We were lucky to catch up with Nate and Dan StoneTribe recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Nate and Dan, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

There’s no personal project more meaningful to us than our first full length album that we just released, “Sync or Swim”. This isn’t a shameless plug either. I’m sure every band has a special place in their heart for their first full album. “Sync or Swim” was a culmination of several years of pouring ourselves into our craft, spending a crazy amount of nights in the studio working instead of partying and making every sacrifice we could to keep it genuine, authentic and well polished. The album traveled the world during the process, with recording, mixing and mastering sessions taking place in 14 different studios in several countries. We poured our hearts into it and made sure every single track, every lyric line, every layer was intentional and there for good reason. Before this album, we had never featured a guest singer on any of our songs before, and somehow we went from no features to having a dozen amazing artists featured on the album! It added so much texture and flavor, having all these friends and fellow artists pitch in, we just consider ourselves to be so lucky to share this project with so many talented musicians.

One of the toughest parts of finalizing our first full album was choosing which songs to include. We didn’t really want to eliminate any songs we had worked on but we wanted a wholistic feel and theme to make the project cohesive. We also wanted to showcase the different genres and styles we enjoy playing, so we had some difficult decisions to make and we pushed the limits on how much contrast we could fit, in terms of energy, style, instruments used and artists featured, all while still making it feel like a collection.

The main message throughout the album is overcoming hardships in life through love and the power of our own minds. We write a lot of experimental shit, that’s just too far out there for the average listener. We had to make hard decisions and put some songs on the backburner to make sure the album was as dynamic and powerful as we could make it. We ended up with 11 great songs that we’re very proud of and really showcase our overall sound and vibe.

There’s some crazy good talent on this project, we could go on for hours about these artists but we’d rather you just went and hear it for yourself so here’s the short n skinny…we collaborated with Kat Hall, who has one of the most beautiful natural singing voices I’ve heard. Zelen Hartz who’s powerful voice and bilingual verse added a spicy bite to the album. Andi Ites, Sgt. Remo, Zoe Mazah and Storm Guevara added their special irie vibes to several songs and several other special guests like Conga Kurty and Andrew McKee from Hirie put their fingerprints on the album as well.

This is starting to sound more and more like a shameless plug so we’ll wrap it up by inviting you to check out the other featured artists on the album when you get a copy, exclusively on our website, www.stonetribemusic.com

Nate and Dan, 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?

StoneTribe is just two of us, Nate and Dan. Both of us have always had a special relationship with music, since early youth, we were quick to see music as a way to express ourselves and entertain as well as heal people. We both dealt with painful losses in our families while growing up and we leaned into music as a way to process the pain and heal. It was a lifeline for us somewhat of an obsession really. Neither of us were satisfied with learning just one instrument or style, so we both played any instrument we could get our hands on and w rote songs in multiple genres. We’ve known each other a long time, played in several rock bands together when we were young bucks in Oregon. Dan eventually moved to Texas and we kept in touch and eventually decided to write music over the web. It’s an easy process of co-writing and layering parts back and forth until we’re happy with it. I (Nate) moved out to the North Carolina coast several years ago and we’re still working remote mostly. We do get together as often as we can to write in the same space, play regional shows and chill out when there’s any down time.

As far as our accomplishments together as a group, we’ve released an EP and about 10 singles, not counting any singles we’ve released from the new album. All together I think we’ve got about 25 tracks in total, and some remixes of those so there’s a good sampling of StoneTribe out there, which is our goal and largest accomplishment to date.

One high point of our music journey was charting in the UK at #6 on MusicWeek, and hanging in the top 40 for several weeks afterwards. That happened right after releasing our debut EP and gave us a great jumpstart, and some cool opportunities to work with world class DJs and producers. Those new resources helped us put out a string of new singles the following year. One fan favorite “No Mo Clouds” got enough love to where we made a music video for it, with a professional film crew and editing team. If you haven’t seen the video yet, it’s absolutely worth a watch for the super trippy graphics and intoxicating choreography of the talented and beautiful Jackleen Rios.

We’re excited for every opportunity we get and we’re working hard to get our music heard on every possible platform we can.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Recently we’ve been working in sync licensing, writing custom music scores for film, tv, ads and everything in between. We definitely wish we would have looked into sync licensing way earlier in our pursuit of music professions! We did get some great placements in various film projects but we only recently realized the power of having a mass music catalog specifically for sync licensing. We missed the boat on the early adoption opportunity, especially since we’ve probably produced a few thousand beats between the 2 of us and could have polished all those up, formatted them for sync licensing and released our own large catalog! We’re far too busy to make that happen today but we’re slowly adding to our catalog and hope we can still get involved on a larger scale in the near future. Sync licensing is a really lucrative side of the music biz and would really help supplement income for us starving musicians types who normally make very little on paid streams and downloads. So if we could go back in time, knowing what we know now, we’d probably produce the largest music library there is for sync licensing.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

We feel so lucky and honored to be in a position where we can create music from scratch and share it with a worldwide audience. It wasn’t long ago when this type of distribution option didn’t exist for small market bands. We’re truly blessed to have access to the equipment and connections needed to produce quality tunes and get them out to market quickly. So I’d say sharing our music with you, or anyone who cares to listen is really the most rewarding aspect of what we do. We feel like it’s our purpose on earth and the other reward would be performing our songs live on stage for an audience.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.stonetribemusic.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stonetribemusic_/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/STONETRIBEMUSIC/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/stonetribe
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1SkluTTfxbB2ywR0r90O8l?si=RQd7QmzHQ4CNLoxt1_fN3g (SPOTIFY)

Image Credits
(credits given in photo names) Jason Risner Rick Rodriguez Ben Artes