Story & Lesson Highlights with Steve Gregoropoulos of El Sereno

We recently had the chance to connect with Steve Gregoropoulos and have shared our conversation below.

Steve, we’re thrilled to have you with us today. Before we jump into your intro and the heart of the interview, let’s start with a bit of an ice breaker: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
wake up, make lunch and breakfast for my wife to take to work, fill water bottles for my two girls to take to school, make sure everyone gets up and gets out the door. It takes the whole 90 minutes. If any of them are left for purposes of this question I make the same breakfast every day which is banana and hemp granola with peanut butter and coconut oil and then a bunch of fruit cut up on top of it

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Steve Gregoropoulos and I’m a composer, arranger, musician and producer living in Los Angeles. The brand I’m here to talk about is SADFAM Records, which is a collective record label sort of in LA and sort of everywhere, as you will see. But it’s different from other collective labels in that it is an organ of a larger collective called Song a Day for a Month (SADFAM, get it?) which twice a year gathers together online at a website where a large number of us write, record, produce and post a song each day for the month. The months are January and July. So SADFAM Records grew out of that, and it is how we release some of what we make. It’s not a label that is scouting for artists or signing people outside of the SADFAM project or anything like that – it’s specifically an organ of the SADFAM project in general. Now: that is not to say that sometimes SADFAM participants don’t release stuff that wasn’t created within the two SADFAM months. In fact, most of our records were created by SADFAM participants and never posted in January or July. (Not mine: I think I’m one of the few people on there who have only released my songs from those months on the label). And many people on the site work with other organizations and labels and a couple have even won Grammys for their work with other groups. But we have this little insular community where we can meet up and do this very insular thing which is a method of creativity that carries over into the rest of our lives.

Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. Who taught you the most about work?
My composition teacher Richard Hoffmann – he taught me to have a sense of humor and go to work every day and make music. Richard, who just passed away in 2021, was Schoenberg’s nephew and amanuensis and his stories about Schoenberg were mostly hilarious. Also he played the violin like breathing and so if you wrote something, no matter how difficult, he’d frequently grab his violin to discuss it and just play through sections. It was all like a job and not some great holy mission and from him I learned to be a proletarian artist.

If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
it doesn’t matter what other people think

Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. Is the public version of you the real you?
I don’t know if there’s such a thing as the “real you”. I usually think the public version of me is more the real me than the private version because I feel like we’re more honest the less we think about stuff. But I don’t know if they aren’t both just as real.

Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: If you knew you had 10 years left, what would you stop doing immediately?
Thanks for asking this question because I reject it on a really fundamental level. The whole idea of bucket lists and stuff like that is just awful to me. I think that if you would live differently if you knew your time was limited (PS everyone’s time is limited) then you are doing something wrong right now. But also if you are doing something wrong right now maybe that’s just a part of your beautiful life that you should keep doing wrong or not keep doing wrong whether you have a day to live or eighty years to live. LIfe is all full of little things like doing something you don’t want to do or waiting for a bus and really it’s important to fully experience all of that. Or don’t fully experience it – spend it daydreaming. There isn’t this hierarchy of experience.

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