We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Will Lord. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Will below.

Will, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Our band, American Megafauna, formed when three of our current members, Will, Aidan and Alex were all attending Southwestern University together. We were all enrolled in the music program and so even though we all had a lot to learn we were already competent enough on our instruments. So when we first got together and started jamming, we though it would be easy since we already knew what we were doing. What we realized though was that playing with other musicians was its own skillset that not all of us had yet developed. Learning to not just play our own instruments, but listening to what everyone else in the group was doing, locking in with them on the beat and responding to them musically turned out to be a very difficult skill to learn. Even now after nearly 5 years playing together we always need to remind ourselves to not just play, but to listen as well.

Crafting songs as a group proved a bit different as well. You can write something on an acoustic guitar and have it sound great, but if you play it the same way when you’re with other musicians, you’ll often end up taking up too much musical space because you’re used to filling it all by yourself when its just you. And that’s not even to mention how much a song can expand when you give all the members of a band a moment to shine in the song, or when other people have ideas for textures, arrangements and sections to add the the songs. Someone regularly walks into our garage with a 2 minute song and by the time the song is done being developed, were left with a song over 5 minutes in length.

Even outside the scope of the music itself, working with other musicians proves a challenge. Coordinating schedules, getting work done without conflict, aligning artistic vision and conducting business are all new challenges when working with others as opposed to by yourself. But with the guys in American Megafauna, its never a challenge we cant overcome. We make sure the work gets done, and even when something proves difficult, we push forward because of our ethic and our friendship with one another.

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?

We are American Megafauna, an Austin based Rock band with influences ranging from Prog and Funk to Punk and Soul. We write and perform our own original music which is available on all streaming services, but we also regularly perform cover sets as long as 4 hours. We perform all over the city, in 6th street bars, local breweries, punk clubs and many more locations. We pride ourselves on being musicians that are skilled enough to work as professionals around town, but also creative and knowlegable enough to create our own music with a unique sound that nobody else can replicate. We make music that is complex and draws from many sounds and genres, but doesn’t lose its sense of fun or catchiness, and is always distinctly us.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

The most important book iv’e ever read is ‘ Mindset’ by Carol Dweck. Reading that taught me a new way of looking not just at the bands creative career, but also my own personal life. The basic idea of the book is the “growth mindset” which is just conciously acknowledging that almost any skill or any type of intelligence can be learned and improved upon. be it music, language, business, art, or anything else. For a long time I had a belief in my head that since I didn’t start playing music until I was 18, I was too late to become a great musician, especially when there were people who seemed to do it so effortlessly. But this book taught me that there was no such thing as effortless skill, and that through sufficient hard work I too could become great at music, so long as I kept in mind it was a skill to be cultivated, not an inborn talent.

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

The most rewarding part of being creative for me is being able to see your effort materialize into something tangible that you can experience and that others can enjoy. Even if I stopped playing music forever tomorrow, I will always have the songs that American Megafauna has written and recorded. I will always be able to hear them and remember all the practices in the hot garage, all the times we finally nailed a complicated part after 10 tries, all the moments of inspiration and all the laughs and everything else that came along with it. And at the end of the day, we write music that we enjoy, and so we will always have these songs that understand us like no others do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://americanmegafauna.com/
• Instagram: @usmegafauna
• Facebook: @usmegafauna
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLVcRpjzD5isrk0rhwOD6lA
• Other: https://linktr.ee/usmegafauna