Working Blind Episode 8: Lawrence Brown, Blind Musician

Lawrence has always been interested in music, but he started seriously playing in high school. From there he went to university, and he’s now a full-time musician. Find out how he did it.

Check out some of Lawrence’s music: The Vitruvian Project and EEP on Bandcamp

You can subscribe to Working Blind on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and TuneIn. If you like the show, consider making a donation to help cover the costs. Alternatively, you can donate via PayPal.

Transcript

[music]
Holly: Working Blind, sharing stories of working blind people from across the globe.
Hello, and welcome back to Working Blind. It really has been a while since I released an episode of this podcast. There are many reasons for that, partly because my own life has been chaotic, but I think also because all of our lives have this year. World events have really changed everything for all of us. It’s interesting because this episode was actually recorded before the pandemic before lockdown and Coronavirus became part of our collective consciousness. It really is quite strange for me to listen to, and I’m sure it will be for all of you as well. I interviewed Lawrence Brown, III.
Lawrence is a great friend of mine, he’s a wonderful musician and such an interesting person, and I can’t wait for you all to hear his story. Here’s how Lawrence began to get involved with music.
Lawrence Brown: Here’s how it really started. I was born in 1992, and I was still around for lots of tapes, lots of cassettes, and Walkman’s.
Holly: Oh my gosh, I remember.
Lawrence: Yes, of course. My parents realized, “Okay, we’ve got to find some sort of alternative stimulus for him. We’ve got to figure out some way that he can enjoy.” With a child– that’s one of the big challenges is you can’t just hang up a pretty colorful mobile for a blind child. It’s not how it works. They figured, well, I mean, he can hear so he’s got his Walkman, let’s just buy him tapes. My love of music and audiobooks– This is totally off-topic, but I know you’ll enjoy it, started from the same space of having being in these places where as a child, you might get a little overstimulated or something like that.
Then listening to either a cassette tape from my father’s R&B or hip-hop collection, or listening to a fairy tale, one of the Arabian Nights, or something like that. It was like that blended together led me to be who I am today, I really think at the earliest stages.
Holly: Because you just had access to that music and that was your thing and those books too.
Lawrence: Yes, music, and books. Music and audiobooks all the way through. I remember the days when there was no Audible, and you spent $80 on your favorite book because you were like, “I have to have it now. I don’t care that it’s expensive. I’m buying it right now.” You listen to the cassettes and you’re– anyway.
Holly: I think I got one book for every six books my sister got just in cost [laughs] because she used to read.
Lawrence: Yes, for sure. Absolutely. Reading Braille, something like Gone with the Wind you’re looking at nine very fat volumes. A lot of the interfaces with audio and with music as well. That whole cassette world opened me up to a world of possibilities. People would just give me random cassettes. That was a thing. It was like, “Oh, well, whatever it is, Lawrence will like it.”
Holly: I had some weird stuff. Like some stuff I look back on I’m like, “What? Why was I reading that when I was five or listening to that?”
Lawrence: Yes, there’s some– I read Arabian Nights. I listened to it on CD when I was seven. Definitely, I should not have been doing that, I don’t think. There were a couple of scenes in that book that were definitely not for a seven-year-old to hear.
Holly: At least we had a really wide vocabulary. I guess– [laughs]
Lawrence: That’s right. Now we jump on radio shows and do all kinds of fun things.
Holly: Right. Maybe we were lucky.
Lawrence: I think so. I think that is one of the perks of being blind is you got to tap into that. At least a certain generation.
Holly: Particularly our generation. We were weird, but at the same time, the weirdness paid off later on because I wasn’t really interested in playing with Barbie’s only to a certain extent, or watching a cartoon, I would but it was like, “Oh, okay.” But then it’s like, “Oh, I got really into radio, and radio plays were my thing.” In the UK, we have the BBC radio dramas, it was like, I was so into them as a kid. Then I would just listen to everything on the radio.
Lawrence: Exactly. I also have a radio background. I spent, when I was in college, I had the opportunity to intern at a station. It was paid for by the state because it was through a program that would pay kids with disabilities to work. They said, “Well, why don’t you find your own job?” I got creative and went to the director of one of the local NPR stations here in town, I said, “Hey, would you consider putting me on the air?” He said, “Sure.”
Holly: That’s so cool.
