We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lavonte Najee-Akram a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lavonte, looking forward to hearing all of your stories 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.

My biggest teacher when it came to learning how to create music in the way that I do really comes from listening to such a wide variety of music. I started making music about 2 years ago, so I’m still pretty new to it regarding the creative process, but I feel throughout those 2 years I also have been able to pick up a lot of skills from my peers that also make music. One of the most essential skills in my opinion would have to be the ability to mix my own vocals when recording. It has saved me so much time and money when creating songs. One of the biggest obstacles that stood in the way of learning more was the fact that during all of this I was finishing my Bachelors degree and working full time, so my time had to be divided amongst so many different things.

Lavonte, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

For those that don’t know me,I am a Hip Hop artist and I go by the artist name of EYS Vonte. I was born and raised in Danville, Virginia. Regarding the name “EYS”, a lot of people have mistaken the “EYS” and pronounced it as “eyes” but it is actually an acronym that stands for Embrace Your Space. Embrace Your Space is a clothing brand that myself and a couple of friends started back in 2016. Most people don’t know this but it was actually influenced by a brand called Space Kiddz which was founded by another friend of ours named Rose.

The Embrace Your Space brand is centered around the principle of originality. With social media being so prevalent today, it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you are not doing enough or are not following the status quo. The brand was made to encourage people to ultimately be themselves regardless of what is going on around them. In a sense, it is meant to unite people by embracing their differences.

Regarding my music itself, a lot of people are able to pick out their musical influences with a list, but that is something that I have always found hard to do because I feel like I’m am influenced by so many generations of music. When I first started creating music about 2 years ago, my aim was to take all of those influences and try to create my own sound while keeping my content relevant to what is going on around me. If you listen in my music you will find that most of my songs sound different, but the majority of them have some kind of story to it.

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

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is being able to share something that I love in my own creative way. I love stories and storytelling music, so being able to create my own stories within my music and share it with the world is an amazing feeling.

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

I feel like the music world, being both fans and artists, needs to embrace each other more often. A lot of the time I see debates on which new artist is better, but I feel like that creates more of a divide between different sub generes of the culture instead of uniting them.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/eys.vonte
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EYS.Vonte
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/EYSvonte
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@eysvonte