Today, we’d like to introduce you to Christopher Kenji.
Hi Christopher, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Basically, I started out just like any other kid with too big of an imagination and no idea what to do with it. I was pretty shy and awkward and spent most of my time alone. I’d just play guitar all day, draw weird pictures, write stories, film little videos on my early 2000s camcorder, or just create whatever I thought was cool I guess. I had a bunch of other strange hobbies too ––I got really into juggling, claymation, and solving Rubik’s cubes. I remember watching an old 2007 Pogobat YouTube video and got the basic Rubik’s cube method down.
Then, I learned this F2L method and was able to solve it in about 50 seconds, but I still wanted to solve it even faster than that. I tried to learn this even more advanced method that would’ve forced me to memorize like 70 different potential scenarios; all with unique corresponding algorithms ––and I was so close to printing everything out and memorizing all the diagrams one by one, but then I stopped myself.
I remember it being quite a sobering moment. There was a silence, and then, calmly, the little voice of reason in the back of my head spoke to me. He said, “Chris, listen to me. You are already so far away from any girls at your school, even looking in your general direction. This is a road of no return, and I am hereby making the executive decision to end our Rubik’s cube journey.”
Maybe there’s a parallel universe out there where I did decide to become a competitive speed-cuber, but anyway, my point with all of this is to say that, growing up, I definitely had way too much free time on my hands and way too little of a social life ––and while that did come with some obvious cons, it also came with some unexpected pros.
Looking back, I’m kind of grateful to have been a loner because I basically put in my 10,000 hours building a bunch of different skill sets and achieved quite a lot before the age of 18. I might not have been the most social kid, but I was way more driven and disciplined than pretty much anyone else I knew. Obviously, there’s my entire music journey, which I’ll touch on later, but I really have to attribute so much of my drive and discipline to training in mixed martial arts for 14 years (something which I don’t think I’ve really talked about much publicly).
I really don’t think that there’s a more visceral experience in this world than the experience of getting the complete and utter sh*t beaten out of you. It’s interesting ––I think nowadays, the normal empathetic reaction of a bystander watching someone else beat the sh*t out of you would be for them to tell the person who’s beating the sh*t out of you to stop beating the sh*t out of you, but in my case, that was actually the opposite of what would happen.
When I was training, if my instructor saw me getting beaten up, instead of yelling at my opponent, he would yell at ME. He’d be like, “Stop letting him do that to you! Stop dropping your hands! Get back up and fight!” ––and when you’re in that moment, all you want to do is just give up because that’s the easier way out. It’s so much harder to stay in it while you’re getting physically and emotionally destroyed, but you’ve got to just find some way to push through. I think that taught me a lot about life. A lot of the time, life will beat the sh*t out of you if you let it, and I guess I just learned from a young age how to keep my head strong and simply survive, no matter the situation.
I remember getting knocked out one time after taking a huge uppercut to the chin ––it felt like I just blinked, and then, all of a sudden, I was on the floor, and everyone was standing over me. I felt so weak and helpless at that moment, but I became stronger. I remember my dad would always drop me off at class a half hour early every day, and my instructor started to notice. One day, he was like, “alright, I’m tired of always seeing you sitting around doing nothing before class every day. We’re gonna go do some conditioning.”
He had me do burpees to push-ups to burpees to pull-ups on repeat, and then he’d yell out kickboxing combinations while he threw this big ball at me, and if I didn’t perform the combinations fast enough, it would hit me. He’d also tie this gigantic elastic band around my waist that was attached to the wall behind me and make me run as fast as I could toward the mirror in front of me while the band dug sharply into my stomach, catapulting me backward over and over again ––leaving me completely exhausted and nauseous.
By the time I was done with all of that, class would start and we’d all have to fight each other. Everyone else was fresh while I was so dead that I could barely keep my hands up. After about 45 minutes of everyone beating the sh*t out of me, my instructor would then yell, “Conditioning!” ––and I would have to do conditioning AGAIN. At first, I couldn’t handle it, but over the course of the next few weeks/months, my body started getting used to it, and I slowly became like this super version of myself.
