How to Build a DIY Career in Metal: The Bunn Is Back

Hey, outlaws.

It’s Matt from Superkick Branding. Thanks for tuning in to the Brand Outlaw podcast. Today we’re bringing back one of my favorite guests we’ve had so far, heavy metal musician The Bun. He’s a very chill, very thoughtful guy who, as you may remember from last time, launched a highly ambitious project in 2022. He started a YouTube series documenting his journey toward becoming a full time musician in a niche metal genre at the age of 50.

We checked in with him last year, just a few months into the project. Now we’re checking back to see how things went in that first year. What were the wins, the setbacks? What can we expect from the Bun in 2023? He’s very open and transparent about his process. So there’s a lot that you can take away here if you’re aspiring to make music, your career. And even if you’re not, there’s a ton of wisdom packed into this conversation and stick around until the end. Once again, we’re giving you some bonus content. We’re going to play one of The Bun songs to close out this episode on a nice, heavy note.

Before we go any further, though, I want to remind you, visit thebrandoutlaw.com not only are you going to find more helpful brand boosting podcasts and articles, but you can also download your free copy of the Buyer Persona Playbook. This is our guide for walking you through the process of building buyer personas. These are great tools for helping you and your staff have the most effective customer interactions.

Understanding who your customers are is going to let you have empathy for them and that’s going to allow you to serve them in the best way possible so that they’re not just one and dones, they become loyal customers. Download your free buyer persona playbook@thebrandoutlaw.com. All right, let’s dive in. It’s the bun on the brand outlaw podcast.

I’ve just been grinding, grinding, trying to reinvent myself. The quest for reinvention, I think, never, ever ends.

Yeah.

As an artist, as a person, making that kind of stuff, like making music, making art, how are you trying to reinvent yourself? You want to repeat enough of what you did before so that your identity is intact. Your identity exists within the work, but you want to do it a different way. You want to say something new. You don’t want to say the same thing again and again. And trying to find that relationship, like where those two things meet, that newness and that consistency, it’s a delicate dance.

Yeah.

So I’ve been navigating that. I had a bunch of time. I spent a bunch of this last past year helping my mom out. She retired and she had to move out of the city and we had to get her housed in something that was sustainable and affordable for a 75 year old woman. 76 year old woman. So it was a lot of time, like traveling. So, yeah, you get into your head, spend a lot of time thinking and thinking, like, what am I doing? Why am I doing it?

And what do I really care about? So I think that’s been the theme of this past year, because I established this thing, I finally sort of last year, just before we first talked, I sort of established my place in the world to some extent. Very small, but still. But then what do you do with it? Who am I within all of that? And where do I go from here? Because that was all new. It’s sort of like coming of age again, and we find ourselves at many starts, at many beginnings in our lives, but we don’t really think about a lot of it.

We just think, well, that’s what I was hoping to do. I was trying to make this thing, and then I got to this mile marker and whatever. I’m just going to keep doing the same thing. But the status of everything and the trajectory of everything has sort of changed because you’ve reached a different point. Everything’s different. The value of everything, the relationships to everything, the meaning of everything is slightly different.

And if you keep doing the same thing, well, then you’ll get results that you used to get, and you kind of need to take these new opportunities and make sense of them and figure out what you want to do with them, what they mean to you, all that kind of stuff. So this past year has been trying to make sense of all of that sort of stuff and figure out, what do I really want to do with it?

Yeah, well, it was pretty ambitious project, I’d say, and it was fun watching you on this ride and kind of breaking down what you were doing. I mean, first, as we’ve said before, the premise very intriguing. Starting a sludge metal career at age 50 and then 51. Now that you’ve turned 51. You did a breakdown video, which I thought was really cool. You broke down all the numbers, how your following has grown, how much more music you’ve made over the past year, and you even were very transparent about the money. You said you made over $10,000, which is awesome.

At the same time, you said it’s not enough to live on, so not even close.

Yeah.

Was it more or less than you were expecting to make when you started?

It was more okay, for sure. So it was more than I expected to make, but less than I hoped to make. Of course, I’m not motivated by money, but I’m not shy of money, and I think that’s a weird relationship for a lot of artists. I think we’ve talked about this in the past, but I have no discomfort with money whatsoever. And I’m slightly annoyed, I suppose, with the art world and its discomfort with money, because it makes it really difficult for everybody to pursue this road, and it’s just as legitimate.

