We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Richie Sullivan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Richie below.
Richie , we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
I work seven jobs on top of running this musical project, our project has rehearsal every thursday night, right in the middle of my work week. I look forward to those Thursdays, meeting with the other musicians in this group, its therapeutic. Everything else in the world can be going wrong and once i’m in that room with those guys, nothing else matters. The work obviously doesn’t stop there. Trying to be a successful musician in this world is an every day hustle. If you don’t wake up every day with the intention of working or promoting your art, you are already behind.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I have been in bands before, I was previously in a Psychedelic Rock band for eight years and we broke up during the pandemic. During this time, I met with another creator in Phoenix, Paul Balazs (Danger Paul), I’ve always had this crazy ambitious idea in the back of my head, which turned out to be our current project, “What If We’re Robots”. Paul understood what I was trying to create immediately and wrong the first five songs within the first month. Post pandemic, I was offered to open and operate a Jazz & RnB club, where I met even more musicians and first became aware of the importance of the music marketing aspect as well as the behind the scenes, business side of the industry. During this time, we fully formed the band portion of this project including, Christian Pascale, Erik Teichmann, Pedro Cortes, Lonze Reynolds Jr. and Tyler Flowers. Each one of these members were meticulously placed in their roles, everything is written, produced, mixed and mastered in house. The jobs that we do in our personal lives help us achieve the goals with a tighter budget, we of course would love to be able to pursue this project full time, I would love to not have to work seven jobs to make this happen. haha
What If We’re Robots was created in a time where there was not any live music for the foreseeable future, which is why we wanted to create such an ambitious project, we had time and we wanted to show the world a performance which has never been seen. WiWr is a brand new performance art concept based out of Arizona. Combining theater, dance, a fully immersive neo opera and a Sci-Fi alternative Jazz fusion experience. WiWr is a multimedia project, not only will our live perfomance dazzle the world, we also produce short films paired along to the narrative of the universe we create.
Our next single and video, I Am Not Afraid (IANA) featuring grammy award winning vocalist, Maya Azucena will be released July 21st on all platforms.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Research, trial and error, and determination. I learned so much from the past experiences I had with my last band. Curating our own bills, rather than waiting around to be asked to perform with already well known, local bands. Going out there and doing it yourself, creating a culture and being an active member in the community will get you a lot further. Research is the most important thing, look up music marketing strategies on youtube, magazines, talk to other more established musicians and see what worked for them.
Regardless of the stage of your career, you need to make a plan before releasing anything. Dont just release music with no intention, you have to have a plan of attack, and promote your art every single day. You need a product before you start selling it. Before you join social media or start playing shows, be prepared. Have photos, music and a video prepped and ready to go before making a social media presence, get tight and start online.
All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?
Money, we have such a huge production with a lot of moving parts. We have ten dancers, multi-dimensional projections, stage props, animation, lights, analog visuals. We have all of the artists in their trade ready to go, as soon as were able to raise funds, we will be able to bring this project to life. At the moment, we are focusing on our live performance, ticket sales and merchandise is the only way we are able to raise funds at the moment. We perform once a month at a local music venue called, “The Beast”. We have a series that we call, “PLUGGED IN”, where we highlight new bands in the Phoenix area and give them a space to perform, introduce them to the manager who books music at the venue in the hopes to support young musicians and create a culture in our community. Its a slow process but hopefully with a couple more of these single releases, we can get the attention of an investor or a label.
Contact Info:
- Website: linktr.ee/wiwr
- Instagram: whatifwererobots
- Facebook: whatifwererobots
- Youtube: whatifwererobots
Image Credits
Josue Orozco and Erika Whitaker
