Today we’d like to introduce you to Wilson McBeath.
Hi Wilson, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Hey, thanks for having me! My journey into music production has been a very roundabout path. I grew up in Cincinnati, and was a big hobby kid – it felt like I was always making something or learning a new skill, but it was never related to music. At the same time, I would spend hours listening to music on YouTube every night. When I was 15, those two things finally combined, and I started teaching myself to play piano, and guitar, and to write songs.
That turned into producing later in high school, and I decided to go to college in Indiana for the music business. I got a job at the school’s music studio and spent all my time there. It was a great space to grow and learn, but Indiana doesn’t have a great music scene, so I decided I would try and get an internship in Nashville in the summer of 2018. I cold-called every publisher in town, reached out to friends of friends of friends, and finally got an internship with this great producer/writer named Jesse Frasure at a company called Rhythm House. They were wonderful to me and taught me a lot – I don’t know if I would hold myself to the same standard of skill today if I hadn’t seen how they worked. It also helped me establish that writing/producing was what I wanted to do full-time.
During my internship, I met a few people at random events in town that were also writers and down to collaborate. I started writing with them, and then when I went back to Indiana, would do writing trips to Nashville every month. This led to me moving to Nashville at the beginning of 2019, right after I graduated. I got a shitty job working as a valet, moved in with a friend, and kept writing and producing with those same collaborators. After a few months of this, I was having a hard time with the lack of stability in my life while transitioning into adulthood. It felt like my schedule was all over the place, and I didn’t really have the life skills at the time to handle it – I wanted to try out a 9-5 while producing on the side and see if that worked better for me.
An opportunity came up to work in a client relations role at a music publisher called Kobalt. I took the job, and that became a big part of my life for about a year and a half. I would work there during normal business hours and then would come back home and write or produce until midnight or 1 every night. In classic chaotic musician fashion, I was also living in a warehouse at the time – the only place I could find to live where they wouldn’t kick me out because of noise issues. The people at Kobalt were great, and I enjoyed my time there a lot, but after a while, it felt like I had learned what I needed to from that job. Thankfully, I was fortunate enough to have enough independent artists wanting me to produce them that I could also afford to quit (this would have been mid-2020, a few months after the pandemic started). And that started my journey of producing and writing full-time, which is what I do now!
Since then, my life has looked relatively the same – I split my time between producing and writing music with artists. I signed with a management company in 2021 called Grass Fed Music in Los Angeles, and they’ve been pivotal in helping my career grow. I focus on pop and indie music, and Nashville feels like it has a bit of a ceiling for those genres, so I’ve been traveling to LA every 6 weeks for the past two years. I’ve found that this has helped me stay inspired and challenged, and I’m more excited about the music I’m making now than I ever have been.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
It’s definitely not an easy road! Any creative field is a hard path to choose, and I’ve struggled with so many things along the way. Financially, it can be tough – there’s not the sense of security that a traditional job provides, and I’ve found that even when things are going well, that lack of security is still there in the back of your mind. Time management can be difficult as well when there’s nobody telling you what to do, and I’m always struggling with my work/life balance.
It’s easy to make beats, it’s harder to have meaningful connections with people in your life. Over the past couple of years, I’ve had to get a lot better at saying no to work opportunities that I’m not absolutely stoked about, and that’s really helped the balance. It can also be hard to work in such an intangible field – I spend so much time on things that are completely subjective. I might think it’s great, and someone else might think it’s horrible, and we could both be right from our perspectives.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I focus on producing and writing pop and indie music (with some R&B and hip-hop thrown in as well). Pop music encompasses so many genres now, and I love that one day I could make a guitar-based pop rock song, and the next day make a vibey indie R&B song.
My biggest strength is vocal production – I love the vocal tone and studied voice for years, so I have the language to be able to communicate to singers and get the sound we want. I also focus on simplifying things, and providing perspective that the artist may lack – my goal is to serve the song with the production, and make the artist shine as much as possible.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Adaptability has probably been the most important characteristic for me. I’m always trying to learn and grow, and because of that, have picked up a lot of little skill sets along the way that are helpful when it comes to writing and production. This also allows me to be a better collaborator, because I can just fit where I’m needed in the room – if I’m working with another producer and they’re really strong at drums but not guitar and lyrics, I can fill that gap.
If I’m with an artist and they write all the lyrics and melodies and come in with chords, I’m totally cool with just fitting production around that too. I think having no ego about the process is really important – just whatever makes the best music. At the end of the day, there are so many talented people out there, and I’ve found that most of the time, the best music gets made when I can help maximize the artist’s skill set instead of trying to impose my own.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @wilsonmcbeath
Image Credits
Heather Hillhouse
