We were lucky to catch up with Stuart Todd Whitworth recently and have shared our conversation below.
Stuart, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
When I was 5 years old, my parents started me in piano lessons, along with my sisters. I liked it at first, but after a few years I got tired of practicing all the time and my sisters and I started begging our parents to let us quit. After enough of our fits, they let my sisters quit, but my dad made me stick with it. Maybe he saw something in me musically that I did not yet see in myself. But then soon after during the summer when I turned 10 years old, my piano teacher allowed me to take a break from all the classical pieces and learn some songs that I knew from the radio. And that flipped a switch in my brain and in my heart. I fell in love with music and never turned back. I decided at age 10 that I wanted a life-long career in music.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m Stuart Todd Whitworth and I’m obsessed with music. I’m obsessed with songs. I’m obsessed with melodies, lyrics, and chord progressions. I’m also obsessed with cinema and film scores and the orchestra.
In my early 20’s a heartbreak catapulted me into becoming very serious about writing songs. In this time, my love for melody-driven pop/rock songs and my love for orchestral music seemed to be begging for a fusion. It’s now rare that I ever create a song that does not include some orchestral elements like violins, cellos, etc.
Through music and song, I’m always interested in exploring the pains and trials of being human, and crafting those inexplicable feelings into lyric and melody in such a way as to reveal a unique snapshot of life that can’t be duplicated or savored in any other way. I’m a sucker for sad and melancholy songs, I’ve always loved them. There’s something that a beautiful sad song does to me that causes everything to make sense again. So I tend to write a lot of them.
But I also love the exhilaration, adventure, and intensity of life, which always leads to more energetic and angsty songs. Traveling almost always sparks my creativity and I usually come home with the beginnings of at least a few new songs.
I love writing songs, I love composing the arrangements and orchestrations, I love producing and molding them into the final finished songs. Then performing music live is the culmination of it all, it’s my favorite part. For musicians, performing live gives the opportunity to create your own world through music, and then invite a room full of people to come join you in that world. And for those brief moments, everyone is on the same page, all together. It’s like nothing else on this earth. I’m never going to stop.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Sure, this one was quite a journey. I recorded my 16-song album IF ALL ELSE FAILS over a period of 8 years, 3 months, and 5 days… it was a very elaborate production—in addition to a full band there was a small orchestra of violins, violas, and cellos on all 16 songs, and other various orchestral instrumentation including glockenspiel & and a live harp player. It was a whole lot of composing, arranging, and producing for me, lots of studio dates and coordination with all of the numerous musicians involved. A couple of years into the recording process when it became clear just how long the album was going to take, it seemed fitting to release IF ALL ELSE FAILS in an unconventional, distinctive and novel fashion. I felt that the delivery and audience experience of this album called for something creative and unique.
So first, I hired an incredibly talented graphic artist, Sara Kovacs, to design the album cover. Her cover art concept was so imaginative and beautiful that over the next 7 years while continuing the album recording, I slowly brought on a handful of additional artists, of various visual art mediums, to dream up their own versions of that cover art concept. The result was a curated collection of gorgeous artwork which felt deserving of an appropriately stunning & elegant presentation. So I dreamed up a hardcover art book to encase the CD and download card (which both contain all 16 songs of the album) to give a tactile artistry-infused experience for the listener. And since we time-lapse filmed the creation of each of the art pieces over this 7 year period, I wove the time lapses together to be the music video for the song “Where You Are” which I’d love for you to see, here’s the link:
An overwhelming amount of life, heart & soul, blood, sweat & tears went into the songwriting, arranging, recording, and production of the 16 songs on the album IF ALL ELSE FAILS as well as the creation of the final physical product filled with so much amazing and imaginative visual artwork.
But then when it came time to manufacture the hardcover book, I searched far and wide for a manufacturer who could produce it to my liking at a reasonable price that left some room for profit. I finally found one and we began the back and forth process of working through all the details to get it just right. This turned out to be a tedious 9-month process. And then right as we reached the finish line, they went back on a crucial part of the original agreement, which killed the deal entirely. I felt so defeated—they had wasted nearly a year of my time, pushing back the release of the album. At that point it would have been easy to give up and just release IF ALL ELSE FAILS in a regular CD case and on the streaming platforms and be done with it. But I couldn’t shake my original vision for this immense project, and so the arduous trek toward a suitable manufacturer started over essentially from the beginning. I did eventually find one, they did a great job, and they did not go back on any terms of the agreement.
It’s staggering to admit—this manufacturing process tacked on an additional 4 years to the time it took to produce the music itself. So from the day I first set foot in a studio to start recording IF ALL ELSE FAILS to the day I released it was… wait for it… over 12 years.
But I am proud of the final product and thankful for all the ways in which the journey stretched me and grew me as a musician, as an artist, and as a person. Whenever I tell the audience about this album at a performance, and show it projected up on a screen, walking them through the art pieces page by page, and then play them the music video, it’s so rewarding to see their reactions and the appreciation of just how much went into IF ALL ELSE FAILS.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
In the summer of 2021, I was street-performing in downtown San Diego (not too far of a drive from where I currently live) on a sunny Friday afternoon by the harbor. In my typical fashion, I was alternating between cover songs and originals. When I started playing my song “Happy” I noticed a particular woman and man sitting on a nearby bench listening and watching very intently. When I finished the song, she approached me and told me how much she liked the song and started asking me a few questions about myself and my music. We chatted for a quick minute and then she said “well, I’d like to give you a substantial tip” and proceeded to put ten $100 bills in my hand… $1,000 cash! I was stunned. I thanked her and told her how much it meant to me. Her husband, who had been standing back at a distance, then approached and I realized he had been filming with his phone. We chatted a bit more and they asked me for my social media handles and said they would post the video and tag me in it. Well as it turned out, she had 1.5 million followers on TikTok, and a large following on Instagram too. Within hours, my TikTok, which had been just a placeholder account for years, was skyrocketing. I went from 7 (yes, single digit seven) followers to 2,300 followers in a matter of hours. And my Instagram account (my primary social media presence) got a nice boost as well. I’m not at the point yet of having tens of thousands of followers on any platform, but it’s growing.
Of course none of that was planned, and it certainly involved some luck of being in the right place at the right time performing to the right [super-generous] people.
But one thing you can do to get more followers: light a big wooden piano on fire 🔥🎹🔥 up in the middle of the snowy mountains while playing it in a music video. That gets people’s attention, and they want to see it:
https://stwmusic.com/shewontbemine
Other than doing crazy things on film, I don’t have a secret formula for social media success. But generally the more you get out there and make yourself and your art seen in real life, the more your social media presence grows.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://stwmusic.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/stuarttoddwhitworth
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/stuarttoddwhitworth
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@stuarttoddwhitworth
Image Credits
Richard Provencio, Taylor Martyn