I started leveling up the ranks and felt unstoppable ––beating/tapping out my opponents left and right. I was then put in the adult class as a teenager where I began fighting mainly 18-35-year-olds. After about 12 years, I received my junior black belt, and then, after two more full years of intensive training, I finally received my 1st degree in the Shodan black belt.
This whole journey, start to finish, had such a huge impact on me and my perspective on goals/life. After setting this goal for myself that seemed so incredibly far away at first, and then putting myself through hell, pouring my actual physical blood, sweat, and tears into it, and then, a whole decade and a half later, finally achieving it, just really taught me the discipline, determination, and patience that it truly takes to actually achieve something meaningful.
At this point, there was nowhere else for me to really go with mixed martial arts unless I wanted to fight professionally or dedicate my life to it/get my second degree, and so on. It also wasn’t uncommon for me to come back with headaches from being hit in the head too hard or getting my fingers bent back and hyper-extended, which wasn’t good for my guitar playing/my ultimate passion: music. At the same exact time that I’d been training for all of those years in mixed martial arts, I was also simultaneously fully-immersed in my guitar journey.
I’ve talked very in-depth about my whole story with guitar in some other interviews, so I’m not going to drone on too much about that again, but the Cliff Notes synopsis is this: I fell in love with a guitar like nothing else in the world, and my playing took me to some pretty crazy places as a kid. I excelled at an unprecedented rate and received awards pretty much everywhere I went, defying all the odds many times. I ended up being offered a scholarship to my dream school, Berklee College of Music, the summer before I was even technically allowed to apply.
After what had seemed like an invincible streak of guitar success that spanned pretty much my entire life, when I started attending Berklee in 2013, I had kind of a quarter-life crisis. I realized that no matter how much I progressed or achieved, I was still never going to be the best guitar player in the world, which, as stupid as it sounds, made me have to do a lot of soul-searching and prompted me to find a deeper purpose with music.
At this same time, I was also teaching myself how to sing. I didn’t have any formal training for many years, but I busked on the streets for money with just my voice and my guitar, and I did about a few hundred open mic nights too. During this time, I actually wrote, recorded and self-produced an early demo of my song, “Summer Fog”, which I then submitted to this big international songwriting contest called the NewSong Music Competition and became a Top 10 West Coast Finalist in 2014.
If I’d made it to the next round, I would’ve gotten to perform at Lincoln Center in New York City, but I wasn’t chosen to move forward. Although I didn’t win, it still felt very validating to have received all of that critical acclaim from such an esteemed, widely-respected panel despite me being so new to both lyric and melody writing. This definitely sparked a fire inside of me, and I began writing a bunch of songs to put on my first-ever album.
It was also around this time that I began drinking very heavily. I remember the first time I got alcohol poisoning ––I don’t think I was even of legal age yet. I had 18 shots in an hour on an empty stomach while alternating between both Svedka Vodka and Jameson Irish Whiskey (disgusting, I know). It’s safe to say that my body was never quite the same after that night. When I regained consciousness, I was pale as a ghost and felt like death.
Any water or food I’d force down would immediately come right back up, so on top of already uncontrollably vomiting every 5-10 minutes for 24 hours straight, I was also starving and dehydrated. I legitimately couldn’t tell if I was dying or not, but anyway, I somehow made it out in one piece. I think that that should’ve been a warning to me, but I went deeper.
I started experimenting with hard drugs. It started off just being a fun “living life to the fullest” kind of thing, but then it began to slowly seep into part of my everyday life. I’d drink and do drugs while doing my daily activities without telling anyone. I’d wake up and do a line of cocaine, do another line before the gym, get drunk and go to class, get more f**ked up and go to work, etc.
After a while, I just really started to let myself go and not give a f**k. I was doing coke with Adderall every day while drinking liquor and getting high and then chain-smoking cigarettes while pounding like 5+ cups of coffee a day and then pulling all-nighters/staying up for like two days at a time, all while eating tubs of ice cream for most of my meals. The crazy part is that that was just during the week. I’d be even more reckless on the weekends.
I remember one night I had like four lines of coke, a half bottle of champagne while also microdosing on acid, and then I took a f**k ton of MDMA before taking a bunch of tequila shots, and then I smoked a blunt and had some Ativan to go to sleep. Over time, the drugs definitely took their toll, but honestly, it wasn’t nearly as bad as my drinking. I’d drink until I’d get really nauseous and then make myself throw up so that I could continue drinking more.
