We recently connected with Mason O’Bannon, Kimberly O’Bannon N/A and have shared our conversation below.

Mason O’Bannon, Kimberly O’Bannon, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. 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.

Mason: “For me, learning the craft was a battle. When I first picked up a guitar at age 12, it was a source of escaping reality. Simply put, I picked up and played what sounded good, or learned the songs and licks that I wanted. As I grew older and more experienced with it, I expanded on the difficulty of what I decided to teach myself. From picking styles to learning the positions on the fretboard, it was very difficult to harness the coordination to progress and get better. At the time, there were people who told me I should quit, or that I sounded bad. Staying persistent kept me going most times. A couple of years later, I was introduced to music production. It felt like everything I had learned previously was a small drop in an endless ocean of possibilities. It was fascinating. From picking up a guitar to creating entire songs with different sounds, structures, and concepts opened my mind to a different perspective and understanding of music as a whole. My fascination with wanting to understand how music works, and how it is created really determined my will to continue to learn. At first, it was on my own, and then I met several people along the way who guided and molded me into the artist that I am today. I learn in a fashion that can only be described as “hands-on”. This took up the majority of my time outside of school and later outside of work. Countless hours figuring out songs, endless repetition, doing things over and over until they were correct or perfected. That in a nutshell is my path of learning guitar, music production, and the combination of all of the things I do musically.

I could have sped up my learning process by being more susceptible to the advice I had received along the way. It was very difficult for me to understand that other people were just trying to help due to the amount of negativity in my life at the time. Had I taken the advice given to me I would have fine-tuned my structure and abilities a lot faster.

The most essential skill I have learned is developing a structure for the creative process. This entails not skipping steps, finishing projects, and focusing on smaller details to bring an entire piece to life.

The obstacles I encountered were negative comments and a lack of a support system. I spent time pondering negative comments when I could have spent my time practicing or improving. “

Kimberly: “As a young girl in the 1990s, I had a karaoke machine with cassette tapes that I sang along to – ‘The Rose’ by Bette Midler and ‘New York, New York’ by Frank Sinatra. I never stopped singing. When learning my voice, I realized there was more bass and more blues, and it didn’t sound like normal girl voices I listened to at the time, like Britney Spears. I was very self-conscious of that for a long time and decided instruments may be the way to go. I wanted to play the saxophone in the marching band in high school, but I was guided by my family to play sports instead. Once I graduated, I still wanted to play music and that feeling wasn’t going away. I needed to learn more. I returned from Army training in 2012 and bought a ukulele to begin learning music. I read tabs and watched videos and played every day to learn songs and notes and chords. I soaked it all in. I started hanging around some musicians that played metal music in a band and one had a bass guitar that he let me play. Once I picked it up and played that first bass line, I was hooked. I began reading and learning as much as I could and jamming with friends as often as possible. I started attending blues jams in Little Rock at The Parrot and Thirst N Howl bars. I got to play with Arkansas legends like Stuart Baer and Kim Griffin. I then moved to Hot Springs, AR, and joined a 3-piece band as the bass player. These were some of my first stage performances and when I learned how much I loved the feeling of entertaining people with music. The pandemic hit and the live music world came to a screeching halt. So, I ran to the music store and bought a keyboard to begin learning piano. I dove in and started learning chords and scales and practicing playing and singing together. I spent hours practicing and learning songs. The piano is so precise that it taught me about the other instruments I was playing and how to have more control over pitch by ear training. My learning style is just absorbing as much information as I can and practicing as much as I am able to. I love to read and there is endless information out there to learn whatever you seek if you commit the time and practice.

I could have sped up the learning process by using my time more wisely. I wish I had taken it seriously earlier. I could have used more learning materials and read more about theory so that I wasn’t diving in headfirst the “what” and having to go back and learn the “why”.

The most essential skills I feel like I learned were patience and resiliency. Music skill comes with practice, but it takes a strong will to keep on practicing and knowing that it is a matter of time to achieve what you want. Resiliency is so important because you have to be okay with not being good for a while or messing up when you don’t expect to and bouncing back and doing it again.