Lawrence: I think that you and I also have that in common. The speaking and the and the vocabulary, it’s things that you learn because of the skill sets you need to learn as a blind person. I think that’s totally true.
Holly: How did you find school growing up? What was that like for you?
Lawrence: School, for me, it was really good but there was a bit of a reason for that, which is that my mother and grandmother are educators. I went to school in the school district where they work. It made things a lot easier when I needed to have that advocacy, and that link. I had my mom breathing down my neck all the time as a teacher, and have that my grandmother as my principal at the elementary school level. I went from that to middle school, and I was very well equipped, and I went into high school, also still very well equipped, but when I got to college, all of that was taken away.
One of the things about El Paso, Texas, which is where I’m from, by the way, is that it’s a small-town feel. The people that live in certain neighborhoods don’t really leave those neighborhoods, or if they do, they always come back. It’s like New Orleans in that way. It’s a very unique vibe but once you get to college, all those things get taken away from you. The legality becomes a lot more flexible you could say, and you have to really go to bat for yourself. That was a big adjustment for me, and having people tell me things that I knew weren’t true or weren’t correct but having people get away with it.
I hadn’t had that happen in my life because before, first of all, these kid’s parents or educators, families, educators, we know that they’ll come down on us if we don’t, and they work in our district and there’s that whole dynamic. At the college level it’s way more about hanging in, and just knowing the system, knowing all the hoops and the red tape that you need to go through. There’s a lot of pitfalls. There are so many. I navigated pretty well. I have always been a pretty hard worker, and I always enjoy learning new things. I had great grades. The biggest challenges that I’ve had were not really academic, they were more accessibility challenges.
Holly: I can understand that. Absolutely. It’s like you may be able to cope with the material but can you use the system where you submit your essays, something like that you know it’s like– and that’s where you get thrown?
Lawrence: Sure, yes, your essays, your papers, and then they give you they say, “Oh, the readings are right here.” Until recently, things like PDFs weren’t accessible. I went to college when PDFs weren’t accessible for the most part, at least for JAWS users. It wasn’t until I became more familiar with some Apple products that I learned other ways to navigate that system,
Holly: You’re just expected to figure this stuff out. You’re not just a student.
You’re a student with all those other things on top of it that you’ve got to know as well.
Lawrence: Sure. If you’re not careful, what ends up happening is, before you know it, you’re halfway through the semester. Things that you may need to figure out, you don’t or you can’t, because it’s like, I have a paper that needs to be done right now, I don’t have any more time to sit and read through threads about JAWS commands, because I have to turn in a math assignment. That’s what I have to do. That also comes with being mainstreamed. I was mainstreamed the whole way through. The upside to that for me is that it helped me with my social skills, and that helps me in my work now as a musician.
I would say that the magic formula is if you’re an American blind person, or parent of a blind person, that you want to try and do the mainstream thing during elementary. Send them off to a state school during the junior high years, and then try and mainstream them again for high school.
Holly: So, they get real exposure in the middle.
Lawrence: Exactly, smack dab the Braille and the accessible technology and the accessible, because, for me, my introduction to JAWS was not one of, hey, let’s learn about this wonderful thing that can enhance your life. It was like, we have to learn right now, whatever you have to learn so that you can interface with the class and move on. Which isn’t really the way it should be. It’s not really the way it should be. I fell behind on things like that. I fell behind on accessibility, just knowing all the ways that accessible technology can help. I had catch up to do and I’m still catching up in a lot of ways. There you have it.
Holly: Did you major in music when you were in college?
Lawrence: Well, that’s a really interesting story. Here we go. I did. I started majoring in purely music. I had a really interesting experience going into college. That was that I had a band director during my high school years who actually convinced me that I could go to school for music, because before that, I thought, “Oh, maybe I’ll end up in law school. I have family in law, maybe I’ll end up–” I don’t know what I’ll do. Music will probably be a hobby. My freshman year, I started really getting heavily involved in stuff, do more all-region, and all city activities and things like that.
Then, going into my sophomore year when this new band director came in, he really showed me, “Hey, you could do this, you could take this as far as you want.” My senior year, I graduated from high school, and I was helping him with the marching band. One day, he didn’t show up to the marching band rehearsal. Long story short, we found him dead in his house right across the street from the school. The real issue with this was that my band director during high school, when it was clear that I was in fact going to try to go to university for music, struck up a deal with my district. Which was I will go and then get training for this kid, this student in the real music software that’s available, which is through Dancing Dots.