It was all fun and games until I remember going to the doctor and getting some blood tests, which (surprise, surprise) came back with some extremely alarming results. I remember her asking me, “Do you want strokes when you’re 40?” ––It was a big wake-up call, but it was not big enough to stop me fully. I was good for a while, but then, I kind of slipped back into a lot of my old habits. I then got another blood test a few months later, and it came back even worse than the last horrifying one. I was really scared for my life at that point, so I cut out pretty much all of the hard drugs I was doing.
After that, I moved away from Boston to live in the bottom part of this horrible house just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. The refrigerator, toilet, and shower were all messed up, and the heating system was controlled by the people living in the house above me, which meant that if it was a nice temperature up there, it was either roasting or freezing me downstairs ––to add to that, the place was infested with wasps.
I would wake up and kill wasps all over my house every day and then go drive Lyft for money, which made for a lot of crazy, sketchy stories, and then I’d come back and kill more wasps. The rest of the time, I was drinking and working on my album like a lunatic until I would eventually pass out.
I started to feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, slowly losing my mind. When I finally finished tracking and producing the album that I’d been working on for so long, I met with some Grammy-nominated folks to get it mixed and mastered. It was a multi-month-long process that ended up costing me a lot of money, and I was barely scraping up enough from Lyft to pay rent.
It was also a very stark contrast because I happened to be in a very turbulent long-distance relationship with a multi-billionaire’s daughter at the time, but that’s a whole other story. Anyway, I finally released the album after tirelessly working on it for three years, and basically, nobody listened to it. I put my everything into those songs, and it all went nowhere, which really made me lose a lot of faith in myself and led me to drink even more heavily. It was almost like, “Why do I even try at this point?”
After about a year of barely scraping by in Nashville, I moved back to California to try to save my dying relationship, and that ended up blowing up in my face and really kind of destroying me. I didn’t want to do anything after that and didn’t really leave my room much for months.
I would sometimes get drunk and sing some songs on stage at this bar called Tupelo in San Francisco, but I wasn’t really doing much else with my life at that point. One day, my friend asked me if I wanted to go on a road trip with him to LA to watch him play a show at the Viper Room. I had nothing else going on, so I said, “Sure.” I remember getting there and watching him play while I got drunk at the bar. Little did I know, this woman, who’d later become my mentor, asked me, “Have you ever considered modeling?” I told her, “No”, and she was like, “Well, I’ve been in the industry for over ten years. I think you could be successful and that I could help you.”
Throughout my childhood, I was never popular, and kids told me that I was ugly, so my whole life, I kind of just carried this feeling that I wasn’t attractive ––on top of that, I was pretty drunk at the time, so I just started making fun of the idea like, “Ooh, I could be a little model boy, huh?” ––to which she replied, “I’m actually serious about this. I can get you contacts and put you in a runway casting for fashion week in San Francisco”. I was like, “Well, my music career definitely isn’t going anywhere, so I guess I might as well give it a shot”.
I watched one YouTube video on my phone of how-to runway walk and then got out of my car and went into the casting. There were so many people and cameras everywhere, and I felt really out of my element. I got checked in, filled out all of the paperwork, and waited in a long line until it was my turn ––I gave it my best shot, and, to my surprise, I was then put in two runway shows. Before the fashion week began, we all had to attend a fitting and a runway rehearsal where they made us all practice walking. I had absolutely zero modeling experience whatsoever, so I just tried to fake it as well as I could.
After we all finished walking, they pulled me aside and told me to walk in front of all the other models to show them how it’s properly done. Mind you, some of these models had walked for Hugo Boss and at New York Fashion Week and all that stuff, and I legitimately had no idea what I was doing. The head of the fashion week was just looking at me and then speaking to everyone ––I remember her saying, “Notice how his shoulders are pulled back but still relaxed, and his hands are moving naturally by his waist but not moving too much.”