An obstacle that I came across was getting to a point where I needed to ask questions or get a little deeper and didn’t know which direction to go. Essentially, “opening the floodgates.” I have started reading more about the theory and history of music and inquired about lessons. Knowledge is power. I’m thankful for libraries and skillful teachers that dedicated their lives to learning to teach people like me.”

Mason O’Bannon, Kimberly O’Bannon, 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?

Mason was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and moved to San Antonio, Texas as a child. He has been playing guitar since 2008, started producing music in 2014, and as of 2017, resides in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Kimberly was born in Pineville, Louisiana, and grew up on a farm. She moved to Fordyce, Arkansas in 1999 when her Pappaw got a job at the new Georgia Pacific plant. She moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas in 2012 after returning home from Army training to be close to her Guard unit in town.

Mason and Kimberly met in the fall of 2021 when joining a band together for a local battle of the bands. Mason played guitar and Kimberly played bass. After the competition, they decided to put together a duo act with acoustic guitar and piano and spent months practicing cover songs to get ready to book shows. In April 2022, they started performing live shows locally. While playing together, they developed a bluesy-rock style that channels the raw, vintage tones they grew up listening to, modern alternative rock sounds coupled with gritty, female vocals. Soon after, they started writing original music together.

In May 2022, they submitted their two original songs, “Best Views” and “Daughter Of A Black Sheep” to a local songwriting competition. The 2nd Annual Henry Glover Songwriting Contest was judged by Tony Stampley, a distinguished songwriter out of Nashville, Tennessee. Their song “Best Views” won the competition. This moment was very defining for them and led to them producing those 2 songs at their home studio with Kimberly’s son Preston playing the drums, and Noah Donoho on the piano, later to be released in June of 2022 on all streaming platforms. This was the birth of a group now known as “Hillestad”.

“Hillestad” now performs in many varieties, including an Acoustic Duo, Trio, and a full 5 piece band all over the state of Arkansas with plans to expand across the country and release more original music. They can be followed on various social media platforms such as Facebook, and Instagram.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Kimberly: “I began my Facebook page for music in December of 2020. I think I partly started it to track my progress and test the skills I was learning at my day job. I was a Multi-Media Marketing Consultant for a company that handled multiple businesses’ marketing campaigns and was partnered with Facebook and Google. I learned about different industries and capturing audiences. I began to post and engage, adding followers along the way, and expanding my skills and comfortability of being in front of an audience. I compared post engagement to see what methods were best to reach my followers and applied those techniques. I feel like marketing is trial and error – monitor and see what works and what doesn’t and adjust accordingly. You have to find a balance between keeping it fresh and letting things run their course to get accurate statistics. Don’t be too quick to jump from one thing to the next. Don’t inundate your audience with random content. Be specific. Everyone is not going to like and follow you and that is okay. Be confident and know that art is subjective to the consumer. Learn from each one but do not let it change what makes you an individual. When posting or utilizing your digital presence, really think about how you want to represent yourself not just to the ones who know you, but the people who are seeing your name for the first time.”

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

Mason: “The most rewarding aspect of being an artist, is finishing a product that you are satisfied with. Most artists spend countless days or even weeks on something we are never truly happy with. For instance, I have produced songs that I will call finished, and go back numerous times to fix certain sounds, and re-mixing the audio, and it seems like a never-ending process. As frustrating as it may seem, listening to a song for the first time and not having to fix it anymore is rewarding beyond what words can explain. We are our own worst critics, and those are the times it is brought to light the most.”

Kimberly: “The most rewarding aspect of being an artist for me is being able to create and be expressive and watch it resonate with other people. They may have a similar story or know the feeling you’re describing and that’s beautiful. I love being able to leave a piece of me behind for my children. They can always go listen to my songs and take pieces that apply or learn a little about where they came from. When we are gone, all we have are the memories others have of us. I find it very important to leave your piece of the world better than you found it.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kimberlyhillestad.wixsite.com/website-1/about
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hillestadmusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kimberlyhillestadmusic/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCscFS5QI0Rt94VyP5tvM-cA

Image Credits
Steve Purifoy – See What I Saw Photography Amy McClure Photography Aeriel Hutchinson Toni Baswell