We were lucky to catch up with Lars Pruitt recently and have shared our conversation below.
Lars, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?
Being a full time “artist” or “creative” is a heavy thing. The highs are really high, and the lows can be very very low. At the low points, I am envious of my peers who seem to have jobs that don’t cause them to have existential crises every 6 months.
It can be quite grueling to feel as if your financial success is tied to your own ability to be inspiring to others. If there isn’t a lot of money coming in, you can start to feel worthless. When things go well, it can be tempting to think that means the ground you walk on is holy. I’ve come to realize that neither of those extremes are really true.
The last two years brought a lot of economic downturn, especially in the music business. I was confronted with a lot of these harsh realities, and thought about giving up multiple times. In many ways the only reason I have stayed the course is because of the support of the people closest to me. They’ve helped me to see the big picture, learn to not be so hard on myself, and also remember to keep my feet on the ground.
One way I’ve been able to seek some wacky sort of work/life balance in being a full time creative is by allowing myself to not be fully defined by my work. I’ve learned to allow myself to genuinely view it as just a job in certain lights. It’s a really fun job, but also a very time consuming one and customer feedback can consume you if you let it.
I’ve realized that it’s a privilege and a measure of our hard work paying off when new people discover our band only to not like it. I’m proud that our music has reached new ears, and who am I to think everyone is going to like it?
So for me, I try to not compare myself or focus too hard on feedback (good or bad) and count myself lucky to have such an interesting job, with people who support me so faithfully. Everybody has good and bad days at work, and I’m blessed to be able to do something that I love!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Lars Pruitt, and I am the frontman of a band called Yam Haus. We are mainly just high school friends who met back up after college to give the music dream a real go.
Our name is part acronym, part homage to where we were when we started the band. We were living together in a house we called the yam house, and we decided Yam stands for “You Are Me”. It’s a golden rule reminder to treat people the way you’d appreciate being treated. A sometimes over simplified tenant that we think is missing too often in most parts of public discourse amongst adults in our modern time. Sometimes I hate our name, and think of it as altruistic or corny, other times I’m very grateful for the reminder of where we started and how important it is to be kind.
We squared up our ambitions to make a career in music, and because of the support of the people around us, we were given the opportunity to try. We took that chance, and have been going full time since the fall of 2017.
Our heroes are bands like U2 and the Killers, people like Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell, who dare to loom larger than life, whilst seeming to maintain a quiet artistic genuineness in their work.
Growing up around Minneapolis MN, we are lucky to be next to a very vibrant live music scene. One thing we noticed early on is that a lot of people our age make “indie” music where we’re from. We decided early on that we wanted to shoot for “pop”. To this day, I am still often confused on what the difference is.
Mainly we want to be honest with ourselves, and our fans, and we decided to own up to the fact that we want to be a band that plays stadiums some day. To us, that means “pop”. As we’ve embarked on this journey, we’ve realized that road is not for the faint of heart, and sometimes we don’t feel like this is our goal anymore. Mainly, we’re just trying to continue to be honest with ourselves and our fans as we figure it all out, making music along the way.
Right away we hit a real wave of “succesful”milestones in our local scene. It was paved by saying “yes” to any and every type of gig when we began. We played birthday party’s, church/synagogue block party’s, weddings, whatever and whoever would give us a chance to play and maybe even make a buck or two. This led to a pretty loyal early following, and culminated in selling out 1550 tickets in the hallowed First Avenue Mainroom in December of 2019.
We felt we were on top of the world, and the only direction we could continue to go was up. Then 2020 happened. Conversations with music industry professionals we had attracted from our 1550 cap sellout disappeared into thin air as everyone went into survival mode. Flash forward to today and I’m proud to say we’ve survived! We even had the chance to represent Minnesota on NBC’s “American Song Contest” on national television earlier this year in 2022. We lost. But 3.5 million people got to see us lose!
In the past year we’ve gone through a major refining process, that by January of 2023 should be more out in the open and over with. It was painful in many ways, but also incredibly helpful, beautiful, and necessary to continue forward in a way that feels honest and true to who we are. “Growing pains” would be an accurate term.
We’ve had to recognize that we’ve drastically changed as a band and as people since starting out, but in many ways we are still on the exact same journey we’ve always been on. Today we are still asking the same questions. How can you be honest with yourself, aiming to loom larger than life just like your heroes, while keeping kindness as a thread throughout the process?
How did you build your audience on social media?
We decided to do a daily vlog on YouTube when we first started the band. The first 100 days or so we didn’t even make the videos public we just uploaded them privately. When we finally decided to stop we had been daily vlogging for over a year. This was a very extreme crash course into learning the social media dynamic you explore as you pursue a career in music.
Because the reality is, you have to figure out your relationship to social media as an artist in todays world. And often you need to re-evaluate that relationship. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s there and it is something you have to address if you’re trying to make a career happen.
My advice would be to really square up how you feel about social media. What do you like about it? What don’t you like about it? In that conversation with yourself or your team, figure out where and how you currently want to exist on social media, and then go for it.
And most importantly, BEWARE OF COMPARISON! It will kill you before you even get started. Just do what inspires you, and focus on that. Consistency always beats virality in the end.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Early on I worked really hard to make music that I thought other people would like. I liked it a bit too, but it really was an important and driving part of the creative process to ask myself “will other people like this?”.
I don’t necessarily have any regrets about this, because at the time it felt right and honest, but I’ve come to realize I need to stop putting that question so high on my priority list if I’m going to continue making music.
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Image Credits
Jesse Roberson, Cassandra Brink, Kaleb Musser, Eva Drennan