Today we’d like to introduce you to Isaiah Villar.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Isaiah. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’m a singer-songwriter and music producer from Corona, CA.
As a child, my parents would tell me that I sang songs first from the television before I even spoke. However, I was more interested in a career in filmmaking. To me, music was only full of meaningless love songs and nothing deeper than that. What changed all that was my exposure to Contemporary Christian music during my middle school years, where I realized that music can bring a lot more to the table than what I thought. Artists like Brandon Heath, Switchfoot, Tenth Avenue North, and Relient K taught me that music could be more than what I expected. Although I’ve moved on from heavily listening to the genre, their songs have impacted me through several stages of my life and helped me look at the world differently. Since then, I have asked my parents for a guitar and started writing songs. I would also start getting into audio production and learning how to produce songs on my laptop due to my EDM exposure. For years until recently, I would produce and record all of my work in the demo version of FL Studio. In this demo version, you cannot save any of the work you made, so it taught me how to work quickly and navigate through the software. Since I started writing and producing music, I would just constantly release music online through various projects and slowly grow a following with each project I’m involved in. In fact, I recently just released my second album, “Loss of Innocence,” which is out now on all streaming services.
Despite music being my main field, I don’t want to be confined to just making music. Recently, my passion for films and filmmaking had emerged, which made me start spending hours of my time just watching films. This passion for filmmaking has led me to photography since I discovered that Stanley Kubrick would learn some of his filmmaking skills from being a photographer for years. Honing my skills in photography, which led me to be a photographer for several of my events held by Norco Music (my college’s music program). Learning filmmaking and photography has helped me be able to effectively showcase my creative ideas outside of music as I would use these skills to take photoshoots of myself and create music videos for “Loss of Innocence.” In fact, I’m currently working on another music video for Norco Music’s Six Feet Apart, which is a Twitch event taking place on November 20.
Overall, I’m still working on becoming better in my craft through each of these areas and strive to go above and beyond with my work.
Has it been a smooth road?
In terms of support, I’ve been very blessed to have support from my family and friends. The funny part about it for me is that my friends during a normal conversation would just randomly talk about how they enjoy my work and how it impacted them. There are many stories that I could tell about someone playing my music in front of me. Personally, I don’t know how to react to these moments of people listening to my music in public, especially when someone tells me that a song of mine has impacted their lives. However, I’m very thankful that my work could make someone’s life better, even in the slightest way. These words keep me going when the road is tough, and when I feel like that, I’m not doing enough with my work.
The rough spots that come with my career are getting people to pay attention in the first place. The music industry overall is constantly changing, as it’s tough to get people to be hooked to a song. However, I try to find different ways to get people’s attention, mostly through working on the overall image of the album from the promos to the album cover. I’m always researching different art styles and album covers to see if it could fit with something that I’m working on. So far, I think some of these options are actually working as there have never been more people that are following my work until now, which I think is also due to the music. Despite these problems, I don’t mind too much if my work doesn’t make much as long as I’m able to still create work and release it to the world.
Can you give our readers some background on your music?
I’m always constantly planning ahead for the next thing that I’m going to do next. This year has been a big year for my music since I released a ton of singles as well as my second album, “Loss of Innocence.” Despite everything that had been released, I’m not yet finished with releases for the year just yet. I can’t talk about too much, but I’m very excited for the next few releases that are yet to come.
What makes me stand out is that I do everything on my own from the music, the artwork, the videos, and the promo material. I don’t personally recommend it for everyone, but I like having full creative control over my work. I like the idea of having the final say on lyrics, a mix, an album cover, or a video since I already have a clear idea of what I want. Sometimes, I would grab help from my brothers for some work. For example, my brothers helped me plan for the quarantine set we did for Norco Music earlier in the Spring. We would map out how we wanted to do the sequence from going to the living room to upstairs to my bedroom. Since we mapped out those plans, we effectively did that scene in one take, which we were all pretty proud of.
There are some instances where I work with other artists on various projects. A great example would be my group, The Sleepless Society, which comprises my friends, M.K Pena, David Amado, and Taylor Taxdal. The group came out of the songwriting class from Norco Music before the pandemic began. We just started writing a bunch of material week after week based on a different issue that our youth is facing. We would continue to write songs until the stay-at-home orders were implemented. However, we would still write a few more songs during the quarantine, just not weekly anymore. I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done in such a short amount, and I’m excited to be able to work on the material that we wrote for an ep that we’re working on. When I played “A Reason Why” during the quarantine set for the music program, people really loved the song, and one of my friends even asked if it was released yet. Hence, it’s exciting to see that people are excited about our work. The details are scarce for now since we’re still trying to figure out working during the COVID season, but I’m very excited nevertheless. However, when this pandemic is over, we still plan to reach our goal of writing twenty songs as a group (so far, we wrote eight).
Doing music on my own has taught me a few lessons that I still continue to work on throughout my business/career. One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned earlier on was from a Bible verse that says, “Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people (Colossians 3:23).” As a Christian, it taught me to continually push myself and do the best work that I can do. I understand that people who would read this don’t share the same beliefs as me. However, I believe in the importance of caring about the work you make and putting effort into it. I always try to make it better with every album than the previous release and thinking outside the box on what I can do next.
Sometimes, the difficulty in striving to do the best in my work is that I’ve always found myself to be so overly critical. I could listen to almost any song that I’ve made and break down every single aspect that I absolutely hate about it. A lesson that I’ve learned along the way is to stop being so overly critical. There was one moment where my friends were listening to “Everything’s Slowly Changing,” and I found myself to be super critical of my work. I remember sitting there and analyzing every aspect that was wrong with the song in my head. I thought to myself how the vocals could’ve been better and how my mixing skills from 2018 were terrible. Afterward, I expressed to one of my close friends at the party how I actually was frustrated with the song and didn’t think that it was perfect yet. She responded by saying how every artist was their worst critic and even referenced how she was critical of her work. It surprised me to some extent because I thought she was one of the most talented artists in my friend group, but even she was critical of her own work. My other friend would also express how he was critical of his own poetry, which again shocked me because I also thought that he was pretty good in his writings. I never really thought much about the conversation until writing this. Still, I realized that artists will never be satisfied with their work. It’s best for artists to just release it out there instead of over refining every little detail.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
It’s hard to tell where the music industry will go in the next five to ten years, especially with everything that’s been happening due to COVID-19. However, I know for sure that artists these days no longer need a label to be successful. Many artists in recent memory have emerged without the help of a label on their terms while owning their masters. Hopefully, I’ll be one of those artists who can make a living without using a record label. For now, I’m just going to continue putting out my work to the world and hope it catches onto people.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://isaiahvillar.bandcamp.com/album/loss-of-innocence
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isaiah_villar/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/isaiah.villar/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/isaiah_villar
- Other: https://isaiahvillar.tumblr.com/
Image Credit:
Isaiah Villar
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