We will talk more about that later, then I will provide things for training for all blind students in the district and in the area. That will be the thing. That happened, my senior year of high school and he said, “I’ll help with his transition into university.” I applied for another school where one of his friends worked and I missed it by one slot. I ended up saying, “Okay, I’ll stay home for one year.” The long and short of it was that he passed very tragically.
The next couple of weeks, I ended up having to go straight into orientation and having to explain to the people at the department, “Braille music is very different. If you give me a music theory exam, you tell me where that I need to put a certain note in a certain space on the staff or on a certain line in the staff. I’m not really going to know what you’re talking about, because the only thing I know is Braille music.” It was very easy to get shoved and say “We’ll figure it out, we’ll figure it out.” I ended up taking basic courses for a few years with some music courses that I was allowed to take. I ran into an administrator who kept putting holds on my accounts.
She would say “Well, you didn’t take this class, you didn’t take that class, you didn’t even buy the Braille music software. We don’t even have that, first of all.” I’m not going to sit in a concert band and count 128 measures of rest to play a note on a gong. That’s not fair, I would need Braille music for that. It’s not fair to the band, it’s not fair to the director, it’s not fair to me. The long and short of it was she said something like, “Because of your disability, you should think about changing your major.” Which is really laughable, and I considered taking legal action.
It was a lot of stuff, I consider transferring schools, I thought for a while about going to UNT, but if I transferred, I’d lose every single credit I’d worked for two years to get. At this point, I was 21 or so, 20. I took some time off in between to get Halo, my dog guide. Then I came back and I had a conversation with a professor and he said, there’s another degree, it’s called the multidisciplinary degree. You pick three subject areas, and you can be done in X amount of time. He said, “Why don’t you think about doing that?” I said, “Oh, well, it looks like a disgrace if I do that if I sell myself short.”
He said, “No man, what you need to do is finish school, and then do whatever you want to do. Get as many degrees as you want after that. What you need to do is get one, so that people can’t deny you ever again, because we did a terrible job of servicing you. A lot of it was because you didn’t have any credential, you didn’t have anybody backing you up, you didn’t have anything. Just because whatever the case may be and the legalities of it, we didn’t serve you the best that we could serve you. My advice to you would be, get your degree, and then you’ll never run into this problem again because you can say, I have a degree.”
I did some really serious soul searching, and just thinking and meditating and all that. I said, “Okay, here’s the deal. If I can get out before I turned 23, I’ll be cool with that. If I can’t, I’m throwing all this away, and I’m transferring and I’m moving somewhere else.” I went to an advisor and they said, “We can have you out by the end of the summer before you turn 23, by the end of summer 2015.” I said, “All right, that’s my sign.” I wrapped up, I took a heavy load that next semester and a half or so, and that was it. I was done. After that, I went to intern for Dancing Dots which is the company that provides Braille music software, and all the things that are available in terms of scanning music, print music into Braille, or Braille music into print and interfacing and dealing with JAWS and all that sort of thing. That happened.
Holly: How do you use that in what you’re doing? How did you find out about it? Just tell me more about the software, because I’ve heard of it but I don’t really know much about it.
Lawrence: Bill McCann is a really good friend of mine. He is a trumpet player pianist. He graduated Cum Laude from Temple University back in late ’70s early or ’80s.
Forgive me Bill if you hear this.
[laughter]
Holly: You’re trying to age him.
[laughter]
Lawrence: Yes, I should know this, but he ended up trying to get a better job than just gigging around as a musician. He ended up in computer programming, and long story short, he worked really hard and developed a software that– it’s called The Good Feel Suite. You can scan, print music into Braille. There is Lime and Lime Aloud. Those are programs that you can compose your own music, and they work with JAWS, and I think with NVDA now and Windows Narrator, and a couple of things. He came up with a variety of solutions so that blind people could in fact compose their own music and have it so that a sighted person can read it, or so that sighted people could scan music into Braille for blind people.
It’s pretty effective. The only real hang up with it is that some of the scripts are not as up to date, and it doesn’t work on Mac products. That’s a real hang up nowadays. Undeniably when it hit the market, it was the end all be all for blind people for the first time. You could have a situation where people could compose and blind people could be alone with their music. For the longest time, it’s like you have to have a scribe there writing out, to dictate and that ruins– Not ruins, but it takes something out of the process.
