We were lucky to catch up with Zaro Vega recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Zaro thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?
I would say it comes and goes. I don’t know if my creative profession is my source of being happy exactly. The majority of my journey has been dedicated to a creative lifestyle, and it’s become part of my daily routine in one way or another, so it can depend on how I’m feeling about everything else throughout the cycle. Everything is a mirror. I feel like it would be a difficult thing to hold on to a certain level of happiness with everything always changing and evolving. Sometimes I do wonder what it would be like to work for someone else, and even then, if that’s the path I would have chosen, I don’t know if I could rely on that for my source of being happy or not. I’d say I’m most definitely grateful and thankful for the experiences I get to enjoy from the different creative projects. It’s always fun to create new relationships, and new sounds that lead to those magic moments.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Zaro Vega, and I’m a music producer and artist who makes Reggaeton, Hip Hop, R&B, and Pop music. I’m Guatemalan-American, born in Los Angeles, and later moved to South Dakota when I was 8, where I grew up. The foundation of my creative work comes from being a dancer as a kid, which I picked up from growing up there. I always gravitated towards music and rhythms that made my body move, which then evolved into learning how to create my own music. By 2011, I had started uploading instrumentals on a producer website called Soundclick, which is what essentially opened up all the business relationship doors at the beginning. I ended up moving back to LA and have been building a catalog since. It’s led to some wonderful collaborations over the years, and I’m looking forward to continue creating.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I was fortunate enough to have found the right place and opportunity to start sharing my music early on, which allowed me to ease into my journey. Before I knew it, I had started my online business without realizing it. I was very young and naive when all this happened. Essentially by 2014, this allowed me to move back to Los Angeles on my own, and start pursuing the next stages on my journey, which was landing a song with a major artist. This became a trial and error process, and took me a while to figure out that there’s a lot of politics involved within the music industry. Through all that, I slowly stopped uploading beats online, as I was trying to save most of them for major artist opportunities. As time passed, and the less I uploaded music, my income started to take a downfall, and it led to me being forced to end my lease where I was staying at the beginning of 2019. That year was tough for me because all of a sudden, I’m having a hard time figuring out what to do exactly. Regardless, I never stopped creating, and I always kept working at it. Towards the end of the year, I heard PartyNextDoor had recorded on one of the tracks I co-produced with Asoteric, a good friend of mine. And just as I heard many times before with other major artists that had recorded on one of our tracks, I didn’t get excited about it this time. I didn’t want to get hype for nothing, and then it doesn’t end up coming out, so I completely let it go mentally. Fast forward to March 2020, and they message us the details and promo video for the song “EYE ON IT” that’s gonna be featured on his ‘PARTYMOBILE’ album. Even at the time, it was a bit confusing because it was about the week or so after that they had announced the world covid pandemic, so it didn’t feel like a big celebration at the time. Looking back now, that was the moment that helped me understand what I needed for myself, and confirmed the mental resources I had to keep things moving forward. The majority of producers on the album are all musicians I imagined myself working next to. Ultimately, the message here for me was, to respect my own journey, and don’t let others influence what’s already working for you. Down time can happen, and it can affect our path dramatically, but those are some of the most important times to understand where our focus is going, and we gotta stay on course. Everyone’s route can manifest differently.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Most definitely our way of operating in this life. It’s something I always battled against with my own parents. Our schedule can be all over the place, and sometimes chaotic, which can make it seem like we have no stability or routine in our life. There’s definitely some truth to that at times depending on where we’re at on our journey, although my favorite part is having some sort of routine always. I’m sure it can be completely different for everyone, so it’s hard to pinpoint any specific solution for understanding. A creative job may not come with the health benefits or retirement package, which I’m sure can become a concern when loved ones are just looking out for someone. In the modern age of entertainment, I’ve simply come to understand that we’re going to have content creators, and content consumers. No matter what field, the creators are here to share their art with the world, and the consumers are here to consume it. Whether that’s through social media, through music, through movies, television, or news channels. Every single one of those outlets are creators of something that someone has to consume. Everyone gets to choose the side they want to be on. I don’t believe there’s any right or wrong way of looking at something.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.zarovega.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zarovegabeats/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZaroVega/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZaroVega
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@zarovega
- Other: https://linktr.ee/zarovega
Image Credits
Johnny Theopholis