In my head, I was like, “Don’t think about it! Don’t think about it! Just keep doing whatever you’re doing”. I walked to the end of the runway, and because I didn’t know how to pose, I just kind of stood there. The head of the fashion week then said, “See, he doesn’t need to pose. His face is his pose.” I didn’t really know what that meant, so I just walked back and sat down.
The guy sitting next to me turned and said, “Dude, that’s a really big compliment,” ––and that exact moment was the first moment in my life that I ever thought modeling could really be something for me. Fun fact: I actually later got “his face is his pose” tattooed down my ribs because of the significance of that moment. Anyway, I then walked both runway shows. I remember the music blasting and the sea of cameras flashing.
After the last show, I tried to leave because I was tired and wanted food, but they stopped me and said, “The fashion week is going to announce the Best Model of 2018, and all the models have to stay”. I didn’t even know that that was a thing. I waited around for a little while longer but then got a bit impatient. I thought to myself, “There are models here who have been working in the industry for years and have tens of thousands of Instagram followers. There’s no way in hell that I would have won this. I don’t even have any professional pictures. Nobody even knows who I am. I’m sure that I can probably just leave, and it wouldn’t really matter.” So, again, I headed for the door and tried to leave, but again, they stopped me.
This time, they said, “Okay, we’re not supposed to tell you this, but you won Best Model of 2018, and you’re going to have to make a speech in front of all those hundreds of people in the other room in about two minutes.” I was like, “Wait, are you serious?” I genuinely could not believe it. It almost felt like the world was playing a big joke on me. I used to get called ugly, but now I’m winning Best Model of 2018. I don’t think that little kid me could have ever imagined that I would become an award-winning fashion model.
They then opened these big doors for me, and I walked through them as all the people screamed and cheered. It felt like one of those moments in a dream where nothing feels realistic at all, but somehow, it’s still happening. They announced me to the podium and gave me my award while they took all the Getty Images shots and everything. I remember saying, “I’m completely speechless right now. This is the first time I ever modeled in my entire life.” ––I really didn’t know what else to say.
It was all so crazy. From there, I went on to book so many modeling jobs. I walked in many different fashion weeks and designer showcases and was on the covers of all these fashion magazines as well as in commercials and ad campaigns with all of these different kinds of brands. It took me all the way to being invited by Ivan Bart, the then president of IMG Models (may he rest in peace), to interview with the agency ––which, for all who don’t know, is pretty much the most prestigious modeling agency in the entire world (the one that Bella and Gigi Hadid are signed to).
I remember telling my mentor about it and saying, “This is the biggest interview of my life. Do you have any advice on what I could do to make sure that I look my absolute best when I meet them?” ––and she said, “Well, first, I’d stop drinking completely for these two weeks before your interview.” I had planned on singing at Tupelo in San Francisco that night, so I said, “Okay, well, I’m singing on stage tonight, so I’m gonna drink, but then I’ll stop tomorrow.”
She was like, “You said it yourself. This is the biggest interview of your entire life. Why would you want to do anything to possibly hinder your chances of succeeding?” I was about to try to argue with her about it, but I knew that she was right. I said, “You’re right ––I won’t drink.” Up until that point, I don’t think that I had ever sung on stage without drinking before. It was a strange feeling that night singing stone-cold sober to a crowd of people who were drunk off their asses, but I did it.
The idea of taking two weeks off drinking didn’t seem like the end of the world to me, but I just felt like it was going to REALLY suck. In my head, I always thought that I was perfectly fine and that I didn’t need to change. I wasn’t nearly as bad as I used to be, which I used as a justification for my lifestyle ––even though I was still too scared to go get another blood test. I hadn’t gone more than a day or two without drinking in over three years, and now I was about to go two full weeks without it. I’m not even kidding; within four days, my entire life changed.
By the way, I think that’s a good rule of thumb ––if you’re ever wondering if you have a drinking problem or not, take a few days off, and if your life drastically changes, then yeah, you definitely have a drinking problem. Within four days, I felt and looked better than I had in years. I could actually think and speak articulately (like this brain fog that I didn’t realize had been there for so long had finally been lifted), and I had a noticeable amount of extra money that normally would’ve been spent on alcohol and, to top it off, this redness around my eyes and nose that I couldn’t find a cure for no matter what I tried, finally started to fade.