Holly: Absolutely.
Lawrence: Bill and I met at a Braille music academy. The Overbrook Institute in Philadelphia.
Holly: I know what music academy you’re talking about actually.
Lawrence: You do?
Holly: Despite knowing nothing about music. Yes. I actually have heard of it. They used to do summer programs for the music thing?
Lawrence: They did. I think I attended the last one if I’m not mistaken. How old was I then? I hadn’t gotten Halo. Who is snoring really loudly in the background here. I hadn’t gotten Halo just yet. I was thinking I was 20 or 19. I must have been 19 actually. Yes, I signed up for this thing and I went out there. I just learned so much about– I was exposed to it. For the first time, a teacher who was a music theory teacher that was specialized in working with blind people specialized in Braille music. I didn’t get Braille music until the midway point through my high school career. My fluency with Braille music has never been great.
It still isn’t amazing. I can read it, but it’s not something that’s out of this world. I have colleagues that can run circles around me for sure. Anyway, I ended up meeting Bill, and we hit it off, and we just stayed in touch. He said, “Hey, what if you came and interned at Dancing Dots?” For a while, I had to say no because I was trying to finish up with school, and just be done with that. Once I was done, we made it work. One thing led to another, and I was over there for two months and I learned a lot. I learned not only a lot about what the mission of Dancing Dots is, and what The Good Feel Suite can do for Braille music users.
I also learned a lot about the accessible technology business and how it runs, and why things are the way that they are, why prices might be the way that they are. Just a lot. I learned so much. Coming out of that, Bill invited me to a music camp that he was working at EHC, Enchanted Hills Camp for the Blind. Just a little audio description for you, Holly. I am in my room currently, and I’m in my most comfortable pair of gray sweats and my EHC staff shirt.
Holly: From this year or last year? [laughs]
Lawrence: Which year is it from? It’s from last year. It’s not the one from this year. I have a couple on hand.
Holly: That’s great. [laughs] I suppose I should provide context that we know each other through Enchanted Hills Camp. Everyone’s going to be like why are you so excited about summer camp? [laughs]
Lawrence: I mean there is a lot of reasons to be excited about summer camp. You and I won’t go into those here.
Holly: [laughs]
Lawrence: The biggest one is Linda’s cookies. No, it’s the fact that camp has provided and continues to provide such a network for blind people around the world.
Holly: It really is. EHC is like something so different from anywhere I’ve ever been.
Lawrence: It is, it’s a different world. It’s a different world, and I ended up helping Bill with the music. I was a camper in 2016, after having interned at his company. In 2017, I returned to work at EHC all summer long for Tony Fletcher as a full-time staffer member and to help with the music camp. In 2018, after 2017, Bill stepped aside from the music camp and it got passed on to me. Now I run that program, and we’ve been servicing youth from the ages 15 to 25, 28, something like that. Now we’re hoping to provide an adult music camp for folks who are a bit older. Folks that you might see in the adult sessions at Enchanted Hills, things like that.
Holly: Oh my gosh, they are going to love that, honestly. There are so many people who really want the nostalgia of a music thing. Particularly older blind people who maybe went to blind schools or things like that. For them, it’s like getting back to that community with music as well.
Lawrence: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Well, the real shift in the music camp that I went to, and the music camp that I’m currently running, is that the blind and low vision community is a big community. What we were finding was that it was originally built as a Braille music academy, but that leaves out a pretty big portion of the community.
Holly: The majority really.
Lawrence: Yes, so Tony Fletcher came to me and said, “Hey, what do we say? What do we do with all these people? Do you see that this is what’s happening?” I said, “Well, yes, I understand, but I want to promote Braille music, Tony because Braille music is important.”
[laughs]
Holly: I can see this happening [laughs].
Lawrence: The thing is I’m not the greatest Braille music reader. I don’t use it every day even. I’ll sit here and tell you the honest truth about that, but it’s important. Literacy is important, and you and I don’t have to stand on the soapbox about why that is, but it’s important.
