Rising Stars: Meet Josh.Lockhart of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh.Lockhart

Hi Josh.Lockhart, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
To begin, I’m Josh. A musician, but ultimately a multihyphenated creative. I got my start professionally in, and around 2016. I was a recent college grad and decided to utilize friends, acquaintances, resources, and people within the network I’d fostered. By then, I was well into my artistry and musicianship and had a bit of skin in the game on the production and sound design side. I’d concurrently spent time behind the camera doing photo and video. I needed to marry these various intersections and figure a way to have my many facets work in tandem. I started writing and producing for friends and very quickly (I say this cautiously) made progress — acquiring multiple placements as a writer and producer. It was a clear correlation between creating intentional opportunities to advance my career, and eventually actualizing them. Naturally I began to create other pathways to incorporate the other skills I’d developed i.e. photography, videography, creative director, author, etc. to envelop, and simultaneously develop, who I am to the core. It’s been rewarding successfully finding the right mix of it all. It’s also cool to pull up to a festival and hear songs you wrote or produced on come to life, or be on the other side of the world and see lyrics you wrote used as catch phrases or hooks for promotion. But none of this happens if I didn’t decide to be intentional about what I wanted to do and actively birth it. Once I aligned my intentions with my actions, synchronicity easily fueled the outcome, and I was off to the races.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road has undoubtedly been turbulent. With each step, there’s been countless missteps, false starts, wrong doings, and so on. Some of it is a product of naivete in my youth, and not properly harnessing my potential. It’s also been an unwillingness to compromise my moral compass and create outside of what I am inherently aligned with. I never wanted the art I create to inaccurately represent who I am in spaces it exists, and I do not. Another component is access to resources. I tirelessly attempted to produce at the highest level with a finite number of resources but reached the inevitable glass ceiling in numerous vital areas, but primarily marketing and promotion. Meandering through the business, and business adjacent endeavors, I’ve learned: to compete and excel at a professional level, you must be on the pulse of evolution. My peers were, and are, funded by labels, investors, publishing companies, fortune companies, and everything in-between, which continue to provide a space that gives them a competitive baseline. The importance of accruing like-minded people willing to help actualize your vision and ultimately your career is the defining difference. It’s a struggle that is still distantly present and used to keep me competitive and productive.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a musician-artist. This includes songwriter, producer, singer, rapper, musician and beyond. I highlight these differences because their functions often bleed into the next, but there is a clear distinction between them all. Before discussing where and why I’m notable, there’s something more pressing I’d like to disclose. It’s been important to understand the music business via multiple perspectives and titles because each requires a different version of me. I’m unable to diversify not only my portfolio but my skillset if I don’t spend a healthy amount of time being each. This is notwithstanding my endeavors outside of creating music. There’s never enough time spent on the administrative side of the business and there aren’t enough discussions on what it truly means to at least start getting your affairs in order. So, to new artists and experienced artists alike please pay attention to these next few sentences: Associate yourself with a Performance Rights Organization as both a writer and publisher. These are two separate accounts, but you will need both to collect the entirety of your publishing when you begin to generate income. Learn how to properly register songs with these organizations on your own. Educate yourselves on how publishing works and where the money comes from. There’s mechanical performance, recording, digital performance, micro-sync, and print royalties that can and will come in to play when you begin to exploit your music and generate income. A manager is important, but a lawyer is more important when the time is right. Vet one very early on and continue to update your list of possible candidates along the way so when you need one, you’ll know exactly who to patronize. Lastly, go outside and meet people vis-à-vis. Online connections are real and meaningful, but offline connections are what dreams are actualized with. I’ve employed every ounce of this advice and more and it has served me tremendously. Now to answer, I’m known for quality and continuity. Be it the music I create, brand identities I aid in molding, creating assets for socials, ghost written books, scripts, etc. It’s all being funneled from the same source thus are varying expressions of the same thing. I couldn’t end this question without also reiterating my photography and videography work. I recently got a chance to shoot some of my friends at NextFestLA at the County Fair and it was superb. I’ve also documented tour with friends at varying stages of their careers and shot stills and lifestyle photos for them and others. My love for the camera as a medium has always existed, but jumped on my list of priorities within the last few years. What truly sets me apart from others are the intangibles. We’ve all got them in varying degrees. Some of us harness them more efficiently than others.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Growing up, I was a tenacious little human. I had no inhibitions and sponged on the world around me. I wrote my first rap in kindergarten, discovered my singing voice in third grade, picked up harmonica in fourth grade, guitar and snare drum somewhere in middle school, and had a late start on piano right around my senior year in high school – which is ironic because that’s my primary instrument now. This is a true testament to time being a fallacy and social construct and shows the importance of having the arts in school! Although I indulged some of these things exclusively in my free time, there were congruent offerings on each campus that would allow me to further my musicianship under the instruction of a teacher and mentor. I had very normal interests. We didn’t have cable television or a computer for the most part of growing up, so I was outside riding bikes and doing back flips off the roofs of houses. My looming interest in music ebbed and flowed to fit perfectly between it all, like mortar to brickwork. I also frequented Da Poetry Lounge in middle school, and it functioned as a supplementary secondary education in the art of writing. I was learning how to access the depths of my soul around that time, and gathered endless tools to successfully do it – there. I’ve always been evenly tempered and not easily dissuaded because of my relationship with intention. I attribute much of my personality and the way I navigate the world to my mother. We had in-home bible study weekly, consistent daily schedules including 5am rise (which I still practice today), and structure and discipline in the evenings after sports and extracurricular activities. I spent many weekends as a very young child copying pages of the dictionary and teaching myself cursive handwriting before I could even read the very words I copied. All of this foreshadowed the adult and creative I would grow into and I’ve somehow managed to commoditized each skill and interest I had as a child.

Pricing:

• The price is the price and is dependent upon the nature of the job. If you want to solicit any of my skills, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.justlockhart.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/just.lockhart
• Other: Also, on Spotify/Apple Music/Any other streaming service, please just search “Josh.Lockhart”

Image Credits
All photos provided are courtesy of Josh.Lockhart.