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Conversations with Landon Whitaker

Today we’d like to introduce you to Landon Whitaker. 

Hi Landon, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
My journey into music started in June in 2019 and me and my friend were just chilling in my room and we were bored so I thought of an idea and it was freestyling. We searched up freestyle beats on YouTube and tried to freestyle but shortly after we realized how hard it was to freestyle so we quit. But I still wanted to do something with music bc I was really bored so I recommend the idea of writing a song and that’s what we did. Once we had all the lyrics, we would put a camera up by the tv that was playing the beat and he would rap into it all in one take and we would post these videos to YouTube. We started doing that more and more and my dad noticed and my dad was a musician too so he already had a room in our house that had a little bit of recording equipment and a computer with garage band, so he told us we could start using that. We started going in there and I made the beats on garage band and he did the rapping and when I say it was horrible, I mean it was horrible. The beats were horrible because I had no knowledge of anything musical and I was also only 12 and the rapping was horrible bc we were only 12. But for some reason that didn’t stop us from posting the songs and sending them to everyone in our school. Skip forward a year and I have a beat YouTube channel and my friend I was doing music with is on his grind and we’re a team. I’m the producer/manager/lyricist/engineer and he’s the rapper. The dream team. We we’re dropping all the time on SoundCloud but we were finally ready for Spotify and other streaming services, and this was a big step for us. While all this was happening, my dad, my friends, and everyone was telling me to rap in my songs since I’m basically doing everything else, but I was scared to. The way I saw it was that I was just a white kid and I couldn’t rap or that would be corny, but looking back I’m so glad I did. So, skip forward a couple months and on one random day, I come home from school with the courage to record my own song. I found a beat I liked and it was history from there. I posted it on all streaming services and was posting about it on all of my socials just pushing the song as hard as I could bc I had found my true passion. With every song I made after that, I got significantly better and better. Not only did my beats and my mix improve but my lyrical abilities and my vocal abilities improved too. I started getting confident when I rapped and I started turning haters into supporters because even they could see how I was growing. Not just making music has helped me grow but listening to it has too. The way I make music changes with my taste in music because for a while I could just be bumping a certain artist and in that time when I write it would be a little inspired of that artist I’ve been listening to. Anyways skip to now, I’ve strayed away from your typical trap beats and started rapping on more boom-bap or old-school hip-hop-inspired beats, and my friend that I started with has quit music and left me alone in this journey. I don’t know where my journey will end but I am excited to see. 

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Being an artist will never be a smooth road for anybody. There will always be obstacles and blocks but if you keep pushing you can overcome anything. Like for example, any person who has ever mixed and mastered a song knows that it is a very tedious thing to learn and do right and it was frustrating for a long time and I never thought I would learn how to do it and it was so bad to the point where I started being scared to make music just bc I didn’t want to have to deal with the anger and sadness of mixing and mastering it. But I didn’t let that stop me and I just kept practicing mixing and mastering and kept going and going and now I’d say that I’m actually pretty good at it and I actually can understand it. 

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am a 15-year-old kid from Dickson County, TN, that raps, produces, mixes, masters, and manages all myself. My music is inspired by a whole lot of artists but I think the main ones you can hear would probably be Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, MF Doom, Kanye, Nas, and old Logic. I think what sets me apart from others is a couple of reasons. My age, the fact that I do everything on my own, my style is really different, my lyrical abilities (like my ability to be able to tell a story in my song), and my different cadences and flows. 

In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
I don’t really know about the future but I trust it. I trust it because I trust me. 

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Image Credits

Jerry Whitaker

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