Meet Shane Ragoonan

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

Shane, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?
It’s been eight years of performing live, creating new music, and finding ways to entertain people and I feel like every year that passes by, it gets harder and harder for me. Every time I do something at a show and the people love it, I’m always thinking to myself, “well how are you gonna top that one?” One of the ways I keep my creativity alive is by self challenging myself to outdo what I did before and try not to do the same thing so that it doesn’t get boring.

Another way I keep my creativity alive is to not force it whether I’m trying to write a new song, doing something new onstage, or coming up with a new topic for my podcast, I’ve learned to let it just come to me naturally and be ready to write it down when it does. You never know when it’ll come, I’ve gotten some of the best ideas of my career from either sitting on the couch watching TV or just by simply taking a walk in the park.

I also like to maintain my inner child by doing things I loved as a kid like I still watch cartoons, I still collect action figures, and I still go crazy seeing Pluto at Disney World. I do this because as kids, we tend to have a very imaginative mind and I think that has really helped me not just in terms of creativity as a musician or a co-host of a podcast but also as a person. I feel like it’s helped me appreciate life more.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am the keyboardist and one of the vocalists for a band known as Galaxy Beat. The band consists of myself, my drummer 2-Stixx, and my guitarist, other vocalist, and best friend Julio Diaz. I’ve known Julio since we were 10 years old in elementary school but for years we didn’t see each other because we attended different middle and high schools. Fast forward to 2015 and we’re both attending Miami Dade College, we reunited in the North Campus and despite not seeing each other for 10 years, it’s like no time had been lost between us.

A year later, Julio had introduced me to a drummer by the name of 2-Stixx and he wanted Julio and I to jam with him. Julio had his acoustic guitar he would always carry around campus with him and 2-Stixx carried a drum snare with him, they wanted me to bring my keyboard which at that point I hadn’t played since high school. I was very hesitant initially, I wasn’t in a good place mentally at the time but I still brought my keyboard and the three of us would jam together across campus when we had free time. A couple of jam sessions later, 2-Stixx suggested we start a band and we spent why get like 24 hours trying to come up with a name for our band and then finally, Julio came up with the name “Galaxy Beat”.

Since the bands inception, we’ve been together for eight years and have been a part of some legendary shows such as Churchill’s Pub’s 40th anniversary, a fundraiser in Miami Springs where all the proceeds from that night went to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, and the night Galaxy Beat flew to New Orleans and played at Checkpoint Charlie’s.

Those are just some of the most amazing shows in the bands history and we are not stopping there, 2024 I want to get the band booked for more shows in places we’ve never been before like Orlando, Tampa, Texas, Philadelphia, and more. What I want for the band is to expand our fanbase beyond the state of Florida and beyond the cities of Fort Lauderdale and Miami. I also plan for the band to record new music, possibly do an entire album perhaps and to produce more t-shirts to provide and sell to our wonderful fans out there.

When I’m not performing live or recording new music, I’m working on my podcast with my wonderful wife Rosa titled No Latex Needed. As of January 15th, 2024, NLN has been going strong for three years now. It was initially Rosa’s idea as she thought it would be fun to do a podcast with me seeing as I had previous experience doing podcasting, I said sure without hesitation and it’s been fun seeing the evolution of our podcast in terms of our audio quality and hearing more confidence in our voices in later episodes. We’ve had special guests and we even did an episode that a lot of people felt helped raise awareness towards toxic work environments (the episode is titled The Job from Hell and is available for listening on all streaming platforms).

We had a bit of a bump in the road as we had our Instagram account hacked and that process was extremely frustrating but it didn’t stop us from doing what we love and that’s putting out new episodes. We’ve been on hiatus for awhile because of the holidays and we’ve been upgrading our audio equipment, I’m very excited for us to be doing new episodes of NLN because we’ve got plenty to talk about.

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?
I have two pieces of advice for anyone and everyone who wish to be a musician, a comedian, and/or a podcast host:

1. JUST BE YOURSELF – In my band, we take pride in being ourselves. I feel that there’s certain bands and/or musicians out there that try to seem like they’re cool or mysterious in their onstage mannerisms and they try so hard, to me they come across as pretentious. One thing I love about my band Galaxy Beat is that we never take ourselves seriously, when you come see us perform live, we don’t just play music, we also love to interact and talk to the fans, we wanna make sure you guys are having a good time *laughs*. We also tend to crack jokes sometimes and do a funny little skit before or at the end of the show. We don’t want to seem like those animatronic characters that you see at Chuck E Cheese or Dandy Bear.

2. HAVE FUN – One of the main reasons I wanted to get into podcasting was that I had listened to plenty of other podcasts and a lot of them to me just sounded so incredibly boring. How can you be so monotone and sound like Droopy Dog for over an hour per episode? Who wants to listen to that for so long? I think it’s important for any podcaster to sound lively for the sake of their audience, like think to yourself, if I don’t want to hear my voice then what’s that say for my audience? When you’re recording an episode, I think it’s best to pretend as if you’re the host of a late night talk show in front of a live audience. I think it helps a lot, that’s what I do when I’m talking on my podcast. If you’re co-hosting a podcast, don’t be afraid to play off each other, it’s one of the things I love doing with my wife on our podcast and that’s one of the feedbacks I always hear back from our fans.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it till the day I die, I don’t perform live onstage with Galaxy Beat because I’m chasing fame and fortune, I do it because I love it. I think too often when a musician becomes famous, they tend to lose their passion for music altogether because they’re addicted to fame and fortune. For me, if you’re not having fun performing live or making new music then what are you doing? Why are you a musician? My satisfaction as a musician does not come from getting paid, it comes from sending people home happy knowing that they saw a show that they will never forget.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
A lot of times I have found myself overwhelmed or even burnt out whether it’s from calling several places to get the band booked or just exhaustion both physically and mentally from performing live day after day after day.

Usually what I do short term wise is take a nap, take a nice hot shower, and then I’ll maybe play some video games or watch TV.

Long term wise, I like to take a vacation no more than a week or so. I’ve been telling other artists since day one that it’s important to take a break for both your mental health and physical body because if you don’t pick your time to rest, your body will do it for you and you don’t want that to happen. A good example is a few years ago, Galaxy Beat was busy in the summer just show after show after show and the shows were all I believe late at night. I was physically and mentally exhausted and we had a couple of weeks before a big show and I didn’t know how I was gonna make it. My dad called me and told me he was going to Tennessee for work and asked me to come with him, I didn’t hesitate to tell him yes. I did a lot of walking, exploring, I even got to take a bit of a tour to the University of Tennessee and after awhile, I felt brand new, recharged, and ready to go for that big show.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Brianna Acevedo (IG: @photoswithbrianna) Daniel Tolentino (IG: @dannydtolentino) MegaCon 2022 Rosa Ragoonan (IG: @skittie)

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