Today we’d like to introduce you to Joel Eckels.
Joel, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I have been a professional musician since I was 18 years old. After touring for years on the east coast, I decided to move to Los Angeles to find deeper inspiration and a music community. I’ve always felt that it’s important for artists to stick together and get to know each other because music is a conversation that can be influenced and inspired by others who are on the same wave-length.
In a big city like LA, it’s easy to get swallowed up and/or feel alone. There’s so much and it’s so competitive. I searched for a while before finally finding the community I needed. It centered around venues like the Mint, Room 5 and the Hotel Cafe. In early 2000, there was a scene happening where all of these talented artists started hanging out together, doing shows together and supporting each other. Songs came from it, bands were formed, relationships happened and it had a buzz. The Hotel Cafe, owned by Marko Shafer and Max Mamikunian, established its reputation as an excellent sounding, ground-breaking venue in Los Angeles and their ambition and drive gathered national attention by helping break artists like Adele, Sara Bareilles, Katy Perry, and the Lumineers.
I inherited the job of booking and running production at a small venue called Room 5 that I always felt was a sister venue to the Hotel Cafe. Jay Nash was the original curator of Room 5 and established the long-running Songwriters in the Round series that happened every Monday night. Mondays were magical there and the talent was something special. It became on of the best nights of music in Los Angeles. I was performing and doing sound there for a bit before Jay offered me the job of booking and running the place. I took it and made it my own passion project for many years.
By focusing on the booking and quality of the venue, Room 5 established it’s own reputation of excellence and I started to become known for my mixing skills. I decided I wanted to work at Hotel Cafe as well and use the two venues together to promote community and artist development. Since both were quality introductory venues with great reputations, we noticed that all of the talented up-and-comers were hitting up both venues to play. Therefore, we would see a lot of the best fresh talent submitting to us regularly.
Once the Songwriter in the Round series started to become increasingly complicated to organize each week, I decided to restructure the night. I wanted a night where I could focus less on how many people each artist was going to bring and more on the quality of talent. There were too many acts that I thought were great, but who couldn’t pull a crowd of their own in Los Angeles yet. I wanted to create a night to include these great acts that I was discovering and put them together with some of the better-known acts we had as part of the community to help it grow.
So, I came up with the Monday Monday music series in 2013. I booked 10-12 artists each week that would all perform three songs. My goal was to pack it full of talent, charge next to nothing at the door and build a reputation for the night itself. I realized that all of the great acts that I knew about didn’t necessarily know about each other. So, Mondays became the perfect place to meet new people brought together by their love of music. The artists started hanging out together, writing songs together and supporting each other just like in the heyday of the Hotel Cafe.
All of this was inspired by the folk/rock movement that came out of Laurel Canyon in the 60s. The Troubadour had these Monday nights called the Hootenanny where it was a scene involving everyone from The Eagles, The Mamas and the Papas, Buffalo Springfield, Jackson Browne, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Elton John, Joni Mitchell and many more. That movement changed the world, changed music and it was all just a bunch of artists hanging out together making music rather than individual artists hustling to make their thing happen. It was real and it was inspired. Everyone was making each other better and it became the mainstream. I was setting out to inspire something along those lines. Monday Monday was taken from a Mamas and the Papas song of the same name. I felt it was only appropriate.
Three years later, Room 5 sadly had to close its doors and the Hotel Cafe Second Stage opened around the same time. I naturally moved Monday Mondays to the new Second Stage. The night has now been going six years strong and has become a popular weekly gathering place for LA’s best artists. The intimacy and quality of the night are unique and special. I am proud of what I’ve created and continue to be blown away by the talent that we find. In a music industry where artist development hardly exists, it is so important to have places like Hotel Cafe and nights like Monday Monday to bring people together and help make them better before they give up out of frustration and their talent is never realized.
In 2016, my local gigs and Monday Monday passion project, although popular, was not enough to cover my bills. I was approached by Haley Reinhart to go out on tour as her audio engineer and tour manager. Haley was a regular at the Monday Mondays and a super talent. I took the opportunity to expand and up-level my production experience. Soon after, I got an offer to tour with The Record Company, who was coincidentally one of my favorite bands at the time.
I learned a lot that year about how the road works on a professional touring level and bigger scale. In 2017, I was approached by Scooter Weintraub to go out on the road with Lukas Nelson & Promise Of The Real. Lukas is Willie Nelson’s son and he and his band are Neil Young’s band. That got my attention right away, but I quickly learned that Lukas and the band had legendary talent all their own. They had momentum building and I saw it as a perfect opportunity to be a part of something epic, exciting and on the rise.
