We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michael Bell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Michael, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?

We all suffer setbacks in life and business. I believe it’s important to keep picking yourself up every time you get knocked down, even if like me, you get knocked down a whole lot LOL. My entire music career has had set backs, even from the beginning, Every group that I had been a part of eventually broke up… so I give it up to bands that have a long history performing together because some personalities just clash or… Life Happens. All the groups I had been in from rap, to R&B, to Alternative Rock etc. all had huge potential for success, I have catalogs of unreleased music that is like a pile of gold to me. Hopefully in some for I will be able to release them in some for either as a performer or have some other artist perform.

The main thing is getting back up. I really enjoy collaborating with other artist but since that has not seemed to work unfortunately, I will continue working as a solo artist. Now I still work with various producers and hope to expand on that in the future, but for now it’s mostly just me, myself and I, Which is just fine.. for now.

So many people let setbacks get in the way or slow them down. It’s even happened to me… but I have this fire in me that despite everything that has worked against me, that I will continue to keep fighting to produce quality music and eventually build what I am working on to help others getting started.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Despite my father being a musician and I used to watch him as he would perform as a drummer when I was a kid, I kind of stumbled into becoming a musician, I started as more of an artist, specifically… drawing and writing my own comics. I always wanted to create my own comic universe, and still do lol.

I didn’t realize I was musically inclined until high school. It started as an anti-drug project for school and when thinking of ideas, someone said “lets do a song”, I being an illustrator, of course, wanted to do a poster… but to many people were already doing that. So that night I wrote my first song “Needles on Fire”. The next day I showed the lyrics to my teacher… and he couldn’t believe I wrote at first… but when he did, he looked at me a way no one ever had before and said, “Michael, this is really good… you have real talent.” from that time on I started looking into writing songs.

For a brief time we had our congregations piano in our basement… I still today don’t know why we had it, but while it was there I played around with it. It had one of those things you lay over top of the keys the let you know which key was which, and it came with music books. We didn’t have that piano for a long time, just over the summer, so I learned what I could, seeing as we could not afford piano lessons.

My mom bought me this little Casio keyboard when they gave the piano back, I wrote another song at age 14 called “Don’t Toy With My Love” and started my first group with some of my neighborhood friends named… Emotion. We were heavily Prince influenced, so we definitely were some wanna be Prince hacks but it was fun, and the girls liked it at the time.

I liked rap, but it was never my first musical love, but I wrote a rap just to diss a bully at school who would not leave me alone. I figured if I couldn’t beat him up, then maybe I could take his ego down a notch. I did the rap in class the next day when he tried to mess with me… it had the desired effect, but even more… everyone went nuts over it and I was shocked at the reaction. I would never have attempted rap had it not been for that incident.

I was in several rap groups one of those, Frankly Fresh, had serious potential but the Deejays we had cost us a huge opportunity and eventually we went our separate ways. I later hooked up with a good friend, Ty Williams, who is a brilliant producer in his own right, as well as guitarist, and we formed an alternative rock band that had a couple of names but settled on Nomad Soul, Ty had family things to deal with at the time so we never got to go as far as we could have, the same goes for another band I was in called Via Medina. Both of those groups had MASSIVE potential and the music for them still cry out to be heard, and one day… maybe.

So it has been a solo effort as Knoetic, that I have been mainly focused on, though I do have an EP for Nomad Soul that will be out soon.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT ARTIST: I cannot say that strongly enough, many people don’t understand the heart and the hustle it takes to push projects out. We’re talking sleepless nights, penny pinching, and the mental anguish that many indie artist have to deal with. We love what we do so we put our blood, sweat and tears into everything we do.

If you are in a house with an artist, even if YOU don’t understand why they do what they do, support them and encourage them. It is hard work. If you don’t like what they do… fine, just don’t be disparaging to it. Like Mike Tyson once said… “if you don’t like it… turn off your station.”

We live in a society where everything is competition, and other artist tend to put other artist down when it’s not necessary. There is enough shine to go around, and there are people out there who will enjoy what you put out because the are like minded or have the same taste.

Society has to do better as a whole in supporting the indie artist who struggle to put out product and don’t have the resources of artist at major record labels, and if you are fortunate to get signed to a major label then continue to support those indie artist that are still out there trying to get where you are.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding thing for me, is that, when things seem quiet or when it seems that what I am trying to do is not climbing as fast as I’d like or plateaued, that something will happen to give my faith in myself a boost, Most recently I have been reached out to on social media by people who told me how much my music has spoke to them and helped them deal with their own feelings or issues. You don’t always realize what kind of impact you have on someone.

I write music to make people think, I’d say 90-95% of my songs are a message or story with meaning. I was walking to my car where I have my Instagram link on the back and a QR code that people can scan that takes them to my website, when a young man stopped me and talked to me about my songs and the lyrics that jumped out to him. He wanted to know more about me as an artist, what inspired me and how I came up with my lyrics. We also went over music production and such, but it was a great conversation and it was an energy jolt to keep me going on my musical journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.knoeticmusic.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepoeticknoetic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThePoeticKnoetic
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Knoetic1

Image Credits
Images were designed and created by me.