Meet Blake Deneweth

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Blake Deneweth a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Blake, so great to have you with us and thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with the community. So, let’s jump into something that stops so many people from going after their dreams – haters, nay-sayers, etc. We’d love to hear about how you dealt with that and persisted on your path.

We have had many nay-sayers and currently have many haters. We submit each of our songs to a ton of critics and they rip us apart. Everything from the singing to the song structure itself. The biggest fact that has allowed us to push the negativity out of our heads is that we are creating music that we want to hear. We aren’t shaping our sounds to what we think will be popular. We truly don’t care if a majority of people don’t love our music, because we love our music. You have to believe in what you are doing, and you can’t let the fear of people’s opinions dictate how you create or express yourself.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

My name is Blake Deneweth and I am the lead singer and guitarist for the poppunk band Halfway Down from St. Paul, Minnesota. I also have a solo music project called DINNERSWORTH which I write and produce myself from an old mac computer in my basement. Halfway Down is a band made up of Shawn Kraft (backing vocals, guitar, and bass), his brother Cameron Kraft (drums) and myself. We set out to just write music that we wanted to hear. I love more rough cut indie sounding punk music. The Kraft brothers love all sorts of music, but land on the more heavier metal end of the spectrum. Together, we land right in the middle at a mid-2000s poppunk sound that we all grew up on. We are all in our late 20s/early 30s and so our music tends to be about trying to find purpose, the woes of working your life away, and feeling like you are always in a war with your own mind.

The most exciting thing about our music is the huge sound and the lyrics that encourage you to self-reflect. Our music is very intense sometimes and very quiet and beautiful other times, but the message is always relatable because it’s always written from an experience or thought that one of us has had.

We release music in an unorthodox way by releasing a new song (bundled with all of the previous songs) every 2 months. That being said, we have 6 songs out already, and we have another big group that we are finishing up right now! Our newest song drops on January 15th and is called “Nothing Left to Lose”.

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?

The three qualities that have been the most impactful in my journey are:

1. Relentless optimism

2. Persistence

3. Being humble

Sometimes, it feels like the world is falling apart. Sometimes, life really isn’t fair. Sometimes, you can prepare endlessly and plan for your life and then you are driven off course by an unexpected event. What I’ve learned is that the only thing that you can control is your attitude. I’ve learned that you get to choose how you see every experience. If you have a bad attitude about something, then you will perceive the experience to be a negative one and vice versa. If you practice having relentless optimism, the world stops looking as scary and unfair as you thought it was.

Persistence is key and I think it comes from believing in yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, then you will allow yourself to quit. If you don’t believe in your passion, inevitably, when the road gets rough, you will quit. You must believe in what you are doing because no one else will.

Being humble is a superpower. Having the ability to control your ego and relate to other people is one of the most important traits that anyone could learn, and it applies to every aspect of life. Business, personal relationships, family, and even your relationship with yourself. Being humble gives you the ability to really hear what people are saying, rather than just listening to what they say. It also gives you the ability to be teachable and willing to learn. There are always new things to learn.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

We are always down to collaborate musically, do interviews, or help out in any way that we can. If it’s a music collaboration, we are extremely open minded and are very flexible. We love having other artists feature on our songs and we would definitely feature on other artists songs who would want to have us.

The best way to contact us through social media is by Instagram messaging either; HalfwayDownOfficial or Dinnersworth. We are on other platforms, but Instagram is by far our most used.

If you want to avoid social media, our email is: [email protected].

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Cooper Allen
Haley June

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