Meet AVE

We were lucky to catch up with AVE recently and have shared our conversation below.

AVE, thanks for taking the time to share your lessons with our community today. So, let’s jump right in – one of the most essential skills for unlocking our potential is self-discipline. Where does your self-discipline come from?
Being an independent artist is very similar to being an entrepreneur and essentially being your own boss… So, it’s taken me some time to find a balance between pushing myself to work every day and giving myself the grace to do what a 23 year old does. I have to give all credit for my self-discipline to my many years of dance. I began with ballet and tap around 4 years old and then dance only became more life-consuming as time went on. Jazz, hip hop, contemporary, modern, pointe and more got thrown into the mix and by 10 years old I was competing. I always joke that my dance teacher, Kristi, helped raise me because I was arguably at the studio more than at home! Throughout all of my developmental years, commitment, follow-through and self-discipline were ingrained in me. So to this day, I’m still dancing several times a week and the self-discipline from all those years drives my commitment to my musical career.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’m AVE, a pop artist out of Nashville, TN and I write songs for social change. Although dance came first, singing and songwriting followed very shortly after so I’ve always known what I wanted to do. In about 6 sentences I’m going to tell you my life story… hang on! Long story short, I got up on as many stages around my NY hometown as I could and created my own stages, too. At 14, I went door to door asking bars and restaurants if I could provide live music for them… Soon enough I was singing, dancing and songwriting every second that I wasn’t at school. In fact I’ll admit, sometimes I wrote songs in class! But don’t you worry, I still managed to get good enough grades for Belmont University in the fall of 2019. And that self-discipline carried me through my college years and enabled me to graduate early in 2021 with a degree in Music Business. So, if you haven’t caught on yet, post-grad looks like singing, dancing and songwriting every day… making and performing music that matters.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Three things that have gotten me far are being bold, being authentic, and being original.

If I hadn’t been bold enough to go door-to-door asking if I could sing, I wouldn’t have played 50 shows throughout my high school years. If I hadn’t been bold enough to go to a college 1,000 miles away from home, I wouldn’t be living in my favorite city. If I hadn’t been bold enough to tip the band $100 to sing with them, I wouldn’t have gone viral on TikTok over and over again… For me, boldness has made me the most progress so far… Coupling it with authenticity and originality is the jackpot!!!! It’s very challenging to be all three at the same time, so you have to find out when/where it just happens naturally. I’ve found that I feel all three of those things when I’m on a stage. I know some people who feel that way in a songwriting room… or a dance studio….or on a football field! So my advice is to commit to discovering theirs.

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
A few months ago, I flew home to watch my brother play his first homecoming game on the varsity football team. I was thrilled to be watching him in person and simultaneously emotional about it. I felt like living in Nashville has kept me from being at every game and watching him grow up… I looked at my parents next to me, with a blanket over their laps in matching sweatshirts that had my brother’s number on the back… I thought about how they’ve never missed a game of his. Then I thought about how they never missed a performance of mine. They were always in the audience. What a privilege to know that someone wants to watch you shine….That support truly gave me so much more momentum than I would’ve had otherwise. For the record, I plan on repaying them when I’m famous 🙂

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Image Credits
Brianne Petrone

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