Holly: [laughs] We don’t. I’ll be here for hours otherwise. [laughs]
Lawrence: The point is that we had to figure out something that was more inclusive to the wider field of blind and low vision people, which is what EHC is- Enchanted Hills is so great at doing. Now we focus at the music camp on the performance being the biggest element is how we perform, and all the things that come with performances such as rehearsals and the preparation, and stage etiquette and professionalism and all those things. We try to
focus on recording a little bit for those who are into some recording things.
Holly: That’s cool.
Lawrence: We try to do that. We also have really made it a point to focus on some of the hardware aspects of what music recording entails. If you’re a blind person, you don’t always know how to plug something in until somebody tells you. Until you get some training on that. How would you set up a speaker and a microphone for yourself at a gig? How would you do that? Having our campers be accountable for that. Also, just trying to do some recording of the campers. A colleague of mine works at the camp, Josh Lintz and his fiancé Mariana Sandoval. First of all, they say hello because they’ll cut my head off if I don’t.
Holly: There’s now evidence that you said hello. This is going to go on a podcast. There’s evidence.
Lawrence: Exactly. No. Shouts out to Joshua and Mariana. They’re great colleagues and great friends. Marianna has been a big component of the camp. Has always been, even since Bill’s time, the chorus. Mariana has been indispensable in helping with that. Josh is–
Holly: Yes, keep everyone singing.
Lawrence: Exactly. You got to. You have to. It’s a requirement. Everybody’s got to do it. Josh has been indispensable in talking about recording and also recording campers and making sure that we have a great show. Just helping in that way and teaching campers about how to record themselves, how to plug in mixers and amps and mics, and all those sorts of things.
Holly: You guys did a great show this summer just gone by. I was so lucky that I got to come to it through something else. I was there and it was so cool to see everyone and watch all of them perform. Especially some of the campers who I know. I was like, “Oh, so great.”
Lawrence: It was very humbling. It was very humbling, to say the least. To receive as much praise as we did this year. We worked very hard. Again, I didn’t know what I was going to do when Tony was like, “I want music camp but I want it to be a camp, now Braille’s going to have to take a backseat.” I was like, “What am I going to do?” I don’t know where to even start. As you said, you do know where to start. He put his faith and confidence in me. I think we’re making it work. We have a better template of what this actually is. I think you’ll remember that when I first did the camp, you and I, we had a conversation about– I told you very frankly. I said, “I don’t know what this is yet. I don’t really know.”
Now, it’s going to be different every year because there may be years where we do have Braille, a lot more Braille music readers coming in. We’re going to have to make allowances for that. We’re going to have to make sure the music that they need is there and ready for them. Opportunities are there for them to use, perhaps the Dancing Dot’s products and so on, and so forth. That’s the X-Factor that always happens at camp, is that you don’t ever really know what’s going to entirely go down.
Holly: As Tony says, flexibility is key.
Lawrence: Is key. Yes, ma’am.
Holly: He’ll be pleased I remembered that.
Lawrence: He will. He will be pleased.
Holly: I sometimes say it to students here and they’re like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “You don’t understand. This is really important. This is an important thing that I learned one summer.” [laughs]
Lawrence: You have to just send them all to youth camp and then they’ll figure it out. It was great to have you at the concert even though we’re supposed to hang out for more time but it was such a busy day.
Holly: It was a crazy day and my weekend was, start to finish, just super busy. I was like, “Oh, my God.” Again, then I had to fly back to Colorado.
Lawrence: That camp is– I don’t know, man. I don’t feel like a director of a camp, of a music camp. I mean, I’m 27 years old. I’m just figuring this out. Just like any other blind musician who might be listening to this podcast, in a lot of regards, I do this because I love it and because I feel it’s my calling to do it.
Holly: Now music is what you do, I guess, full-time. How did you figure all that out and start that? You left college, you did your internship, you went to camp. How did it all begin to get you where you are now?
Lawrence: First of all, I would say that I’m at a place in my life where I’m still looking for financial stability and music doesn’t necessarily provide that. However, I’m in a bit of a catch 22 because my career as it is, is really just starting to take off in really big ways. I’ve been playing professionally for 10 years. I guess almost 11 years now, really. My first gig I was 16 years old. I was still in high school and I was in the youth jazz program. The people running the youth jazz program said, “Hey, why don’t you come down? You and this other kid in the program, come down and play for $20 on a Saturday?”
