Trust is a tough lesson.
I moved by myself exclusively for many years. I didn’t want to collaborate with anyone, I wanted to do it all on my own. That’s a young artist’s game, I feel. When you first get into your art more seriously, you think you’re gonna show everybody – there’s never been a producer, rapper, whatever, that can do it like me.
The deeper you get in the game, you start realizing, damn, a lot of my heroes had teams low-key. Even though on the outside, it looks like one guy. But nobody does anything by themselves – everybody has someone that put them up in their first gallery, gave them their 1st break, gave them their first shot at something greater.
You don’t wake up in Baldwin Park with idols as a kid. It’s a slow life, in a slow town. No one’s really made a name for themselves where I’m from.
I wouldn’t say I was introverted growing up, but I definitely kept to myself. A lot of people knew me as a music guy. I had uncles and aunts who were extreme metalheads on one side, and on the other, I had boom-bap heads. I’ve been a drummer most of my life, drumline from high school into music college. But my first instrument was an accordion.
My mom’s from the mountains of Jalisco, by El Río Ameca, and my dad’s from Culiacan, Sinaloa. Even though I’ve had other influences my whole life, I was raised on banda & corridos.
I recorded some corridos around 2020 and barely put them out this year. They were songs I began sharing with collaborators privately at the end of writing/recording sessions, more for fun than anything. I’ve been rapping and making R&B my whole life, so it was nice to find an outlet that feels new but familiar at the same time.
I heard enough reactions to know it’s something worth pursuing. And after putting them out, I’ve gotten a lot of random support from people and places I never thought I would get support from.
I went to Mexico City in August and did a ton of interviews, a lot of people were stoked on me over there. I think a lot of their love came from the fact that I’m a Mexican pocho foo from LA, and I’m not hiding it. I put that forward in the music because I’m not trying to be something I’m not. It had to be refreshing for a lot of people out there, in a type of music that’s so heavily associated in their society. We’re not dealing with cartel violence here, we’re only talking about what we know.
I’ve already been in bandas, so it’s not my first time playing around with this genre, but it’s the first time we’re doing it for ourselves. Naturally, it’s gonna sound way more LA, and I’m not talking about pulling up to ranchos para hacer desmadre. We’re not on the avenue, we’re more on smoking weed & maybe stealing some things here and there <haha>. I think it’s refreshing for them to hear a song in the genre that’s not necessarily heavy, which makes it heavy in a completely different way.
We’re here now, breathing this air, with the opportunity to change narratives for ourselves. All I can do is focus on the kind of change I wanna see in my life and in my universe, which will hopefully reflect outward, right?
I carry this saying with me: in order for you to be where you’re supposed to be, hundreds of projects have to die. We all have old bands and old homies, old squads, even old names for ourselves, and ways of thinking, too. They all have to go at some point. And sometimes when you cut people off you don’t even stop talking to them, you just stop coming around as much because you can’t be wasting your time.
I definitely cut off everybody at one point. I was working by myself from around 22 to 26, very anti-collaboration. I was doing real estate and had quit music completely. During those years I was getting very depressed. I was making good money but hated my working life. One day I’m on Instagram and – this is back when people were really using hashtags – I searched for #livemusicjam. On one of the posts I saw ‘Long Beach, Roxanne’s live jam…’ I used to play jazz gigs in Long Beach and that wasn’t the first time I heard about Roxanne’s. I said f*ck it and drove out from West Covina on a free day.
I went up to the guitarist and one of the drummers between sets and just laid it out: ‘Hey man, you guys don’t know me, but I’m really serious about music. I haven’t played in a long time, but I’m a jazz pianist.’ So they made me go up to jam, and we met up the next week to jam again over some tracks I had written.
Eventually I worked my way up to doing shows again. At the time I was known for rapping and playing piano at the same time. One time a couple of rappers went up to me after a set wanting to collaborate; I was always reluctant, but these foos were so persistent… They would go to all my shows and I remember starting to feel like the Grinch. I was like, Man Chris, you gotta ease up, bro. These foos are really trying to build with you and you’re shutting them down, for what? So I ended up tapping in, and those became the homies that I work with now in The Brownboyz & Brother Smack.