Doing art and selling art, making a living off of art is no less valid than logitech selling mouses.

Right?

Does anybody need a logitech mouse? Because the argument is, does anybody need another stupid song? And the answer is yes, I want it. There’s a lot of music that I love. We both love a bunch of music. I don’t know what your involvement is in terms of making art, like on the music side of things specifically, but I know you love music, and you probably are always curious to hear what’s a new sound? When you do hear a new sound that you jive with, you’re like, whoa, absolutely. What is that?

Yeah, we all know that feeling. There’s always room for new music, but for some reason, there’s this kind of thinking outside of music that kind of influences people pursuing music. It could be family members, could be friends, et cetera. People who want to pursue these things, they’re like, why do you want to do that? Nobody needs that. Well, nobody needs a logitech mouse or any example similar. Like, nobody needs all of the car options that we have.

Right.

Kia car company could disappear tomorrow and nobody would care. Nobody needs a kia car. Nothing against kia. Yeah.

Every product we make, why is it not just the absolute basic model? Because that’s all anybody needs if we.

Want to talk about what people need.

Right.

And that’s not why people buy things. That’s why some people buy things, but.

For the most part, we buy emotionally. So why should we not purchase music since that’s such an emotional thing?

Millions and millions and millions of people do. They buy it with their attention if it’s like spotify or whatever, or they buy it physically records, or they buy it with bandcamp downloads, whatever. There’s a bunch of different ways that people buy things. It’s not always necessarily even money. Yeah.

Musicians or any artists, they need to get rid of that attitude that I’m selling out, that I shouldn’t be making money off of this, because that just perpetuates things, because then it makes the consumer say, well, if you feel like you shouldn’t be making money, well, I shouldn’t be paying for it. And then you’re pushing the race to the bottom, and we can’t have everybody doing that. I mean, there’s enough of that these days in the world of graphic design. For example, when you’ve got people on fiverr who are willing to make a logo for pennies, really?

I mean, just absolute peanuts for something that supposed to make your brand lots of money.

Yeah. Well, maybe the right people find each other. Maybe the startup that is racing to the bottom finds the services that are racing to the bottom, and they’ll all end up at the bottom. I know what you mean, though. Having worked in graphic design and having had businesses, standard brick and mortar businesses with regular customers and doing regular work. When we’re in the startup phase of any kind of project that we’re trading a product or service for money, a lot of us feel like the only place we can compete is with price.

And I think it’s a mistake because we take our own. Maybe we’re starting this up and money is very lean and we’re taking our own thoughts about money and we’re applying it to how our customers might think about money when the opposite may in fact be true. Like, who are you targeting? Is your target market? Dentists and lawyers. Then they don’t care about price. They care about other things. They care about how it makes them feel. They care about a job well done and not having to fuss with it again for another ten years. They care about a bunch of other things.

Every now and again, you may find a dentist or a lawyer who is a penny pincher, but then you go back to whatever your model is, like, who am I trying to serve? Right?

Yeah. And what are you offering that’s different from everybody else? Because if you do find a way to do things differently, well, then you can almost charge whatever you want because no one else is doing it. You’re the only game in town.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

There’s a lot more to it than price.

Yeah, a lot more to it than price. But I think it’s important to get comfortable with the economics of it all and how money works. And money is just a tool. And whether you’re a doctor or a bricklayer or a musician, it’s the thing that makes everything go round. It’s the thing that feeds you. So getting comfortable with it and being transparent. For me, being transparent. The point to it is to motivate other people who are maybe listening to that voice inside their head, that voice of their mother, the voice of their friends, the voice of their teachers, whoever is maybe telling them that it’s impractical or don’t do it or whatever.

And if we take what I’m doing, I’m doing music and nobody needs it. And it’s kind of hard to sell because people are like, who buys music? It’s all free on Spotify and all this kind of stuff. Well, if you know the landscape and you know the market and all these sorts of things, well, then you can identify where the money is. And if you’re comfortable with money, you can be like, Where’s the money? And kind of follow the money and make sure that you’re okay, make sure that you’re eaten and all this. And I think something we hit on last time we talked was the more okay you are, the more okay you can make it for other people.

Yeah. Well, it seems like you’re nailing it because with your YouTube videos, you’ve really gone from giving tech advice to giving business advice, especially for people trying to break in the music industry.

