On May 19th 2022, I released a song/music video with fellow San Antonio artist Catwalk.
Today I would like to breakdown the flow of production for this project, from the initial meeting to the worldwide release.
This project begins with the music — a casual encounter with Catwalk in early 2021 led to a typical request for some beats to play around with vocally, particularly one that really caught my attention — which would eventually become the musical bed for Faster. My vocal approach drew parallel inspiration from White Pony-era Deftones and James Blake, specifically the song “If the Car Beside You Moves Ahead” — a glitchy, downtempo vocal lead as experimental as it is beautiful.
Fast forward to 2022, having released the album DEATHBLOOM, I got back in touch with Catwalk and made plans to continue the momentum with this song, having already recorded a demo. After a few production re-touches (nothing is better for a project than taking time away to revisit with fresh eyes and ears), we sent it off to be mixed and mastered.
The mixing was done by Matt Meli, who similarly mixed the DEATHBLOOM record. The mastering was then done by Roy Mendez, a longtime friend who most recently mastered my electronic cover of Everlong.
Modern practices require as much time as possible from submitting a song to streaming platforms before release(two-weeks at the least, preferably a month) — and so the challenge became using the few weeks we had at our disposal to deliver a great visual, something that not only boosted the song but stood on its own from an artistic merit.
The idea to feature a car came naturally to the subject of the song, but how?
Cue Britt (Catwalk’s alter-ego) suggesting we find a field and have a car driving in circles, to then both of our eyes widening with madness — what if a car was drifting, Fast and Furious style, in circles around US?
After a deep dive into the San Antonio Facebook Drifting community (yes, that’s a real sentence), we finally found a guy with the right car, skills, availability and price point to lock in our vision.
I mean, the driver goes by Turbo Tyler.
You can’t make it up.
With the key elements in place, we then had to find locations —and thankfully there’s no lack of beautiful places to shoot in a city as culturally diverse and, frankly, laid-back as San Antonio. The grit and color we wanted to match the song was found all over the East Side of town, and once we decided on our spots, it then became time to storyboard.
Some of you more professionally-trained film aficionados are likely cringing at my sophomoric attempts to shot-list, but for my and my teams purposes, it worked just fine.
Once the shot list was approved, I had a final meeting with the production crew — my longtime friend and collaborator Diego V Chavez was handling the principle cinematography, alongside another friend Bryan De La Garza working Camera 2. And while these names may likely not mean much to you, the casual reader, for me this is an actual dream team. Both of these guys are highly sought-out, extremely creative, and most importantly, efficient.
Now, a fun fact about me — the artist who I most want to be when I grow up is John Favreau. His big break came from an independently financed film called “Swingers”, in which he not only wrote and directed, but also plays the lead alongside a then-unknown Vince Vaughn. My personal path has always been to utilize enough skill in enough areas to be able to fully implement my personal touch into personal projects, and so the task of then Storyboarding, Location Scouting, Acting in, Directing, and Editing a video for a song I also am singing in is really the most fun I could possibly imagine having on any given day.
With that said, the only way to be able to pull it off is to have a capable team of people working that you trust and respect. If you want my advice on getting the best out of any team, its this:
Pay them, listen to them, and feed them.
And so, with all of the parts in motion, the only thing left to do was show up and shoot the video. I won’t pretend that how it came together was entirely professional, nor even legal (at times), and we were certainly threatened by a certain parking lot owner for certain damages to a certain slab of concrete.
The run-and-gun approach is not for the faint of heart, and the risk of things going wrong should always be taken into consideration before hitting record on the camera. But, by the grace of God and the flow of the Universe, we took two hours on a random Wednesday by storm and got everything we needed.
That’s the real superpower of a good team. Time management.
And so, five weeks from the initial-meeting with Catwalk to the release of a fully mastered song and conceptualized music video shot and colored in 6K, another piece of work was added to the stream of the internet’s collective database of content. Making this project was a dangerous experience, and I can’t wait for the next one.
“Faster” is now streaming live everywhere:
