Some of the best opportunities we’ve ever received have been completely serendipitous and unplanned, but they happened nonetheless.
Josh, 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?
In The Variant was started about 10 years ago with one of my best friends Josh Somers. We started writing music together in his small appartment bed room on a $200 laptop. We met Jason Deliganis, our drummer, a few years later and ITV was born. We play something a kin to heavy, psychedelic funk-metal, if you can wrap your head around that! Our influences range from Tool and Primus to Anthrax and Enya. It’s very eclectic in our camp. We spent the last 8 years crafting our sounds and playing all over Colorado and as far south as Texas. We were able to put out a great record recorded at The Spot Studio in Denver a few years back and I couldn’t have been prouder. I think one thing I’m most proud of so far though is that we will be playing this year’s Underground Music Showcase (UMS) in Denver at the end of July. Words cant describe how stoked we are for that!
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Just do it! I can’t tell you how many times we wanted to just not deal with social media and online stuff. I think as an artist it can be hard to give enough attention the the business side of everything. Years ago we invested in a fairly high budget music video. We really wanted to make a splash with it and painstakingly planned for hours and days on how we were going to release it. At the end if the day it was great, the response was great, and we gained new fans but it was exhausting and stressfully. We made ourselves sick trying to make EVERYTHING perfect for it. After that we never really did anything quite like that again. I think promoting, especially self promotion can feel weird to people. But I just say go for it. Even if you don’t spend money or a bunch of time story boarding things just make content. People want to see what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a song in your bedroom or footage of you setting some cool effect up, people just want to see YOU and your art. Put yourself out there, your whole self.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Supporting artist and a creative environment can be so easy. People overthink these kind of things sometime. Go to their shows and galleries, buy their merch and stuff. Also, don’t lie. If you cant make it or afford it that’s ok, find a different way to support. Sometime all that looks like is sharing something online. Most importantly though, support kids in art. Encourage them to follow that passion of finger-painting or banging on those pots and pans! Feeling comfortable creating early on and not feeling judged is the foundation for free flowing creativity.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.inthevariantofficial.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inthevariant/
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/InTheVariant/?refsrc=deprecated&_rdr
- Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/inthevariant
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCSsTjyKl3oYWg_q4Pp5ZkGA
Image Credits
All artwork by Blythe Crowe
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