I try not to kind of go all the way into the world of advice, but yes, essentially it’s more like this is what I’m doing. And these are the things that are working. These are the things that are not working. A lot of those might be specific to me, but might be valuable food for thought in terms of somebody else navigating a similar environment.

You’re just trying to give people, hey, this is my experience. If you find something that you can take from it, go ahead. You’re not actually telling people. Yeah. Why? Is it because you feel like there’s that weight of responsibility and you don’t want to steer people to do something that worked for you but might not work in their situation?

I think it’s a little bit more fuzzy than that. I want to inspire. Inspire the starting, really. I think if I zoom all the way out on what I’m doing, what I’m trying to do, what I’ve been doing, it’s really to just inspire the start. Because the biggest hurdle, the biggest gap is from zero to one in any project. We don’t know what other people are stuck on, like what is prohibiting them from starting.

Just trying. Arguably there is no try. Like if you try, then you are doing so it’s just do.

That’s what Yoda said. Yoda knew his stuff.

It’s true. It might sound kind of corny or whatever, but it’s really simple and it’s really true.

Yeah. And don’t wait. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect before you start either. Just start and you make mistakes, but learn from your mistakes.

Yeah. That’s something that I wish I would have been a lot more had a lot more clarity on earlier. Because I used to be focused in my twenty s or even my thirty s. I was a lot more focused on what I didn’t have or what I couldn’t do, rather than the opposite. And it’s just a perspective shift, like what can I do? What do I have, what can I do?

Yeah. What were you doing in your twenty s and thirty s?

Kind of the same thing. Still doing music and art, but I didn’t go all the way in on music, I guess early thirty s, thirty two, something like that where I started touring quite vigorously across the country in the United States. We had no idea what we were doing. That’s a different story. But we were trying to do it and I didn’t have the perfect gear and I didn’t have any money and I didn’t have whatever.

And even in the midst of that scenario and things were happening, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was making things happen. And we went from being no one and having nothing to it being something and having some recognition and fan base around the world. It was modest, but it didn’t exist before we did it.

Last year when you launched this big project. You made a decision not to do any touring. You were just focusing on making the music, promoting the music. Was that the right decision?

Yes. It still is. Good.

Do you think that’s going to change at some point? Do you want to do live shows?

Yeah, I want to get back out there in some capacity. We’ll let the results of the work, the results of everything that I’m doing, kind of dictate what that move will look like. It’s interesting. I’m 51 years old, and I think a lot of people at this stage maybe feel the fire burning, they feel the candles running out, and I’m kind of the opposite. I’m happy to work on a super long time horizon. If it takes ten years, it’s fine.

I don’t care. I’m committed to the thing itself.

Good.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in pivoting. Another thing that I didn’t really understand for the longest time, like, it’s okay to fully pivot, but doing something like this and doing any kind of startup, really, you have that benefit of being able to pivot on the micro. Like you can pivot within the silos of your business. This particular thing isn’t working totally pivot on. It just change.

Try and do it in an educated way. Like, change for the sake of change is not a good idea. Change for the sake of something not working and going in the direction of something working better. I used to be really intimidated by data analytics and keeping track of things. And I wouldn’t say that I’m amazing at it now, but at least I look at it and I try to make sense of it, and I do the research to learn what it means and all that kind of stuff and try to make educated decisions. It’s kind of like the results, the data, that’s one metric and then another metric is just volume.

And it’s those two things together. And I didn’t know this before because I never really had volume, at least semi consistent volume in the past with anything. The more you do of a specific thing, the more data you have. Like, if you only did five things, if I only ever put out five songs, I wouldn’t have any data. I would have some data, but I wouldn’t be able to do anything with it.

Yeah, and we’ve talked about split testing on Brand Outlaw before, and that’s something that you can’t have with just a tiny bit of data. So, yeah, that is why you need that volume for whatever you’re doing. And maybe it doesn’t perfectly apply to music. I don’t know if you’re going to split test songs, but you can split test the way you promote them.

You can split test songs. In a way, I feel like, though, in terms of thinking about songs as product, because it is product, it’s a little bit tricky because usually a song is the artistic expression I think it may be in pop music, people would be happy to do version A, version B type of thing and see which one hits.