I was honestly really not expecting anything to change at all with me not drinking ––I just thought it was going to be really annoying and inconvenient, but this all truly blew me away. It felt as though I had woken up for the first time in years. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the moment that I stopped drinking, but it was the moment where drinking was never the same for me.
I went those two weeks without a drop of alcohol, and I really felt like a new person flying to New York City for that interview. I got there with my comp card and modeling portfolio in hand, and they took me up the elevator to the tip-top floor of this insane building, where I walked into this incredible room full of windows, plants, and natural light overlooking all of New York City ––it was like something out of a movie.
Everyone was so nice ––the kind of nice where you know how important and powerful they are by how composed and well-mannered they are. I took some test shots with one of their photographers and then had my interview with this man and woman, who went over all of the photos in my portfolio with me. They were extremely nice, but I could tell they didn’t really care that much about my modeling. I had done a lot in the industry in the past year since I started, but I realized that I was still nowhere near the level of most of their models.
I had brought my acoustic guitar to the interview to show them that I had more to offer than just my appearance, and, in a last resort, before they politely showed me out the door, I asked them, “Do you mind if I play you an original song I wrote?” ––and the man said, “Sure! Nobody ever performs for us here!” ––so I closed my eyes and performed an acoustic version of my song “Waiting in The Wings”. I really gave my all and truly sang it from the heart. I was expecting them to just clap and say, “Yay! Good job, thank you!” or something like that, but it was silent.
After being so cool and composed, they were both speechless. The man literally started to stumble over his words, and the woman laughed and made fun of him for it. He said, “Wow… I was not expecting that. I’ve never seen anything like that in our office before. That was incredible.” I thanked him, but he kept going on about it. He was like, “You wrote that?” ––and I was like, “Yeah”. He said, “Too bad we’re not a music agency because I’d sign you right here on the spot.”
He then asked me if I could record a version of it so that he could send it to everyone on the team. At that moment, I realized that the biggest modeling agency in the entire world didn’t give a f**k about my modeling; they gave a f**k about my music.
I had been spending so much time neglecting my true passion and, instead, prioritizing my modeling over everything, but really, I should have been doing the exact opposite. After trying so hard with my music career and feeling like a flat-out failure, out of nowhere came modeling: this thing that I hardly even tried at and, for some reason, succeeded at SO much that I couldn’t even believe myself. It made no sense to me, but it was the one thing I had in my life that was actually going well, so I clung onto it as tightly as possible.
I’ll honestly be forever grateful to IMG Models for not signing me because, from that moment on, I decided to prioritize my music over everything, and I never turned back. Additionally, because I hadn’t drank in two weeks, I got to see how infinitely better of a person I was without alcohol. That being said, I still wanted to celebrate with a glass of wine.
Unfortunately, though, that glass of wine turned into another, which turned into another, and another, and you get the point. I had missed the taste and feeling of alcohol so incredibly much, but, at the same time, I also felt so incredibly sad. This time, it was different. This time, it was my choice. After seeing how beautiful and vibrant my life could be, I was actively choosing to go back to this s**tty, miserable version of myself ––and I hated myself for it.
I then went back and continued to drink for another four months straight, leading me to three rock-bottom moments in a row. After that, I truly couldn’t live with myself anymore. I got to a point where I just really couldn’t bring myself to go on ––so, on August 3rd, 2019, I quit. The funny thing is, though, that even though I did end up quitting that day, in my head, I was already making a plan for the next time I’d drink.
My whole plan was that I’d stop drinking, and then on my birthday, three months later, I’d celebrate by getting absolutely tanked on margaritas at my favorite burrito place (so f***ing dumb). Anyway, in those three months leading up, I didn’t realize how much internal work it would actually take to continue to stay clean —how isolated and alone I’d feel, how many issues I had with myself that I’d kept pushed down for years that would float back to the surface and I’d actually have to deal with, how weirdly unfamiliar I was with being fully in control of my own life, etc.
When my birthday finally came around, I felt like I had gone through five lifetimes of work and was a completely different person than before. Nothing inside of me wanted to drink that day and the thought of me going back to who I was depressed the absolute s**t out of me —so, I didn’t drink that day or any other day after that ever again. I realized that so many of my issues stemmed from my childhood ––I always felt like I wasn’t good enough as I was and that I needed to have some extra thing to trick people into liking me or finding me attractive or special.