After two years on the road with Lukas, I have now experienced mixing audio and running production at every level in the industry including stadiums, arenas, amphitheaters, theaters and all of the major festivals. I’ve been able to be around industry professionals that are responsible for breaking the types of artists that I enjoy and believe in. It has opened my eyes to so much of what it takes and how the industry works. Lukas and the band are getting recognition all around the world and I get to be a major part of making it happen. Needless to say, it’s been an incredible experience.
All along, I’ve continued to curate and organize the Monday Mondays at Hotel Cafe back in LA with the help of the community. It’s difficult to keep up with at times, but I make it work. I know how important it is and I love what it represents. My hope is that I will be able to take the experience and relationships I’ve gained and apply it to this idea of artist discovery, curation and music community that I’ve been cultivating. All the while I’ve stayed an artist myself and continue to write and produce music of my own that I can put out into the world. I’m always trying to perfect the balance of all the plates I’m spinning so that it can one day come together and make a difference. The world needs music. It’s the universal language. True talent and musicianship is out there and just needs to be nurtured so it can grow and become greater tools to bring the world together.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
My biggest challenge now is that it’s hard to be creative on the road when I’m consumed with the responsibilities of production management. With a rising artist like Lukas, there’s so much going on and it’s constantly changing. I have to really push myself to write because it’s a completely different part of my brain than the production duties. It’s weird. I’m around the most inspiring people and situations, so you’d think that I’d naturally be inspired to write. The problem is that when I am done with a long production day, I’m tapped out and have been in a whole different mindset than my creative head. Switching gears can be tricky. I have to stay an artist though. It’s who I am at the end of the day and I know I can’t lose it. So, it’s a matter of pushing myself to make it happen.
With the Monday Mondays, one challenge was that it took a while to catch on. I’ve always said that all it takes to create a music community and a night like mine is participation. Just show up and be a part of it. If everyone gets involved, it works and ends up being more fun. You’d be surprised how long it took to actually click. Now everyone seems to get it, which is funny to me. People will come up and compliment the night and I just think how the idea and format hasn’t changed since it was created, but people have just caught on and now they feel like they’ve discovered this amazing new night of music. Haha.
Please tell us about Hotel Cafe.
Hotel Cafe is a 200 cap music venue in Hollywood that specializes in an intimate live music experience. We have everything from up-and-coming artists, breaking talent and big names that want to give exclusive intimate performances. My Monday Monday music series is a weekly showcase featuring 10-12 artists playing three songs each. I’m proud that it has become regarded as one of the best nights of music in LA.
I specialize in songwriting, producing, curation and creating an inspiring live music experience for the artist and audience. I am known for having a good ear.
My main specialty is as a sound engineer. I have a unique perspective being a singer and bandleader myself. I have intuition about what the artist needs and wants to hear and I know how the music should sound. It’s different than someone who knows the controls but doesn’t know first hand what it’s like being behind the mic making the music.
My goal is always to for the music to sound the way it is intended, with all of the tone and nuance that is coming from the stage. I always make sure the audience can hear the lyrics and feel the beat. It sounds pretty simple and obvious, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds to get it right.
What were you like growing up?
I grew up in a Navy family with one younger brother (Shawn Eckels) who has also gone on to play music professionally. We moved around every 2-3 years in general back then. Sometimes from one coast to the other. When I was in high school, we moved to Iceland for two years, which was a difficult time for me. I had been just getting into music and the social scene around the Seattle area and Iceland was so far removed from the rest of the world. I was pretty rebellious at the time and found music as my outlet to cope with my angst.
Iceland, ironically, provided me the isolation that inspired me to play guitar for hours on end. There was nothing else to do and I was discovering a lot of music at that time. An English teacher I had at the time inspired me to start writing poetry and songs. When I moved back to the states for my senior year in high school, I joined a band, wrote songs and began playing shows.
It’s been nothing but music ever since…
Contact Info:
- Website: www.hotelcafe.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @monday_monday_at_hotel_cafe
- Facebook: @hotelmondaymonday
- Twitter: @joeleckels
- Other: www.joeleckels.com
Image Credit:
Pete Escobar, Joel Eckels, Justin Higuchi, Joey Martinez, Monika Lightstone, Abby Shoot
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