That would be a little frowned upon in the metal world, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, it’s not true. It’s not art. And that’s okay. You don’t have to change your art to do good business. You don’t even have to change your business to do good art. Like, the two things can have a relationship but also be kind of protected from each other to some extent. Like, business doesn’t have to rule your art. And I think that’s a big fear that artists have. I think that’s a big fear that pretty much any business person has.

At a certain point, it seems like, I don’t know, you’ve interacted with a lot more businesses in the space of marketing and branding. I’m curious what your idea or what your thoughts on this are. But it seems like most people are kind of uncomfortable reaching out and saying check me out, because they don’t know how to say check me out. They don’t know that. They don’t have to say check me out either.

They can do it a different way.

Yeah. I’d say in general, most people are not comfortable naturally being salesy and they kind of think that there’s well, you do one of two things. You either don’t talk about what you’re doing and let the work stand on its own, but then that’s hard because how are people going to find out about it in the first place? To see if the work is good, but then they think the only other option is to be super salesy and be like that car salesman douchebag.

Let me go talk to the manager and see if I can get you a discount. He’s not really talking to the manager, but you know how it goes. But there is a middle ground and I would say it’s put the customer first and figure out how what you are producing is going to benefit them. And then you don’t have to always say check me out. It’s hey, I know you’re having this problem. I have a way of solving it.

Yeah, I think it’s about getting really clear, what is this? Who is it for? What problem does it solve?

Exactly.

And you can even apply that if you want to get kind of businessy in art. You can even think about that in terms of music. Like, I think about it all the time. Like, who is my music for? It’s for people like me. I am the number one avatar in my target audience. And I seek a certain aesthetic, seek a certain void in the world of music and art that is not there’s not a lot of options, not a lot of people doing this sort of aesthetic, this sort of sound.

Precisely. And for people where it really matters to me, it really matters. Like these very sort of subtle details and differences. It’s for those people. It’s not for everyone. It’s not for people who like Taylor Swift. Maybe there are people who like Bun Jams that also like Taylor Swift. I wouldn’t be surprised just because I said it.

I enjoy your music. And I enjoy Taylor Swift.

There you go. There you go.

I’m one of those weirdos, but, yeah.

I’m not considering the broad audience. And I think that’s the case for all businesses. I used to have a business before this whole journey, and it was a print business, print and design. And our focus was the music business. And our whole thing was like actionable assets for people to kind of launch their careers or to move swiftly. So we did like very small quantity runs of CDs, tapes, whatever, very small quantities of T shirts with very limited specs for everything. But still good.

It was still good and it still made an impression, but it was just geared towards actionability. So people who didn’t have big resources but wanted to get in the game and wanted to start making bigger moves in terms of being a live performing artist or even on the Internet and introduce physical product or whatever, we also did design, just straight up design, so web oriented stuff as well. But it was all geared towards that. So we had, like, what is the product and what problem does it solve? We had that sealed up.

It’s very hard for people to get started and get going. And it’s even hard, once you get going, to maintain. It takes a while to kind of just build steam. Yeah. What is it problem? Does it solve? Who is that person that has that kind of problem? And then is the product, does it truly deliver? And those three things are kind of the keystones of all marketing. The check me out. Those are the keystones of the check me out.

And I think, yeah, you can totally apply that to art as well. It’s just a little bit more gooey because art is a little bit gooey. It’s like, what is it exactly? It’s all subjective. Whereas a product is definitely a product, there’s still a subjective aspect to product in terms of what it means to the person and what the aesthetics are to the person and all that kind of stuff. With a product that fills a void, it’s a little bit easier to say.

Okay, this product does this recent video of yours. You talked about putting some of your music out on a micro label. Can you tell us about that experience? Yeah. First, what is that and then how has it gone for you?

It’s been pretty cool in terms of particularly community building and visibility and I guess, like, a different kind of credibility changes what your credibility was like, who we were and what it meant before is a little bit different now since working with this label and putting out a record with them. And once again, in the music space, it’s gooey. A lot of subjective factors here, but nonetheless, definitely things are happening.

So what we did was this is my project. Venz it’s a very intense project. A lot of screaming, only screaming. It’s very intense. Even musically, the songs are very short. It’s all blast beats and double kick drums. And for people who know anything about music theory, it’s all diminished. And for people who don’t know, diminished means it’s very jarring, very sandpaper on the back of the neck kind of stuff. It’s not yes, it’s for a very small audience.

There’s a lot of those people in the world, but in terms of the total global audience, not a lot of people. Might be a couple of million people.