I guess I realized the whole time I was just scared. I was scared that people wouldn’t like me as much if I was just me or that I wouldn’t have the confidence to be social anymore or sing in front of crowds without alcohol, etc., but all of that couldn’t be further from the truth. I was always so afraid of missing out on life by not drinking, but I realized that I’d been missing out on so much on life by continuing to drink.
This year, I’ll be officially five years sober, and I feel so incredibly lucky. Since my crazy days, I’ve been really able to focus on building my career as well as who I am as a person. I have been featured on Vogue, Harper’s BAZAAR, Elle, L’Officiel, Vanity Teen, Earmilk, and The Food Network (out of all places). Since my official Christopher Kenji artist debut in July 2020, my music has received over a million streams worldwide, my music videos have received multiple awards and nominations from film festivals all over the globe, and I’ve been a headlining artist at various shows, music festivals, fashion weeks, burlesque revues, and everything in between.
My life has been a very wild rollercoaster ride with lots of twists and turns along the way, but I feel blessed for all of it —the good, the bad, and the ugly. It all led me to where I am today, and I guess that’s all that really matters, right?
Would you say it’s been a smooth road since your sobriety? If not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
As far as my sobriety goes, there was a lot of work that I had to do internally to get myself to the place I’m at today, where, fortunately, it’s not a struggle to stay sober. Anytime I see alcohol or drugs now, they just symbolize who I used to be, and I feel physically repulsed. There is no attraction anymore; just a reminder of how I never want to be like that ever again.
As for my career since sobriety, there have definitely still been a number of obstacles/challenges along the way. One of the challenges that I struggled with most was just not being a business-minded person. For so long, I’d been thinking only like an artist and not like a label. As an artist, you’re always so caught up in the art that it’s almost like nothing else really matters, but the thing is, it’s really difficult to be an artist (and make a living out of it) when nobody knows that your art even exists. Once I started thinking not more like a label, things started to make a little more sense.
If there’s anything that labels have, it’s connections and money. As far as connections go, the more you build yourself up and make yourself more attractive to potential prospects, the more connections you’ll have access to. It is a lot about luck, but also, luck isn’t just something that you hope will happen to you —it’s something that you cultivate and create the perfect environment for so that when it does come, you’ll be the right person in the right place at the right time to receive it.
Essentially, the harder and smarter you work, the luckier you’ll get. I also think that with connections, we’re always thinking about how awesome it would be if someone with power could just do us a favor and make us successful, but why would they ever do that? Instead of thinking about what other people can do for us, we have to think about what we can do for them. How can we help make their job easier? How can we be something that solves one of their problems? You see, it’s much easier to be successful if you make it easy for people to say yes to you.
For example, contacting a booking agent and saying, “Do you have a show I can play?” sounds much less attractive to them than saying, “I noticed that [insert artist] performing at your venue on [insert date] doesn’t have an opening act and I’d be the perfect fit. I’m in the exact same genre, have a very similar fanbase, and would bring around [x amount] of people to the show.” That solves a problem for them and makes their job easier —because of you, now they don’t have to put in the effort of figuring out an opening act for that show. That is an attractive proposal to them —and that is how you make connections.
As for money, it seems impossible at first, but if you’re able to budget and even just use the money that you’re already spending on your Venti Oat Milk Mocha Frappuccino’s at Starbucks every day and, instead, invest that into promoting and advertising your MUSIC every day (you know, presumably your biggest passion in the entire world) —success will be just that much more attainable.
It doesn’t seem like much, but say, for example, you were ordering a Venti Oat Milk Mocha Frappuccino every day from Starbucks (don’t lie, I know that some of y’all do), you would be spending an extra $7.15 a day, which doesn’t sound like much but that’s $2,609.75 a year. That’s more than an extra month of rent plus some for most people. If you were to put over two and a half grand toward advertising even just one song, you could legitimately get that song in the ears of hundreds of millions of people all over the world through ads. So yes, reallocating your Venti Oat Milk Mocha Frappuccino money could literally change your life ––not to mention your health.
