Today we’d like to introduce you to beedo.
Hi beedo, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
Music has been in my life for my life. My parents made music a part of every day and every event. I started learning piano when I was 8, wrote and composed some of my first (bad) songs and fell in love. Throughout my life, I picked up the violin, cello, and drums. I played in school and church bands and orchestras, traveled overseas to perform, and made solo music in a number of genres.
Sometime in late childhood, my dad introduced me to some greats: Beastie Boys, Lauryn Hill, and Eminem, among others. My eyes were opened to hip hop and it was all down(up?)hill from there. Some of the other inspirations I picked up along the way: Mac Miller, J Cole, Logic, Tyler the Creator, H.E.R., Erykah Badu, Childish Gambino, and the list goes on…
Fast-forward a couple of decades of rap dreams and excuses for not starting, and we land in 2020 — the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was sent to do my job remotely, find work-life balance for the first time, and try to look for ways to make the best of the situation.
I realized that I had a laundry list of things I’d been putting off for years because I was “too busy”, and now having free time for the first time, I chose to pursue a music career to prove it wasn’t always just excuses. I built a cheap studio in a walk-in closet in my apartment and got started.
Since then, I’ve produced and released a handful of singles, I’ve performed all over Texas and in 4 other states, collaborated with some incredible artists, released my debut EP “Chapter Four”, and fell more and more in love with hip hop every day.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
They say nothing worth having comes easy — and music is so worth it. Being an independent artist is a constant uphill battle in a number of ways.
Chasing a creative dream has taken a toll on my mental health, my time, my finances, my emotional stability, my relationships with family and friends, my priorities, etc.
There are a lot of sacrifices to be made to create a dream from scratch on top of regular life. But the payoff — the feeling of being able to be me unapologetically on a stage is unmatched.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a female emcee. I write conscious hip hop over boom bap lofi beats.
I talk about abuse, unfair societal standards, depression, and anxiety. I focus on lyricism and creative cadences. I’m proud of everything I’ve written, but I’m especially excited about my first EP (“Chapter Four” available on all streaming platforms on Sunday, July 24, 2022) and I think it’s such a perfect representation of who I am as an artist.
I’m proud of every show I’ve performed (even the ones I messed up). Everything becomes worth it when I hop off stage and someone comes up to me to tell me how much they resonated with my music, with my performance, with my stories. I make music because it’s therapy for me to get all these feelings out of my head and onto a beat, so when someone tells me that I had an impact on them and I made them feel connected with my music — the feeling is indescribable.
What does success mean to you?
Success, to me, is achieving something greater than you have before, without compromising on why you’re doing it. I struggle with seeing my peers who are so much further ahead of me or getting a response from audiences that I’m not getting. The instinct is to ask, how can I change what I’m doing to get that result?
But you have to be careful to not compromise on why you were trying to reach your goal in the first place. Is getting a promotion and raise at work sweet when you sacrificed your mental health and work-life balance to get there? Is reaching your goal weight on the scale as exciting when you’ve developed poor health habits to hit it? Is having a top 100 track as satisfying if you just made something to trend rather than what you truly wanted to make as an artist? I don’t think so. Being truly successful in reaching your goals means getting there the way you’re supposed to.
For me, that means putting my absolute best performance on every stage regardless of how many people are even in the room paying attention to me; it’s putting out my EP with probably zero songs that will go viral but all songs that I love entirely; it’s refusing to compromise on telling my story even when it’s not something they want to hear.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/beedo_raps
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beedo_raps
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmX2Rnw5M7JMFawmT7MSUGQ
- Listen to my debut EP “Chapter Four”: https://distrokid.com/
hyperfollow/beedo/chapter-4
Image Credits
Karla Reina, Bernadette Castillo, and TX Snapped