It’s not for those Taylor Swift fans.

Not for Taylor Swift fans, except you, matt comes through. We’ve always done this project for kicks. We really get a kick out of doing it for some reason. It’s very artistically satisfying, but it’s also got this strange sort of regimented aspect to it. It’s very strict, and I like that kind of push and pull of it being this fun, visceral freedom. But also it’s so regimented. The way that the music is made, the way that we work on it whenever we work together, there’s two of us there’s myself, I do all the music production, and the vocalist, Theo Cappadestrius, or Theo Caps, he’s a comic book graphic artist.

Okay, nice.

He’s working on a graphic novel right now. So it’s that project. Not a huge audience, we don’t really care. But when we initially launched this project, we did it really quickly. We did it over the course of about a month and a half, maybe two months maximum, from writing to full release with CDs and tapes and all of that kind of stuff. And it debuted on Bandcamp in the top five. I think it was number three.

Wow.

It might have been number one, but my brain says it debuted at number three. Bandcamp is a bit different back then. This was 2013. That’s kind of the spirit that’s always driven this thing. It’s like, oh, do this thing just because we’re stoked on it. But then, oh, surprise. For some reason, people definitely like it, and maybe it doesn’t happen that way for everybody, but nonetheless, we just always have propelled ourselves in it that way.

And then last little over a year ago, before we spoke the first time, we released an EP, a new EP, a follow up EP, after years of just demos and trying to get it together. But now I was on my new quest to be the music guy at 50 years old, and I’m like, I’m going to put all of it out all the time. So I put out a new EP, and it made an impression with a few people. And this label from the United States is actually a joint venture between a guy from the United States and a guy from Canada.

The two Daves. They’re both named Dave, of course.

It’s like the two bobs, only just much cooler.

The label is called Zegma Beach Records. A reference to Starship Troopers, I believe. The guy just reached out and he’s like, hey, I like your sound. I wonder if you’d be interested in putting out a seven inch, because it was only four songs and each song is like, maximum two minutes long. It’s very visceral kind of stuff. And a seven inch for those who don’t know, a seven inch record is actually seven inches in diameter, and it’s a very small record. It’s a vinyl record.

And we were like, I talked to Theo, and I’m like, what? I don’t know. Should we do it? And he’s like, yeah, let’s do it. I’m like, okay. He took care of most of the kind of admin on it because I was trying to hustle and do everything, do everything else with the YouTube channel and whatever. We submitted everything. This was like last spring. It was maybe before we spoke the first time. Might not have even been spring. It might have been like winter still.

But anyhow, we put it all together, put it all in, and we waited. And my experience in terms of putting out records, friends putting out records and records that I’ve put out in the past is sometimes things can be massively delayed, especially with vinyl. I’ve had friends who have had things delayed, like a year and a half. That is still the case for some people, depending on who they get to manufacture it and whatever, or if there’s complications along the way, who knows? It’s a finicky process or it can be a finicky process.

And also, we don’t know who this label is. We don’t really have a deal. It’s a handshake deal. They’re just a small company, and we like what they do. Their roster is, like, awesome and totally fits with what we’re doing. And we’re like, stoked to be part of this community or part of this world, but we don’t know if they’re actually going to come through on it. They seem to be doing a lot of stuff, but you never know with small projects like this. Anything can happen, right?

So was it a little scary thinking maybe this won’t happen after all?

Well, we had nothing really to lose other than these people would have our master recordings, but we still have a copy of them. It’s not like we gave things away and couldn’t get anything back, so there’s nothing really lost that way. At the same time, we were like, who knows where it’s going to go? So months and months later, it was exactly a year or ten years to the day, to the exact day that we released our very first EP back in 2013.

So it was exactly ten years later, march. This past year finally came in like a week or two prior, maybe two or three weeks prior. We had a little bit of time to put some assets together. I was like, I guess it’s ready. It was not even on my mind. I’m like, who knows? And I’ve learned I think this is a smart thing in all businesses, but I’ve learned, especially in music, don’t talk about what you’re going to do.

No ever.

No, never ever. Only talk about what you have, what you can do right now. Absolutely. Never make promises that you can’t keep. So we didn’t say anything to anyone that this deal was done and that it was going through or anything like that. And then suddenly it shows up. But I’m like, I guess it’s out. Like, let’s put it out. So we took a few weeks to put some assets together, like a music video, and put some promo together for social and all this sort of stuff, and put the record out. And it actually sold pretty decently, as far as I know.