I was so stubborn about spending money on promoting myself until I realized that it wasn’t “cheating” and that pretty much every single successful artist ever had lots of financial backing to get them to where they are today —and it’s most likely the reason we even know who they are in the first place. Yes, you should still try to blow up organically, and yes, you should still try to stimulate as much growth as you possibly can without spending money, but in the meantime, wouldn’t it be nice to just help yourself out a little bit and make your goals that much easier? Honestly, even just a little bit can go a long way. Oh yeah, and by the way, by ‘promoting yourself’, I’m not talking about paying those sketchy music promo services to “get you 100,000 streams guaranteed”. Please stop with that.
I think I really needed to get out of the starry-eyed, wishful-thinking artist mindset and shift more into the rational, strategic mindset of an entrepreneur. I very much struggled with sacrificing my own personal comforts, cycles, and habits, but the thing is, you have to treat your music career like an actual career; otherwise, it will never become one.
You get to be the CEO, which is awesome, but that also means that you are, ultimately, the one responsible for your own success or failure. That means that you clock yourself in and clock yourself out not based on some arbitrary hours that someone sets for you but based on when the work is done. You have to set your own deadlines, plan out your own courses of action, make your own investments, solve your own problems, and manage your own time, efforts, resources, expenses, etc.
It’s easy to always just give yourself time off every weekend and go party with your friends because you feel like it, but that’s not always what’s best for your career. It’s easy to go to bed at whatever time you want and wake up at whatever time you want and kind of just do everything in your life based on what you feel like doing whenever you feel like doing it, but is that really going to get you the success that you’re hoping for?
No. In reality, you can’t expect to have life-changing outcomes by making zero lifestyle changes. You need to be ever-changing and ever-evolving. I think Albert Einstein said it perfectly: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m a pop-rock artist/producer, fashion model, gym addict, burrito consumer, and weird-part-of-YouTube enjoyer. I would say that I’m less known for my burrito eating and more known for my music and modeling. I think that what truly sets me apart from others is that I’m me. I don’t try to be anyone else.
I built my singing style around all of the “imperfections” of my voice. Sometimes I lean into my natural raspiness, sometimes I sing choir boy clean and sometimes I scream like I’m in an exorcism. It’s whatever feels right at the moment. I use every part of my voice from my deep, ‘scare-little-children’ register all the way up to my high-pitched ‘mosquito register.’ Additionally, my songs tell the story of my life ––all the love, happiness, pain, anger, passion; everything. My lyrics are honest, heartfelt, raw, and sometimes even silly.
I don’t believe that I’m afraid to venture outside of my genre ––especially in my production. People may love it, or people may hate it, but either way, nobody can take away the fact that it is me ––and I think that is what I am most proud of.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I think that my authenticity is the most important characteristic of my success. I know that, in its general terminology, success isn’t necessarily dependent on whether I stay true to myself or not, but in my own definition of it, it absolutely is. I don’t believe that copying and pasting whatever the latest trends are and being someone that you’re not just to get your 15 minutes of fame is success.
I remember that before I started fully producing myself, I worked with this producer. He had lots of connections and wanted to get me signed to Interscope Records, which, at the time, I was incredibly eager about. The only problem was that everything I recorded with him he essentially turned into pop garbage. I was so excited about the opportunity of commercial “success,” but, ultimately, I couldn’t bring myself to release any of the songs we recorded, and I ended up cutting ties with him altogether.
It was a really difficult decision for me to make, but I just had to do it. I realized that even if I did become “successful” from those songs, I personally hated them so much that I would have been utterly miserable having those songs be what I was known for ––and is that really success? No, I don’t believe it is. I think that people fall in love with authentic selves, not fake personalities. Yes, people may be attracted to certain presentations or deceptions but fall in love?
No. As an artist, I’m not interested in trying to trick people into loving my art. If you don’t love it, that’s okay ––it’s not meant to be loved by everyone. I want people to love my art for what it is: me. That is my true definition of success: being loved for who I am.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.christopherkenji.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/christopherkenji
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/christopherkenji
Image Credits
Marlon Hurtado, Kimson Doan, Chawin Terk Piriyagagul, and Jack Hu