From there, I just continued and I made my own bands. Then I got into college and I played in different ensembles. I played all the ensembles there were to play. Steel drum ensembles, Middle Eastern ensembles. I played just whatever I could. I played sessions and I still do that. I’ve been freelancing for a really, really long time. It’s something I’ve been doing since high school. My line of work hasn’t changed that much. It’s just that things are becoming slightly more and more– What’s the word? The profile of things is a little bit higher.
At 18, if you would have said, “Hey, you’re going to run a music camp when you’re 27 in Napa.” I would have been like, “What?” This is something that happened. It just fell into my lap. I didn’t plan for it. My idea is to perhaps go back for a master’s and get a master’s in ethnomusicology which is the study of the anthropology of music. You do ethnographies with different people and different traditions. For instance, I might go to Yorkshire and study all of the Madrigals that were produced in a certain church around a certain time and how they affected whatever–
Holly: They have lots of churches so that will– You’ll be all right.
Lawrence: Yes, I could get it but that’s just one example. I can go to Bulgaria and study wedding music in a certain religion. That wouldn’t be– My line is in the African diaspora in the United States. That would be what I would want to do. I’ve managed to remain debt-free thus far. I’m trying to keep that going for as long as I can. For many blind people, there aren’t all that many fields we can find ourselves in. You might find yourself in rehab. Maybe you might find yourself in teaching, in VI. You might find yourself at a call center.
Holly: Most of us are in tech these days as well.
Lawrence: Yes, in tech. None of those really appeal to me. Aside from, perhaps teaching. Even then if you would asked me five years ago, I would have said, “No, no, no, no, no.” Now, I have a bit of a difference with that
but music is my passion. It’s what drives me. I’m constantly making records. I’m constantly working on projects with different artists, and I’m always playing different styles of music. There’s a rock record that I’m working on right now. We just released a pop and R&B record, it’s called– with this new band that I’m working with, Horizon Executives. We just got invited to the NAMM convention, the NAMM show over in Anaheim. We’re going to go in a couple of weeks.
Holly: That’s so exciting. Oh, my gosh. That’s amazing.
Lawrence: It’s through a company, an electronics company, it’s called Mackie Hardware Company and they make headphones and speakers and all kinds of things like that. I’m actually using their headphones right now, and they’re making it possible for us to go to NAMM. It’s a really big honor and that just fell out of the sky a couple of weeks ago, That’s my life. For instance, you’ll remember our good friends Aza and Tahani that worked with Guide Dogs of Hawaii.
Holly: Yes, you went out there didn’t you to Hawaii, I believe? Did you?
Lawrence: Yes.
Holly: I know. I was like do I go crazy?
Lawrence: I get it. It was something I never– I didn’t think it was going to happen. You know what I’m saying? I was at camp, still working at camp, and then Aza messaged me. She’s a caseworker for GDH and said, “Hey, would you like to come out and bring a musical component?” It’s like, “Yes, for sure.” I don’t know, man. My life is- it’s not stable. It’s not. I wish I could sit here and say, “Oh, I got it figured out.” I have a five-year plan, I have–
Holly: I’ll interview you in 10 years. It’ll be different.
Lawrence: Oh, man. Oh, God willing. Yes. I wish, I hope, I pray that it will be. You never sign on for that when you’re a musician. The reality is that you’ve got to spend five years losing money before you start making it in a lot of ways.
Holly: I think that’s the blessing and the curse of creativity. It’s definitely saying, I’m finding. Three, four years ago I started to get work published and I was in newspapers, and I was like, “This is it. This is my big break. I’ve made it.” No, I hadn’t made it. That was just the beginning of the grind to making a name for yourself. The first thing you do you think, “Oh, my God, I’ve made it right now.” The first time you play with a band or whatever it is for me, it was writing. I was like, “Woo” but what you realize a few years later is I got on the ladder.
Lawrence: Yes, exactly. How many more rungs, and then how many more times do you get knocked off a couple of rungs, and then you got to climb back up.
Holly: Then at least for me, and I feel like it’s probably the same for you, creativity has also, whilst it brings you instability, it definitely brings you opportunities that I feel people who have a 9:00 to 5:00 job, and that is not being disrespectful because I think that works for some people, but it brings you opportunities you wouldn’t have if you had that 9:00 to 5:00 job.