I didn’t sell it. The label sold it. Right. But it put me into contact with some other people that I’d never spoken with before and, like, other artists and whatnot that I’m a fan of and all of that. And it just made our world bigger. We got to work with Dave and Dave, and they’re awesome guys. And one of the Dave’s also has a band called Crowning. And coming to know that band and getting to know the guy behind it is totally awesome.

I don’t know. It just makes your world bigger. It wasn’t about money. It was about making the world bigger. And this video that kind of that you’re talking about, that spawned this topic, the gist of the whole video is we don’t need to do everything for money. And sometimes certain things are worth a lot more than money.

Yeah, great. It sounds like it was a worthwhile endeavor, and it sounds like you would recommend this to other musicians, especially in niche genres who might not be able to get a huge record deal. Just work on a micro label basis and just get your music out there a little bit further.

Yeah. And honestly, like any business, don’t be afraid to collaborate with someone smaller than you or something that isn’t going to put a whole bunch of money in your pocket. One thing that you would be maybe familiar with I’m not sure what your market is like, where you’re situated, but one thing that has been prevalent for me as a graphic designer historically was doing pro bono work for nonprofits and charities and whatnot.

The thing about some of that stuff is it can really, really raise your profile. And you get to work with an amazing organization. There’s no money in it, per se, not directly, but there’s a whole bunch of other benefits to it. And also, like, the relationships that come from that turn into other things. They don’t have to. I’ve never done pro bono stuff like that specifically to get those things. A lot of times the times that I’m thinking of in my head is like, I got to work with this person who worked on these other projects that I was pretty stoked on.

Or I got to meet this person who’s just like the most awesome person. Or I got to make a difference. Like help make a difference in something.

Absolutely. Yeah. There are rewards other than money. So it’s great to hear and try to do some work for our nonprofit advice. That’s fantastic place to start, especially when you’re starting out. But even if you have made it big, keep doing that. Even if it’s like pick a nonprofit every year that you donate that you donate your services to or something like that. But especially for people just getting started in certain industries.

Yeah, working with a nonprofit. And I think looking at it on a more micro level, like the people that you get to work with on the inside, it’s not always about the whole organization. That might be part of it, but there’s so many other factors in terms of just working with other people in any capacity, especially if it’s going to be able to be professional. And one thing to shy away from, I guess, at least in my experience, if it’s going to reflect on you negatively and it’s going to be a big hassle and huge money suck or whatever, be careful when you’re entering into these sorts of things.

Don’t do them if you can’t afford to do them, but if you can afford to do them, they’re amazing.

Absolutely. All right, so getting back to the Bun, I want to ask, how would you define the Bun brand?

The Bun brand is it’s like the solo DIY kind of spirit and making something really big out of nothing? Taking the resources that you do have or the skills that you do have and trying to see what you can do to blow those up in such a way to make an impact, to make a difference, to help someone, to make something awesome. My biggest motivation personally is using something like a movie as an example.

The average movie, even a tiny short movie, let’s say a five minute short, maybe even a micro short, like a two or three minute movie. Often they’re done with like I’ve known micro shorts to be done for like anywhere from $30 to $100,000. I’m like, what? Not knocking anybody who goes that road. Not saying that you shouldn’t pay people or anything like that. But I get a real buzz out of projects where it’s a let’s say it’s a micro short and let’s say it’s a 15 minutes short and it was all done by one person.

And I’m just like, wow, seeing what one person can do. Or a very small group of people can do when it turns out amazing. And it’s just like, wow, there’s that film everything everywhere all at once. I think it’s called it’s like a time shifting movie. It’s got a lot of amazing effects and it was done with a tiny, tiny, tiny team of people. And it’s kind of a wow movie because it’s a really amazing experience as a film.

And stuff like that just gives me a buzz. So the bun is that sort of spirit, like, how much can you do? How big can you go by yourself or with just a few people and not a lot of resources, thinking about things like gear or whatever, the world of music and film or whatever. A lot of it is very gear focused. And of course, I like gear. I like things that work, that allow me to do the work that I want to do.

Use my cameras always as an example. This camera, this is like the main camera that I shoot most of my video stuff with. And it’s a Canon M. This one’s an M one, and this one here is an M two. They’re the same sort of series of camera. They’re tiny mirrorless cameras that came out in 2011 and 2012. You can buy them for about $150 on ebay. I’m just like, I don’t upgrade my cameras because I’m like, how much can I do with these terrible cameras?

