We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Wayne Matthews Jr. a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Wayne, thanks for joining us today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

I believe that me misunderstood was the best thing that could’ve ever happened to me. I truly think I might not have learned as many life lessons had I been the jock archetype, or most popular in the class, or even hang with the top of the social food chain. Now this is not to say that I never had friends, but I never really felt like i had a friend group that accepted every aspect of me, or even knew how to deal with me or understand me. I’m an overthinker, so I really went back and thought about what everyone thought of me. What that opened the door for is massive intrapersonal understanding, or as I feel like other people call it, Knowledge of Self.

I was able to build my moral compass upon things, and not just go along with what people told me or who they thought I were. There were a lot of my aspects that people didn’t like, that I ended up loving about myself. Who cares if I was into Bionicles? I liked them! Who cares if they don’t like random statements? I do! Who takes an aggressive pass in music in the middle of Phrase 3? Guilty. Who gets into car accidents and are completely level headed if they’re not in the wrong? Hi there lol The true joy of being able to be cool with yourself in who God made you to be is such a huge flex. Now this is not for flaunting to other people, cause that is jerkish behavior. Keep that for yourself lol

And to bring it around to my work, my acceptance of who I am lead me directly to who I am creatively! For anybody who knows me, I ALWAYS talk about bigger picture. There’s risks worth taking to push the envelope to establish a new standard or possibility. So being misunderstood is so okay, because through your journey, somebody will find you who’s willing to understand. Stop chasing.

My hope is that everyone goes through a small period of being misunderstood, so they can come to find the light within themselves.

Wayne, 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?

Welcome to my unofficial TED Talk. My name is Wayne Matthews Jr. aka WavesByWayne. I consider myself a Music Wavologist by trade, only because I’ve been trusted to be someone’s drummer, keyboard player, producer, musical director, drum technician, playback engineer, and arranger both musically and vocally. I also believe I provide good objective advice and insight on music that I don’t take part in as well, and that’s really important for people to be able to have a good second opinion on things that isn’t biased. So I guess we’ll go ahead and put musical advisor down as well.

Full transparency. From adolescence, I felt like my course was charted for me. And not from a sense of my parents forcing me to do music like some horror stories that people have lived, but from a sense of this God given delicacy called music shaped my life. My father is a musician by way of my grandfather being a music enthusiast. He’s honestly the reason I ended up getting into music in the first place. Then my mother stating that I was kicking in the womb on beat. I don’t believe my parents foresaw me doing this full time, but honestly I appreciate them being so supportive after starting to do it full time Spring Semester of my Freshman year at Xavier University of Louisiana.

But to really answer the questionnaire, haha. In a lot of ways, I always knew I would be doing this full time. It never felt like it wasn’t going to be in the cards because I had been involved with it since the beginning. I did other things like Taekwondo, I did ball in my middle school years, but that broke off by High School when the position I played had a star player of the school. I knew I wasn’t bout to get no play time. So I knew success was available to me in music.

And I also have to mention this. New Orleans is a city that births musicians. The city lives and breathes it. It’s the culture. There’s so much rich history New Orleans has. Traditional Jazz (Revival Music), Brass Band, and Bounce Music are the three biggest pockets of music the city is noted for, but there is so much more. So it’s really easy to make the conversion into doing music professionally, and not every place is like that. Rightfully so, because there’s no place like New Orleans. That’s one major aspect that sets me apart in the music field. The culture is based in the question “What do you have to say or offer?” It’s all feel, no fluff, no extra aesthetics, no stage plots, no gimmicks. And you have to deliver, for many hours at a time even. The way New Orleanians go about music is just different.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My biggest driver is that the ability to play Music is a God given gift, and just as it was given it can also be taken away. So my thing has always been to do right by the gift first. That means practicing, being responsible with the calls that I take from people who want to hire, and even doing right by my own original music, that I’ve been working on currently.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

The best thing society can do is to pay artists and creatives their proper rates. Aside from the top of the food chain, somehow music always ends up getting the shorthand of the budget when it comes to things on the other side of the coin. To keep it specific, this is for people that are interested in music, and/or having music at their events. When you pay your artists and creatives properly, that in turn helps out the money they have invested into their own craft. That includes thousands of dollars invested in gear, into wardrobe, and into the car note for the car that takes them to many venues and places for performances. On a more personal note, it allows artists and creatives like myself to pay my artists and creative friends properly for project startups, studio sessions, and gigs that I want to put on for myself. That then helps to end the struggling artist archetype.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @wavesbywayne
• Twitter: @wavesbywayne
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@WavesByWayne
• Soundcloud: @WavesByWayne
• Other: Link to works that I’ve been a part of.

  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6HJcIJa6FRw0dfMaeJtqBj?si=f2b7ad85cab54641