Lawrence: Absolutely. Absolutely. Although it just makes me stressed out when I look at my bank account. Yes. It’s okay. I do realize how incredibly lucky I am when I’m sitting in a recording studio writing a song about this or that. I’m playing drums and working on how to get the right drum sound for a certain song or whatever. I’m on stage at a festival in Mexico and I’m there. I went to Mexico City this past summer to tour a record that we recorded last Thanksgiving, and then it came out in March. We did the CD release in May, yes, I think it was May. Then we went and did a couple of dates in Mexico City. Those things are exhilarating. It’s amazing, but it’s also stressful for sure.
Holly: Yes. I hear you on that one. That’s definitely how I feel with, well, all my creative endeavors. It’s like they’re so rewarding because you put some of your soul into them. I don’t know, it’s not like just doing your job, but you’re doing what you’re told to do. You’re putting yourself into it, but then you also have that stress of, I don’t know when the next paycheck is coming if there is one.
Lawrence: It’s really true. It’s really, really true. You understand it because you’ve been writing for a while. It’s not like you just published your first blog yesterday, you’ve been doing it for a long time.
Holly: I’m still working my way up. It’s going to be a while, I think. I think I’m resigned to that fact now.
Lawrence: I guess that’s what happens. You get resigned to grinding it out. You understand eventually that this is what it is. The grind doesn’t stop. This is another day at the office.
Holly: Yes, but I think it also separates people who love it and people who don’t. Like, if you’re in it for the fame, you’re not going to be there for all those years of, how do I pay the bills or whatever, because you’re just going to be like, “I’m dropping this. I didn’t become famous. I’m out.” Whereas, if you love it, you’re going to pursue that maybe beyond what people think is sensible, but you do it because you love it.
Lawrence: There’s no doubt. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s beyond what people think is sensible, but yes, of course, I’m very driven to doing it. Yes, it’s been a wild ride, and I have so many colleagues to think of. People like Bill McCann, of course, the professors at the University of Texas here that really did believe in me that weren’t like the lady that I mentioned before, folks like Eric Ainsworth, Sean Mahoney, and Chris Raman and Dina Jones, and several others. Those people tapped me into different networks. Those people are my go-to when I need something.
Of course, my immediate circle of colleagues, people like Josh and Marianna, who I work with in a musical sense here at home. Josh, he records me a lot in town. We write songs together. We work on sound gigs together. We work just on a lot of different projects, and Marianna has got her own things going on. Those are only just a few of the friends that I have in the network that I have here at home locally.
Holly: What’s the music scene like in El Paso? Can you tell me a bit about that? What’s it like being a musician in your city?
Lawrence: That’s a really great question. Well, in my city, there’s a lot of talent because El Paso is a border metroplex. People don’t understand it unless you’ve been here. First of all, you have El Paso and Juárez. You have those, and they’re sister cities like Buda and Pest. It’s like Minneapolis and St. Paul. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s one city, but it’s two cities. Juárez is massive. Juárez has over 2 million people now, maybe even 3 million. It’s not small. El Paso is 900,000 and growing for sure.
Then not only do you have that, but to the West, you have Las Cruces, New Mexico, and all these surrounding little towns in between El Paso and Las Cruces and in the areas and plus towns on the outline. It’s a lot of land. There’s a lot of space out here. Subsequently, there are a lot of home studios and a lot of very affordable recording studios. There’s one called Sonic Ranch. It’s not far from El Paso and your listeners can Google it. We get a who’s who of people at this studio. I can’t even get into the list because it’s so– They all come to little old here to record, but because it’s cheap and it’s discreet, it’s nondescript and that’s the vibe.
There’s always live music happening, but it’s like certain venues. Certain venues and certain people controlling who goes in and out of certain venues. For instance, if I want to gig at a certain bar, I’ve got to know one person, or I have to have it in with one person to get there.
It’s not like I could just do it off merit. You know what I’m saying? It’s just easier if you can do a one-person situation. However, it’s easy to build merit out of New York or an LA, and people have a unique sound. People have a unique sound because it’s so isolated here.
Phoenix is six hours away. Albuquerque is four and a half hours away, three, four hours away. Denver is 10 hours away, 11 hours away really. Houston is 12 hours away. You get the picture. It’s an island. It feels like an island here, and so it does allow for a lot of– like, for instance, when I have been to New York, I love going to New York because you see the best talent that the world has to offer in a lot of ways. You also hear a lot of cookie-cutter sameness. It’s like, all right, well, you sound like this other guy that’s trying to sound like this guy. Whereas like El Paso, you might go out to like some divey Mexican restaurant bar and hear a guy playing drums in a blues band. You’ll never have heard anything like that before. You’re like, “All right, I’ve never heard that anywhere else except here in El Paso.”