I’ve seemed to made quite an impression with a lot of my videos. And yeah, my cameras are $150. I bought both of them for $150.01 for about 160. And this one was 150. It kind of paints the picture of like, what is the bun? The bun is stoked on trying to do big, not trying stoked on doing bigger things with very limited resources and kind of leaning as much on skill as possible, attempting to develop as much skill as possible.

Even if you don’t have the skill to begin with, how much can you learn to kind of do something with?

Yeah. And there’s another lesson for people worried that they’re not ready to get started because, oh, I got to have the most expensive equipment and I can’t afford that right now, so I’m going to.

Have to hold off.

No, you can get cheap equipment. You can get cameras that were made in 2011 and still make awesome stuff. Yeah.

100%. Yeah. I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to show off either with any of it. Like, I’m so good, or whatever my obsession is with the challenge of it. And it’s not that big of a challenge, but you wouldn’t know if you didn’t throw yourself at it. We’re capable of a lot more than we think. We’re usually a lot smarter than we know. I think we tend to give up a lot sooner than we should. I know this is the case for me.

I think my reason for these sorts of motivations is because my entire twenty s, I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I didn’t have any of it right. I just was very kind of lack focused. I still did some stuff, like I was still in bands and whatever, but everything I did was from this point of view of lack. And it took like, thankfully I had enough experiences to kind of turn that around.

You never know how life is going to go. Might have not had those few key experiences that did turn things around that kind of made you look in at yourself, how am I thinking about this? Or who am I and what does it all mean to me? Super important. Especially if you feel like your chips are down. What do I actually have and what can I do with it?

Well, as we wrap up, I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on the past year and then what the future holds. Like, what were your biggest wins from last January when you announced what your goal was going to be? What were the biggest wins from that project? What were the biggest things you said, I could have done this better. And then what does the future hold for the bun?

Right. Pretty simple. The biggest win is that I’m still here. Keeping going, like beyond money, beyond how many songs that I finished, beyond how many people I connected with, beyond everything. It’s just like I’m still here physically and I have my health. I actually went through a little bit of health difficulty over the last year. There was a few setbacks there, so I’m pretty thankful, pretty happy about that. Yeah, I’m still here.

Everything good now.

Everything’s good.

Okay, good.

But I’m still here physically. I’m still here. The bun doing the thing. So that’s a huge win in terms of what I would love to do more is just more. I want to turn the tap on. I’m not sure how to turn the tap. Not turn the tap on. Turn the tap, like to maximum. I’m not sure how. I’m not afraid to do it. Despite not knowing how kind of doing this dance of like trying to figure out how I can turn it all the way up without dying, without not being and exiting myself out of this big win of still being here and still going.

Yes, very important.

So we talked a lot about volume today. Just turn the volume of everything up, but also the quality, like at no deficit to the quality.

So for the rest of the year, are you saying we can expect more bends and more wetlands and more foreign?

Yeah. There’s been a major turn of focus to more of the art side of things. And I’ve been prioritizing that because without those things, nothing is real, nothing is happening.

Any ideas on how to make that happen or what’s been holding you back what roadblocks you have that are keeping you from producing the volume you want to produce.

I think the biggest thing this sort of echoes back to everything I’ve ever done in businesses as an artist, all that kind of stuff, knowing what is my trajectory, what am I trying to achieve, like being clear and what has been kind of weird about this project. And it’s only weird because I guess you don’t know what you don’t know until you know.

Yeah, I know.

You kind of have to get clear all along the way. As you keep going, things change. I guess your overall goal is always the same, but you have to keep it’s not a straight line, I guess is the best way to think about it. We tend to think of things in straight lines and I think that’s maybe because of the educational system and the traditional sort of job path, a lot of those things are linear and we tend to think of achieving anything according to what we know. And a lot of us, that’s what we know, we know that path.

So I’ve done a lot of things outside of that, but a lot of the other things I’ve done have been a lot simpler and thus a little bit more of a straight line. Whereas this is like bigger than anything I’ve ever wanted to do, mostly because I’m very solo in it. I’m not forever solo in it. I’m not opposed to taking on like building some sort of a team, even if that’s a tiny team. A person who does administration and management type stuff and a person who does who helps me with the technical things or whatever.

