I’ve got new music to show you, and I am going to share it away from streaming services and away from typical social media practices.
If you don’t know me, I’m Leilani Patao, I’m a singer-songwriter, producer, engineer, performer and whatever else thing I’ve had to be in the past. To date, I’ve released three albums, my first one being The Lovers Reversed which just hit its 4th birthday. I spent so long writing those songs in the tiny refuge that was my room when I was 16. I didn’t know anything about the music industry or posting online, I didn’t even have Ableton Suite yet, I was just using the free trial version and hoping for the best. I sometimes feel really embarrassed of this album, because I know I could do better. I don’t tell people about it generally. I barely told people about it then. Once I made the album and painted the cover art, I put it on Distrokid, I posted to my couple hundred Instagram followers and felt good. That felt enough for me. I don’t even think I played a single one of those songs live ever. But it was an album I made, with my name on it, out in the world.
A lot has happened in 4 years. Shocker.
My last album is called But What If? I wrote it over the course of my first two years in college. I produced it with some help from my girlfriend and a friend from home. I worked with a friend I met here in New York to make album roll out. I made music videos, picked out singles, came up with TikTok ideas. Some really cool things happened from all the hard work, I can’t lie. I had an album release show with pretty much all my closest friends, and they were all so lovely to me, it felt like my wedding. I hand made merch with a broken pin machine and an ancient sewing machine I got at the thrift store. I made a zine with all the pictures and lyrics and stories I’d collected through the two years it took to live and make the album. I am so proud of the work me and everyone who supported me did. So much work that I feel so so proud of.
But the thing is, it wasn’t a financial success. I didn’t make any money. I’m not a huge star. For the amount of work we all put in, we didn’t make enough back to even go out for dinner.
But that shouldn’t be my bottom line. My bottom line should be that I made something to be proud of. I did the work I wanted to do, I told a super personal story with it all. And my life is better for it. So then why do I feel like I failed?
I’ve been sitting on a shit ton of new music. Shit that’s ready to go out tomorrow if I have the energy and the plan. I wrote just about 25 songs in the span of two semesters. I’ve got a lot of stuff to show. But I’ve been exhausted and tired and scared. Who am I to be making noise right now? So much is happening, so much that people should be paying attention to, I don’t need to add to the noise with my latest single. I don’t want my video about my silly little song stopping someone from seeing an ice watch notification, or a gofund me campaign from a family in Gaza, or anything that really matters to them. And I made all this music as an escape from reality. I personally don’t think we should be taking many escapes when we’re not doing all we can to help.
I also very much did not want to interact with the music system again. I don’t enjoy knowing that the music I make directly interacts and, in some ways, aids Spotify’s CEO funding of AI military tech. I don’t enjoy paying for convenience, I don’t enjoy not paying musicians, I don’t fucking enjoy AI. And social media platforms are no better. Even on the surface, algorithms are steering people’s likes and dislikes, censoring certain words, videos, or creators, and letting ads slip into every day content, making what you want to see and what it wants you to see indistinguishable. And there’s so much we don’t know. There are people being directly affected by my complacency on Spotify, what should I care if I’m on New Music Friday?
As a musician and a creative, I’m constantly torn between denouncing the system or joining it and surviving, fighting in what ways I can. I’ve been told, even in the few years I’ve been releasing music, that if I am not on streaming, if I am not posting about my music and telling people about it, that I am the one hindering my success, and that it’ll never work. That I have to lose money to make money, to take shit gigs in order to get good ones. These success stories in the mainstream of the small musician, discovered on the internet, just playing to the camera for fun, who gets discovered and becomes the next superstar that they’re playing in the CVS while you’re picking up your birth control. They always say that you have to keep working hard, keep posting, keep being silly and being the only one to believe in yourself, and you’ll eventually make it if you don’t give up.
I don’t think believing in myself means I have to constantly post things that I don't like. I think believing in myself means I’m going to take a chance, at essentially the start of it all, to not do what everyone says is the procedure. I feel so deeply, so wholeheartedly tired of this system, and how it interacts with and even aids facism, capitalism, and oppression. And I know there are people out there who feel the same. Someone out there has to feel this way, I know I am not alone.
I want to show you this music. Not necessarily because I think it’s cool and I think you might like it. But I want to prove something to myself. I want to see if I can avoid these platforms as best as I can, and still have people listen. I want to get fairly paid, and fairly pay the people who help me during this. I want to play shows, make zines, talk about music! I want to use these kind of silly, random songs to prove to myself I can exist as a creative without centering the oppression that I write against.
I hope you’ll tag along. It might be harder to find this way. But I’m hoping you’ll enjoy trying something new. I’m trying to :))
Love it! Go for it!!!🫶🫶🫶