We were lucky to catch up with Kevin Merrill Payne and Bruno Lopez-Vargas recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kevin and Bruno, so great to be with you and I think a lot of folks are going to benefit from hearing your story and lessons and wisdom. Imposter Syndrome is something that we know how words to describe, but it’s something that has held people back forever and so we’re really interested to hear about your story and how you overcame imposter syndrome.
We’ve found our creative voice over the course of playing together for years, and writing the exact music that we want to hear. Once we started writing songs that express fully what we wanted to say musically and thematically, and once we saw that people resonated with our music on more than just a surface level, we realized we could fully lean into our creative intuition without any insecurities or hesitation. We didn’t really know what we were doing or where we were headed when we released our first few singles under the To Bloom moniker, but as we’ve progressed we’ve gotten so much more positive feedback than we ever thought we would, and its emboldened us to make our music even more visceral and vulnerable. We’ve started to hone in on articulating feelings that a lot of people have trouble putting words to, or are embarrassed to talk about. We as individuals, and as a full band, have found a lot of strength in discussing our shortcomings and fears. We have to let ourselves know as much as our audience that no one is truly alone. In a sense, the main way that we’ve overcome our own Imposter Syndrome is by realizing that everyone else around us is scared, and that by comforting ourselves we can also hopefully comfort them with our music.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
To Bloom is a project meant to be a vessel for the results of our creative impulses and work done to seek some kind of respite from the emotions that we endure on an almost daily basis. Each song and lyric written is an attempt at understanding our own personal selves and the human condition at large. To Bloom is our vehicle for trying to make any kind of sense of the inarticulate anguish which is always with us. Furthermore, we try to learn something from these small epiphanies and try to grow as people, which is where the name of the project derives from. We are currently working on our first full length album which we’re hoping to crowdfund after we’ve gotten enough material out to use as the Proof of Concept. We’re producing two singles at the moment and are planning on releasing them in 2025.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Being willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. 2. Social Media is your most valuable asset for reaching the right audiences.
3. Presenting your most genuine self, even if it means being vulnerable.
Early on, it helps to be open to most opportunities that come your way, but don’t hesitate to go with your gut feeling and set boundaries when something makes you feel comfortable.
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
The band is at somewhat of a crossroads now – how to go about producing the next few songs we plan to record. Up to this point we’ve done it completely independently, with a lot of aspects having been completely DIY, which we pride ourselves on. That said, we set a certain standard of fidelity for our recordings with the release of our most recent single, “Hound”, and now we’re in a place where we don’t have access to the same resources we did when that song was being recorded. So now we have to decide as a band which friends/associates to turn to for various parts of this process and which articles of equipment/software we purchase ourselves to do certain things entirely in-house. Truth be told, we’ve gone back and forth on this for a while now but never really came to any definite decision. This is mostly because we had a number of shows we needed to prepare for and were still in the midst of writing the new material, so the prospect of recording was somewhat distant and abstract until now. But we’re just about to play our final show for the year, and we’re hoping to get some tracking done before the holidays, so maybe once we’re free of other obligations we can make these decisions with clearer minds. More than anything we need to prioritize what should be done in-house, so that we can invest in the relevant equipment and in the end have complete control over that aspect of the process.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/tobloomband
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tobloomband/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tobloomband
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@tobloomband
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/tobloomband
- Other: https://tobloomband.bandcamp.com/track/hound
Image Credits
All Photos Courtesy of Nat Schmidlin.