I don’t know what the roles are that I really require at this very moment and the long term goal. I don’t really have like a time frame. I’m just like however long it takes, don’t really care. Death is on the horizon anyway, so who cares? Just go for it. One of the things about doing everything yourself, being like a content creator, music producer, songwriter, I guess it’s pretty complex and you’re bouncing around all the time. The content creation really is to support the music, to say to the world, it’s like there’s this music guy out there and maybe you’re interested in the music and if you are interested in the music, here’s sort of the thread to follow about all of that.

Yeah, and I’m sure the less shifting of your mind, the more you’re going to be focused and the more you’re just going to get into that flow where you’re producing music. So yeah, I can see how bringing on someone to help you with just a few of those things, even part of the content creation and the video editing or whatever it is that you can take off your plate, that would help a lot and it’s hard to do.

We try to do this too. We’ve had some people help edit the podcast and things like that. And sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. I had one. I hired a freelancer just for one podcast, see how it turned out. I ended up reediting the whole thing myself. I’m like, Why did I just paid someone else for me to do the work? But that happens. You can’t let it scare you off from everybody else, though.

I have to get back out there and say, okay, can I still find someone else who’s capable of doing this? So that it clears my plate for other things that move me toward that ultimate goal?

And I think doing a little bit of the work, I’m not sure how you went about it, but for me to make that as smooth as possible, I think that spending some time with whoever I take on so that we can figure out, like, it’s like, okay, this is, you know, the sort of established style. What what does this person have in terms of their techniques and ability and insight that might be beneficial to this? And how do we kind of build a workflow so that things are on brand, but the editor is satisfied not to, like, if it was editing, let’s say.

But yeah, sitting with the hire so that we’re all on the same page and things work, right?

Yeah. So I hope you find someone like that, and I look forward to hearing more music from your project. What do we call this? Venz. Foreigns Wetlands. Are they projects? Are they bands?

They’re projects.

Okay.

They’re projects. It’s a different approach, I think. It’s not that different than, say, a producer, but it’s different in the sense that these things live on their own and they’re not a one off thing. So foreigns is an entity. Wetlands is an entity. Venz is an entity. Venz is a duo. There is another person involved in that, and there will probably be more projects, but it’s definitely a different model.

And I catch a little bit of flak for it, but that’s okay because I’m at the beginning of something different. There are other people doing similar things in the world. I’m not unique in that way, but it’s just not a popular thing. It’s not a popular concept. A lot of people, like I say, they have difficulty sorting it out. But for anyone else who feels that they’re in that kind of a boat, stick to it, because you’re probably part of a disruptive kind of path that may, in fact, usher in a new era or something like that. Who knows?

You don’t know where it’s going to land. But disruption is good.

Yeah. Definitely taking a different path. I love your approach. I think it’s a really interesting model to have those three, that there’s something for everybody. Well, maybe not everybody, but something for people who like that kind of heavy music. And some people gravitate toward one over the others but there’s overlap, too.

It’s really interesting in terms of the output. It’s a wider net, so to speak. I don’t think of it that way. I built it as a utility to my inability to always come up with bangers for anyone’s style. And so I have these three things that are slightly different enough from each other that take a different approach. So as a writer, I can always sit down and do something. If I don’t have any good ideas for this thing, then I can shift gears to this thing, and I can just keep outputting music.

So it was built as a utility, but it turned into something a little more fun than that.

Awesome. All right, so how can people find the Bun?

Thebun CA Canada.

There we go. Bun, CA. Perfect. And of course, you’re on Spotify or wherever else you get music.

Yeah, the music is all on Spotify and all that. I’m a big band camper as well.

Yeah, that’s a great platform, too.

Big supporter of band camp.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Why don’t we wrap it up this way? Last time we had you on, we ended with one of your songs. Do you want to do the same thing?

We can do that. I’m always into that.

Do you want to put a song at the end?

Okay.

All right. How about we do this? Let’s close it with you doing one of those old school rock radio things where someone from the band would call in and be like, hey, this is Lars from Metallica. You’re listening to 106.7 W-I-Z-N. Yeah, I’m.

Not a big radio host, but I did have a radio show in college. Nice.

Nobody is.

Yeah. Hey, this is the Bun, and you’re listening to Decorated on the Brand Outlaw podcast. You can end only by diluting yourself.