A Quote by Dennis Lloyd
I started to record songs and put them on YouTube and people laughed behind my back.
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Yeah, I started on YouTube. I posted videos every Friday and wrote new songs every week. Back then, I was in a very vulnerable place with all my fans. Now in a pandemic, it feels like I'm going back to my roots and playing on my OG piano that I played when I first started.
I used to put like, 'Yo Gotti type beats,' 'Future type beats' on YouTube. And uhh, I started getting paid off YouTube. Like YouTube started giving me Google AdSense checks.
Every record has been very different, so I can't really compare them. The first record was good. I originally recorded about half the songs on that one in 2003 or something, and then I went back a few years later and re-recorded them and added some other songs.
People started noticing my singing on YouTube, and then I came to L.A., and I lived on a studio couch. I wrote songs every single day with whoever I could write songs with.
I'd always wanted to do an R&B and soul record; a friend with a studio asked to come by and record a couple of songs, maybe just make a 45. Then the songs started to pour out, and pretty soon we had eight or 10 songs down.
You no longer have to have a big record label behind you and have to kowtow to the politics that enabled you to get there. You can be a phenomenal artist and put your stuff out there on YouTube and find yourself becoming a star.
I'm so inspired by people like Issa Rae who started on YouTube or Abbi and Ilana from 'Broad City' who also started on YouTube.
Everything that happens to me gets put into a song. For some reason, I'm really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs. There, I don't hold back: names, dates, times, expressions on people's faces, exactly where we were and how it felt, what I wish I would have said to them in the moment. So I'm not only excited about sharing the songs with fans; I'm also pretty interested to hear the response from the guys I've written about on the record.
Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.
I would go on the iTunes chart and see the hottest songs, then I'd cover them. People would go on YouTube and search for those songs. That's how I got my views. I'd post two or three songs a week.
I don't think any of us felt like, "Oh, we need to put joke songs on the record." If we found something funny, we would record it, and if we wanted to, we'd put it on the record. It's not really something we spent too much time agonizing over.
You can de-select the songs that you don't want to have on the record, but I hope we always put something out that has a lot of songs that the majority of people will love.
Making a record? You've got to have the song, then you create a record. I think it's the same with a live performance. If the material is strong, you're already 90% there. I always tell young people it's all about the music, the songs. Work on the songs, work on the songs, work on the songs.
The videos I put on YouTube have expanded my audience beyond what I could have done at just a Hamburger Mary's. People saw the videos, started booking me, and literally 40-plus countries and thousands of gigs later I can basically say that YouTube has bought me a house.
People didn't go on YouTube to get famous back when I started.
What I love about YouTube is that you don't need brands to pay you, because you get paid off the views. When I put effort into YouTube, I directly see money back.
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