We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elijah Stavely a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Elijah, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
I firmly believe someone’s work ethic stems from how passionate they are, so I work hard simply because I enjoy it. “Discipline” gets thrown around a lot when it comes to your work ethic or improving yourself, but the lines between discipline and passion are blurred enough to be used as a marketing tool making people believe they can’t do something because they don’t work hard enough at it. I promise you, the gym rats pulling two-a-days spending hours on end in the gym every single day don’t do it because they’re “disciplined”, they love it. It certainly doesn’t make it easy, it doesn’t mean you love every aspect of it, but it’s as simple as how much you like it is how much work ethic you’ll have for it.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’ve been drumming for about 12 years, starting on one of the first video games I ever got for Christmas; Rockband. I fell in love with the game, worked my way up to being the best I could at it, and asked for a drum set shortly after. I of course fell in love with drumming and, being from a small town in Kentucky, would mainly just drum for myself learning songs from some of my favorite artists and drummers. I started posting covers on YouTube, and ended up connecting with a California based band called “Hail the Sun” after covering one of their songs. I was able to come out to a show of theirs, play the song with them, and after graduating high school I moved out to California and began touring with them. I started to make connections with artists we’d tour along side of, work with, and those local to LA. Currently, I’m still based out of LA and freelancing with multiple artists, one of which I’m sitting in a diner with en route to Texas to start a tour together. Things continue to move forward and I’m still making progress which is the only form of success I’m looking for, so hopefully more tours, sessions, videos, shows, and practice to come.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Adaptability, preparation, and research. Being able to adapt to any situation especially when changes happen on the fly is something I believe a lot of artists and directors look for from their performers, so it’s something I try to push myself to overcome when being thrown into those kinds of situations. Preparation is something I consider my biggest strong suit, most of which ironically stems from my anxiety surrounding what I do. I tend to overthink and over-prepare, thinking of all the worst case scenarios and things that can go wrong and planning far in advance for those so that I’m not as caught off guard. Research is the thing recently and I think will be the thing in the near future that will really get me to where I want to be; some parts of the music industry are somewhat niche and lend themselves to a lot of “how would I even begin to do that?” styles of questions. I’ve spent a lot of time researching not only on a small scale but a large scale how to break into certain areas I’d like to be in, and researching what skill sets and attributes would be the most beneficial for me to have in those situations.
Tell us what your ideal client would be like?
As a freelance drummer I obviously have a slew of artists on my bucket list that would be incredible to perform with. Right now, my main focus is the pop, R&B, rap, electronic side of music that I’d like to continue to develop in. Some artists I have my eye on at the moment are Sam Gellaitry, Audrey Nuna, Slayyyter, 93FEETOFSMOKE, Croosh, Lolo Zouaï, Ashnikko, underscores, PinkPantheress, Brakence, Payday, and quite a few others. Over the past several years I’ve developed a deep interest in pop music and the way it’s translated live and have thoroughly enjoyed the creativity in the projects I’ve been performing with in those genres.
Contact Info:
- Website: elijahstavely.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/elijahstavely
- Youtube: YouTube.com/StavelyDrums
- Other: twitch.tv/StavelyDrums
Image Credits
Holly Turner (@hollyturnerphoto) Dario Garcia (dariogarciaphotography) Lishen Ye (@liishenn)