We have a collective going on with The Brownboyz. It’s mostly producer-songwriters and we’re working on an album right now too. The first project should be out sometime next year. I’m working on a Corridos project for my personal music right now under Eleazar. We’re involved in around 19 projects in total, because we’re producing and writing for a lot of other artists right now, planting a lot of seeds that we can reap and sow next year. One that’s been starting to drop already is for Simone Joy Jones.
Brother Smack is a rap group between myself, Kennedy Hollows, a rapper named MASH, and a producer named STRETCH, they call him CRSMilano. I love that group because I still get to create hip-hop with everything else I have going on. We have a manager and graphic designer, a video guy, and homies that help us out with day-to-day project management. We also have our photographers like Williecaptureslight, he’s like a master fly on the wall.
I had to drop those walls, the ego in thinking I could do everything by myself. I started applying a bit more humility to my life, incorporating a system of checks and balances, so my homies and I could build each other up.
As I started going to Long Beach more often, I recognized some members of The Free Nationals at an event, that’s Anderson .Paak’s band. I went up to them and started singing a .Paak song, and they started tripping out laughing. The bass player Kelsey… He didn’t have to do this, but he asked me to join them for a drink. He’s a really cool & open guy. We got to chopping it up, and eventually my day job came up.
“What the f*ck? You do real estate? You don’t wanna do music, or what?”
I didn’t even know where to start.
“You just gotta do it, man. You just gotta find a band, your people to rock with, just start doing it. There’s no way around it.” He told me he was broke for a long time, how he used to live with a bunch of homies in Koreatown… We had a 2-3 hour chat. And the next day, I quit my job.
He didn’t tell me to quit my job, and I also didn’t tell him I quit my job. I just did and started pulling up to Long Beach more often. I kept turning leaves and being current and making it work.
I play piano mostly now. You know those keyboards with the light-up buttons? I’m literally a success story from that, man. I got a keyboard for my birthday when I was 10 and stopped playing accordion almost completely because I was so obsessed with the piano. I remember learning Moonlight Sonata from following the lights and playing it for somebody at school the next day. The light bulb went off and I thought, if I learn the lights, then I’ll learn the piano.
I should be playing piano in Europe right now, there were a few tours I said no to. I decided to stay here to finish these albums. I play the most with Thee Sinseers and The Altons. My first ever run with them we were opening up for Los Lonely Boys in Oregon… They liked how I played so much that I ended up playing with them on that leg of the tour too. But I play in other bands alongside Rudy De Anda, The Jack Moves… More soul artists than anything. I got picked up by The Free Nationals recently, playing keys with them this last summer for a bit. Most currently, I’ve been playing with Cuco.
The other night I was thinking about my old dishwashing job, being so covered in shabu that by the end of the day, I could take off my pants and they would stand up on their own. And even when I had a little money, nobody was calling me up and nobody knew me as a professional musician. Fast forward to being able to say no to tours? It’s an insane blessing. The audacity to say no to a tour when you come from not having sh*t <haha>.
At the same time I don’t want to get trapped in a loop. My biggest aspiration is to help my family succeed, and to do it through the means of being an artist. It’s hard to do that when you’re building other people’s dreams.
Perception is a motherf*cker. I remind the homies all the time that, in this modern era of social media marketing and music being all-encompassing, we’re just playing a game of perception. We decide what to show people, which leads to people forming opinions and biases based on content. Being authentic goes a long way. Hopefully our approach will help us stay sane in the long run and not feel like we’re in this weird orchestrated play.
Lately I haven’t been writing love songs as often as I used to. We’re living in some crazy times regarding judgment socially, and sometimes I feel we become so open-minded that we forget our thoughts can weigh us down. There’s definitely a lot of truth being uncovered, but overall, I just wish people would realize we all want the same things in life.
-Eleazar.