Holly: You think that helps you keep your style as well and who you are as a musician living in a place that’s so– I mean, there are so many cultures as well in El Paso and all of that. Do you think that has helped you as a musician?
Lawrence: I would say absolutely. It has helped me to cultivate a style that is, when I go to jam at a jazz club in New York or in New Orleans or wherever I don’t feel like I need to sound like those people. I can respect whatever it is that they’re doing and come at it as honestly as I possibly can. The other problem with El Paso is because we are so isolated, you end up only getting compared to the success stories of El Paso ones. That can be a double-edged sword.
Holly: Right, because there’s those people who really, really made it, and then you’re like, people are going to put anyone who’s working or trying to get into music in that category too.
Lawrence: A great example is Khalid. Khalid is the location guy and, ‘Can we just star– that song. He’s on the radio left and right, right now. He’s a giant pop star. He’s not originally from El Paso. His family is a military family and they ended up here because of the base, but he decided, hey, this place is great. I’m going to rep it. This is my city, I like it, and the people have embraced him with open arms. However, now everybody wants that. You know what I’m saying? It’s tough because I wouldn’t mind that myself. I’ve worked at a studio that he’s worked at and reported stuff at.
His presence is very strong here in the city. He’s also done a lot to ingratiate himself with the people of the city, with the shooting situation that we had happen here. It was so unfortunate. He responded immediately. He has a foundation that gives back to schools and stuff. Again, the good thing is that at least people in my city are seeing, hey, somebody can make it, because you’re from El Paso, you don’t have to think that you won’t get a shot at the industry because he definitely did. It’s definitely possible.
Holly: Well, thank you so much for talking. It was great. Not only to catch up but also to do this interview because it’s something really unique. I’ve had a lot of people who work, I guess, more normal jobs.
Lawrence: It’s true. I’m sorry, I’m not Stevie Wonder or Justin Kauflin. I’m not quite the big shot musician yet, but my idea is to just keep grinding and–
Holly: Give it 10 years. Like I said, I’ll come back in–
Lawrence: Give it 10 years.
Holly: This interview in 10 years, someone’s going to look back and be like, “You know it’s from his early days before he had his break.”
Lawrence: I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope that just because it just takes so much time to get into this, and I’ve been so fortunate to have all the– despite all of the hardships that come with it, I’ve been so fortunate to have the ability to work with the variety of people that I have, and in the situations that I’ve been able to work in. From being yelled at the dinner theater, because I didn’t play the part the same every night because I didn’t have the music, because they didn’t get it for me in Braille. To playing at a jazz festival where I’m part of the headlining act, and I’ve got my own green room and I got all my guys around me.
Holly: Oh, my gosh, that’s amazing.
Lawrence: I’ve seen the gamut, but I know there’s even a bigger gamut beyond the day in and day out of what I’ve seen. I just look up so much to people like Justin Kauflin, to people like Raul Midón, to people like Andrea Bocelli, of course. Of course, the OGs, like Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, and those guys. There are a lot of blind musicians doing their thing out there, shouts out to Christina Jones and to Stephanie Smith in the LA area and to Bill McCann, and to Blessing Offer on the East coast. I can go on and on and on about all the great guys and women that are out there doing exactly what I’ve been doing for longer or in a different way or better. It just never ends.
Holly: You’re in good company. That’s a good thing.
Lawrence: It’s true. It is true. I feel very fortunate.
Holly: Well, thank you so much. This has been great.
Lawrence: Holly, thank you. I wish you nothing but the best on your future episodes. I’ll be locked and loaded to see what else you got cooking up in the Working Blind podcast world.
Holly: Yes, there’s some interesting stuff.
Lawrence: I’m ready for it.
Holly: Thanks for listening to Working Blind. If you like the podcast, please subscribe. For more of my advocacy initiatives, including my blog, visit my website, https://catchthesewords.com. You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram @catchthese words. That’s C-A-T-C-H-T-H-E-S-E-W-O-R-D-S. If you have any comments or feedback, please email me holly@catchthesewords.com.