We recently connected with Kyle Wright and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kyle thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I come from a musical family- my older sister, my grandfather, and my uncles all play guitar (some professionally), so there was always instruments around at family gatherings. Multiple people tried to get me started on acoustic guitar, but younger me thought it was “lame” so I never really took to it. Sometime while I was in middle school, my parents brought home the latest Guitar Hero game and I was hooked. It sparked an obsession that would lead me to beating all of the games on Expert difficulty. After completing one of the games on Expert (I believe it was Aerosmith??) the game literally tells you “go buy a real guitar”…so I did. I saved my birthday and Christmas money and bought a First Act Electric Guitar and Amp, and a chord chart poster, and sat in my room until I could play all of the chords on it. Armed with my basic chords and First Act instrument, I auditioned for my church’s youth band, and they said yes, sort of. They let me come to the rehearsals and learn the songs, but I wouldn’t actually play on stage for a year or so- probably for the best. Looking back, I could’ve saved myself a lot of frustrations by learning from my family instead of the chord chart alone, and by taking some actual lessons before I went to literal music college! I think especially early on, the thing that limited me the most was just my own stubbornness.

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

I started Away From The Earth in 2019 as a way to finally push myself to release some music and stop hoarding it on my hard drive (still a problem that I have). I went to school for Music Performance and Music Production starting in 2016 so I spent a lot of time learning, studying- and eventually writing- music. Originally, I was writing for class assignments, but soon I found myself opening up my recording software *for fun* and just crafting songs around riffs I was writing. From there, it was only a matter of time before Away From The Earth was born.

Initially, I wanted AFTE to be an ambient oriented project, with long flowing soundscapes and not much real structure, but I quickly realized that way of writing is almost in complete contrast with the way my brain naturally thinks. I’ve recently learned that I’m on the Autism Spectrum, which means my brain loves to organize, sort, and predict things to feel comfortable in daily life. Unfortunately for me, I did not know this about myself when I was starting this project, so the beginnings were extremely mentally frustrating for me. I was trying to force all of my music into this box that did not come naturally to me. I knew that I needed to change something eventually, but honestly the world made the choice for me.

When COVID hit, I was graduating college (May of 2020). Graduating into a global pandemic gives one a lot of time to reflect, and it gave me a ton of time to write. What I found in this time, was the familiar comfort of the electric guitar, and moving back to a more traditional song structure. This led to my EP “Paint With Grey, See In Color” which was extremely cathartic and really motivated me to keep going through the artistic struggle.

Through the last 3 years of identity crisis, I feel I’ve finally began to find my voice and my sound as a musician, and it’s been incredibly freeing.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

When I was first starting my journey with Away From The Earth (around the summer of 2019), the common advise given to new artists was that you just needed to get the music out there and it would “find its audience”. In some ways, that is still said a lot today as well. I’m not saying this is necessarily bad advice, just that I think it can be misleading.

For me, this always came across from my peers and instructors that the hardest part of the process is making and releasing the music, and that if you can get through the “artistic struggle”, people will listen! I very quickly learned that this was just not true. A younger me spent countless hours frustrated and confused at why no one was listening when he’d spent so much time and energy on this music, and it was a matter of having the wrong expectations. What I know now is that the journey to building an audience is a long, ongoing journey that is not as easy to distill as just “release it and people will find it.” It’s going to take time, energy, sacrifice, and many, many setbacks before even the semblance of a following starts to show up.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

As an artist, I think the most helpful thing people can do is to place more value on art, and this could look like a lot of different things. If you like an artists music, buying a physical copy (or digital if you can’t afford it!) of their music, going to a show when they tour, or buying some merch when they drop it is *extremely* helpful! I promise that most creatives just want to be able to be creative, and having the financial ability to do that is often the biggest barrier preventing them from doing it.

For free, you can also follow their socials, SHARE THEIR ART, give them shout outs, interact with their content, encourage them when you see or talk to them, and just listen to their music. All of those small interactions give that little bit of extra help that- both literally and algorithmically- really add up to make a real difference to us,

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/awayfromtheearth/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/awayfromtheearth
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/awayfromthee
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@awayfromtheearth2878/featured