The Velo Club
Making An Artist
1 | Introduction
My name is Ben, and I’m the founder of The Velo Club. The Velo Club is a proving ground for alternative artists. So many of us think the roadmap to being successful is the story we’re fed on TV and YouTube interviews, where someone gets “discovered” and then signs and blows up. That’s just not the reality. Most great artists are born into the industry or substantial wealth, especially in the alternative segments. It’s common knowledge that The Strokes met abroad in a Swiss boarding school and came from wealth, with frontman Julian’s father owning a successful modeling agency in Manhattan. Coldplay rose to fame around the time lead Chris Martin’s father sold a company for millions of pounds. Clairo’s father worked as an executive for Rubber Tracks (Converse’s recording studios) which allowed him to leverage her into incredible opportunities most couldn’t walk into. There’s a million other examples, but I choose these as I’m not “exposing” anything. This information is incredibly easy to find on your own. If you’re reading this thinking well, no hope for me. I wasn’t born into this. You’d be dead wrong. It’s not the wealth or connections that make the artists. I’ve loved The Strokes long before I knew of their origin story. It’s the 2 byproducts of these headstarts: the surplus of validation, and the absence of fear. When you have a safety net, you’re not terrified of the leap. And since there’s no leap, you can focus solely on the craft. For a career as an artist, your whole job is to be fearless. To push the boundaries, to create something new, to express what people are feeling but nobody is saying. You have to be ready and willing to seize every opportunity, be comfortable with doing the uncomfortable, and be not only willing but excited to keep marching through the inevitable troughs of your career. Most importantly, you need to be in charge.
Who am I to tell you all of this? Well, I once felt like nobody and then all of a sudden people treated me like somebody. It all depended which side of the country I was on. When my all star Los Angeles producer friends would introduce me to their all-star friends, they’d paint me in an incredible light. When I was talked about on the east coast by friends, family, and coworkers, it was much less glamorous. I realized (embarrassingly late) which side allowed my career to grow at a much faster rate than the other. I also needed some serious adjustments in thinking. The understanding of how to operate at the highest level based on my lack of connections, capital, and relativity in the space. Let’s start from the very beginning.
I grew up a little north of Boston in a city called Woburn, Massachusetts. It was not an artistically-rich place. In fact, at the time I grew up there it was pretty blue collar. You had to be really aware of what clothes you were wearing at the middle school bus stop or you might face crude shouts from cars driving by about your sexuality. For someone who had a general tendency to stand out, these shouts became as regular a morning occurrence as my alarm clock going off. There were a lot of horrid ideologies that came out of the place from the townies, a New England term for the people who are born within a 5 mile radius of their final resting place. The people who will never look past the relativity they grew up in, unwilling and afraid to recognize perspectives outside their own community. It wasn’t always a great place to grow up with a dark-skinned latino father, either. Everyone looked pretty identical, and just about each kid I went to school with was Irish, Italian, or a mix of the two. In elementary school, when my dad was able to drop me off at school on his way to work, he’d kiss me on the cheek in front of all my classmates. It doesn’t take a wild imagination to guess what early elementary school kids started saying about me and my dad.
At the time, I was ashamed that I wasn’t able to fit in with what was normal and accepted. Even at lunch time, I was forced to sit at a different table due to a severe anaphylactic peanut allergy. Not only did this alienate me from the rest of my entire class, who all joined the rest of their classmates at the peanut-friendly tables, but it continuously drove forward the narrative that I was not like everyone else. This taught me a lot at a young age about our psychology. Not in a way I could yet assign a framework to, but I was able to experience what it was like to be seen as something else, and I learned some of the tools to change the way I was perceived without actually changing anything about myself. There’s extreme power in being able to control our positioning.
When I first started taking lunch, I sat dead alone. All the kids in my class looked forward to lunch as a time they’d joke around and chop it up with friends. I hated it. I’d feel a physical pain in my face from the humility of knowing that I was sitting at a table that was pushed far back from the remainder of the cafeteria, on my own deserted island. The older lunch ladies would notice and come try to have conversation with me, which would further drive rumors amongst the elementary school that they were my only friends. Most of the time, I just wanted to go home. My anxiety would get so bad that I would begin convincing myself I had a terminal illness. I would tell myself that I forgot how to swallow and needed to go to the nurse’s office. Eventually though, this all changed.
After a while of noticing that I was frequently sitting alone and teachers hearing some of the things other kids would joke about me, somebody had an idea that would shift my world. At this point in time, there was no competition for seats at my empty peanut-free table. One day while we were lined up to enter the cafeteria, we were welcomed to an announcement. “Guys, there is a new rule. This is very important. Nobody is allowed to sit at the peanut-free table, even if your lunch is peanut free.” The lunch monitor delivering the news turned to look at me. “If you want to sit at the peanut-free table, you have to ask Ben, but he can only pick 3 friends to sit with him.” I immediately felt a bunch of kids looking at me and my first thought was what a stupid rule. I’d already dreaded coming in each morning specifically knowing I’d need to sit through another painful lunch. It only took one person, however, to start a frenzy.
