Teacher Spotlight: From Studio to MTV Shout-outs

Many new musicians dream about recording in a studio, signing with a record label, and creating a loyal fanbase. For Los Angeles music teacher Louie D., that dream became reality with his band, holychild. In fact, their music video for “Best Friends” was recently featured on MTV’s Buzzworthy Blog. How did they get to where they are now? Here’s our exclusive interview with Louie…

1) How did your band get started?
Liz (the singer of holychild) and I met in college at the George Washington University in Washington DC, and started writing songs/jamming together informally at first. holychild initially started as my senior thesis project for my jazz studies degree, of which at some point while we were recording our songs in the studio in DC, we realized that it was something worth pursuing after college.

2) What was the roadmap like for your band to get to this point?
Liz and I began writing the songs we produced/self-released on YouTube a couple years ago and then started recording them with an audio engineer friend of ours at a great studio in DC called Cue Studios a little more than a year ago. Literally all money I earned from playing gigs around town in DC was directed towards studio time, so there was definitely some struggle there in terms of making ends meet, eating, surviving day-to-day, etc. It’s not like I am living ‘the good life’ now by any extent, but the cost of living in Washington DC is simply way higher than in Los Angeles (where I am based out of now), so it’s more manageable to be a creative person here in LA to say the least. holychild spent a good 6-7 months crafting the 7 songs on our debut EP before we played our first official gig here in LA. We made the band here in LA with a couple of friends of mine, ran down a 10-12 song set with them over a month or so of practice and started playing out in SoCal this past February.

3) What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
In terms of my music career, I don’t know if anyone has told me this word-for-word, but trusting my intuition at the end of the day and relying on no one else to make something happen for me and my music career matters so much more than what anyone says they will do. It’s nice to have business folks be fans of your music and say they will do this or that to get you to the next level, but at the end of the day, it is totally up to you for making everything happen. I wish I had learned that sooner!

4) And what advice would you give aspiring artists/bands?
The advice I would give to aspiring artists/bands is the same advice I have learned from doing it myself; you have to make everything on and off the stage happen yourself (or at least all of the initial leg work has to come from you!). In my experiences, half of the work of getting on stage or in the studio entails administrative preparation (in addition to the musical/technical preparation); i.e. working the phones, sending emails, connecting the dots, and making sure everybody involved is on the same page so you can relax, have fun, and express yourself fully!

5) What is life as a performing musician like in LA?
As a performing musician in LA, a typical day for me at the moment entails a quarter to half of the day sending out emails or making phone calls to folks I’m working with (whether it is folks in holychild, our manager, PR firm, lawyer, other bands we’re playing with, their agents, responding to fans, inquiries, etc.). The other half or quarter is spent recording in my bedroom where I have a simple recording rig, practicing in my band’s practice space, or teaching my own students!