“I don’t have peanut butter,” blurted one classmate, quickly looking over at me with puppy dog eyes. Immediately another chimed in that he didn’t either, plus they were friends. The bidding war commenced. Before I knew it, classmates were organizing themselves in the groups of 3 they’d want to sit with to join at the table. I was now able to get the draft picks of my lunchtime companions. Lunches from there on out became different, as each time the competition was a bit fierce. Extra kids would come sit at the table before the lunch monitors came over to kick them out, enforcing their new and make believe rule. Occasionally, someone would make the draft pick only to try and sneak a peanut butter sandwich at the table, causing a potential security breach. The one thing that was for certain though was that I was now seen differently. The positioning had shifted. While everything about me was exactly the same, the story my classmates were telling themselves about my lunch table was rewritten.
As the years of elementary school progressed, I learned other ways to shift positioning and perception in the minds of my peers. Even in regards to my dad. In the early days, I’d face some general ignorance from classmates who would repeat the things their parents said about “Mexicans” to me, despite that I was Guatemalan. Of course, in a city with around 6% latino population (datausa.io) in comparison to the approximately 47% hispanic/latino population of Los Angeles (datausa.io), it wasn’t hard to see why they would be drawn to comment on things outside the usual. Sometimes I’d get a seemingly strange question from a group of classmates, eagerly awaiting a response so they could giggle about the answer. “Do people in Guatemalia (they’d add an extra i for effect) use toilet paper?” Their smiles were too friendly and their eyes were too piercing, so you knew you were already the butt of the joke. “Say something in Spanish,” was always a fun request, because no matter what they told you to say, when you’d translate you’d be met with “What?!” as they all laughed amongst each other. The positioning they had was simple: We are this, you are that. I wasn’t a member of their tribe.
One day after school, the kids outside were playing soccer. My dad came to pick me up after work, and it was around the time soccer season was just starting up. I was 8 years old, and I’d grown up with soccer being a heavy part of my life. It was the only sport they’d played heavily in Guatemala at the time, and my dad had years and years of playing under his belt. He’d taught me tons of drills in our backyard and I’d practice them against my cousins when I’d visit in the summer. When he saw the schoolkids outside playing, he walked over, beckoning for someone to give him a pass. One of the kids, intimidated by the 6 foot tall figure approaching him gave a light pass. My dad jogged to meet the pass and flicked the ball up with the toe of his shoe. He began juggling the ball on his knees for a while while the rest of the kids came over. They stared in awe while my dad showed off the skills that I’d already seen a million times in our backyard. He let the ball fall at his feet before dribbling mockingly by my classmates. A couple of them tried to get the ball from him, and he’d quickly shift it from one foot to the other, leaving them tangled up and falling over themselves. He pranced up and down the field as my classmates excitedly tried to pick the ball off him. Eventually, he passed it off and we all coordinated a scrimmage. My dad said he’d play on my team and needless to say, everyone wanted to play on our side. The opposing team complained we were overpowered, so we allowed for them to get more players. Regardless, we wiped the fucking floor. My dad and I would run the plays we practiced in the backyard. “Primer Intencion!” he’d yell before lobbing a pass for me to drill into the back of the net. Once again, the narrative had shifted and our positioning had gone from being the butt of the joke to top dogs. Once again, nothing about us had changed.
Throughout those formative years, these changes were tough to understand. Maybe I just need to always be playing soccer, I thought. I see these rationalizations happen amongst so many peers in music as well. Artists who’ve struggled for years, throwing “shit it the wall” before something finally pops, and they quickly create a false reasoning for it. It’s the same as someone who is overweight their whole lives suddenly losing 100 pounds after deciding they will only eat apples. The reason they lost weight wasn’t the apples, it was the caloric deficit they entered after switching their diet from high calorie fast foods to the fruit. Instead of eating over 5,000 calories per day, they ate less than they burned, resulting in weight loss. Yet, the story they tell themselves and others is that the secret is to only eat apples. Humans are funny in the sense that only a very small portion of the decisions we make are based in logic or reasoning. Most are made from a place of internal narrative. When you learn to control that narrative, you learn to change the world. You become an artist.
Much later in life, I took a college course titled Social Influence and Persuasion. It was in that class I learned the most valuable lessons I could in my career. These were the tools used to shape the narratives. I tested these tools in part-time retail sales positions, immediately outperforming all of my full-time peers. I felt that I’d learned superpowers from that one class purely based in human psychology. It also unveiled to me how these tools could be used to shape our thinking in terrible ways, distorting our perceptions of right and wrong. Any tool — like a hammer — can be used to help build wondrous things creating memories and value for people. A tree house for children to play in, for example. However, in the hands of a wicked person, a hammer could be used to bash the heads of innocent civilians. The tools you learn in this guide should be handled with responsibility and integrity. To make you not only a better artist, but a more intentional thinker, and an even better person. One that is able to clearly identify biases others look past and do what is objectively right.
There’s a reason we hand pick each act we work with. Most artists we take on are at the very beginning of their journeys. While it is more difficult for us both financially and psychologically to work with people at this stage (we’ll talk more later in the guide), we believe it is crucial to be present early in their careers. That way, we can help them map out the home they want to live in long before the bricks are laid down and cemented. Again, in an industry as competitive and testing as ours, there is a razor thin chance of success. It is a guarantee that without an extremely thorough vision of what the world we want to create is, it will never be created. It’s not some sort of voodoo either. Imagine Christmas was coming up and you wanted a specific doll. If you never told anyone, there’d be a 0% chance you receive it. Yet, for so many artists they wish for a specific definition of success that they haven’t laid out, even to themselves. How do you ever achieve that? Is someone else just going to bring it to you? The answer, based in logic, is no. Not even Santa Claus.
