Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Austin Sweeney. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Austin, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
Growing up on a family farm.
From as early as I can remember, our entire family ethic was built around hard work, sacrifice, and faith that the work we put in today will result in a better tomorrow. I always admired my dad’s ability to get to work early every morning and not stop working until long after the sun had gone down. He missed many sports, activities, and events due to the demands of the farm. He made the ones he could make (during the wintertime mostly), but even when he couldn’t, it didn’t phase me.
My entire life growing up, I was always incredibly proud of the amount of hard work that my dad put in, day after day. When people asked me where my dad was, I was proud to tell them that he was working. I thought hard work was the coolest. He taught me the value of finishing your day and being proud of the progress made.
This, of course, didn’t make the work any easier. I had many years of long days and nights picking berries, hauling corn, moving irrigation lines, weed eating ditches, tilling soil, etc. When I was a kid, I always loved the abstract idea of working hard. It took me a number of years to realize what hard work really consisted of, and that often, we do the work not because we want to, but because it’s required.
I’d run into real frustration when I would finish an 11-hour workday and get news that we were on the schedule to haul corn that night. My dad would tell me to go home, eat dinner, take an hour nap and be at the corn field for a full night of hauling corn. Other times, we’d pick marionberries for 12 hours all night and then spend 6 hours during the day reconfiguring the berry pickers for the neighbors to pick blueberries. The work was grueling, but we used to compete with each other about who got the least sleep. It was a badge of honor to work on the farm a full week with only 14 hours of sleep.
It was as frustrating, exhausting, and painful as it was rewarding.
Many of our family dinners now find us rehashing some of those experiences. We often remark that we’re not sure how we pulled it all off. But, we pulled it all off because we were a family, we were a team, and my parents worked together to make it all happen.
I couldn’t possibly quantify the skills I learned on the farm that go far beyond what many people might picture as farm work. It isn’t the glamorous, simple-living life that many country songs would have you believe. It is blood, sweat and tears in its most pure form. The satisfaction was directly proportional to the work put in. I couldn’t have asked for a better education on what true hard work is, and I’m thankful I gained the constitution to get up everyday and do it again and again. Nothing but credit and love should go to my parents, sister, and grandparents for running a profitable, successful farm when many farms would have folded. Good farmers deserve far more credit than they’re given. It requires such myriad knowledge that no class taught anywhere could ever encapsulate it. It’s like learning a new language – you’ll never know how to do it properly or even understand it without full immersion.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Sure! I’m a singer/songwriter/guitarist from a family farm in Oregon, now pursuing music in Arizona.
I’ve got an album, a single and EP already released and a new full-length album coming out this year. The first album was released in 2019 and the single and EP were released in 2023.
The new album is called ‘Long Walk Out of the Woods’ and is an exploration of the journey one takes from adolescence to adulthood. It touches on themes of addiction, freedom, hope, despair, family, death, adventure, the journey of self-discovery, and the pure joy of an open highway. I don’t write songs that I haven’t lived. You can point to a line in any of these songs and I can tell you where it came from and the accompanying story. I try to live my life with a pen in my hand, ready to canonize moments – beautiful and despairing alike – that I’ve lived through. It’s a musical journal as much as anything. I strive to write songs and albums that capture seasons of life.
I attempt to write songs with a catchy pop sensibility and accessibility while retaining lyrical complexity to get the story across. It’s an album with both light and heavy themes, but the focus is still the music. I want it to be thoroughly enjoyable and I hope that by the end you feel like you really know me better as a person and hopefully can relate. In a world of easily digestible content and endless single releases, I still believe in the power of the ALBUM. I meticulously put this album together to feel like an adventure. The track listing was thought out and each track is in its position for a reason. The album starts with the title track, “Long Walk Out of the Woods,” and ends with “The Trail”. I want this album to be a great road trip album. One that doesn’t feel like all the other music coming out right now. I want it to be singular and an album you can put on that will transport you to a faraway place. An adventure you can take anytime.
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?
The ability to listen, analyze, and receive constructive criticism
Hard work and resilience
Selling real estate
I’ll address these individually:
To make music, it’s not enough to simply love music, although that’s obviously still at least 50% of it. It requires study. It requires dissection. Why did that song make you love it so much? Not just love it, but FEEL it. Why did it resonate? Was it the lyrics? The melody? The production? What is it that keeps you coming back again and again? How can you take templates created by other artists to build your own set of songs that will hopefully resonate with someone else?
Can you put your art out into the world with the awareness that there will be people who don’t like it? There might even be people who hate it. Creating true art requires you putting your soul on display for the world to see and judge. What do you do when you spill your heart, blood, and guts out on the stage and it gets tepid applause, if people even listened at all? Can you retain the faith that you’re honing your craft and that your audience is out there somewhere? Can you share it with fellow artists you respect and be willing to take their notes about potential improvements of the song? They might even tell you to scrap the whole thing. If you can retain a steady stoicism about the craft of writing and creating art, you will eventually create something undeniable. It takes 10 bad songs to write 1 good one. That’s a lucky ratio if you can manage it. My north star that keeps me grounded and on the path is to just keep going. Knock on as many doors as you must, eventually the right door will open. If you have the eyes to see it and the resolve to put in the work required, you can seize that opportunity. What’s the old saying?
“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
Hard work beats talent. Every time. Combine talent with a consistent and tenacious work ethic, and you will succeed. You will succeed because you refuse to stop until you succeed. I am still on that path and refuse to quit. Hernan Cortes burned his fleet of ships to ensure that there was no fallback plan for his men, thus ensuring that they would fight to the bitter end to succeed in claiming new land because the ships were now in ashes and there was no way out but through. Don’t go about it foolishly, but live in the mindset that you’ve burned your ships, and success is the only option.
I sold real estate. This seems like a funny third choice, I realize. But real estate taught me so much about marketing, relationships, patience, disappointment, setbacks, focus, and grit. Sometimes I ‘planted seeds’ in February that didn’t bring about a result for a full year or more. It required the faith that all the strategies I implemented today will result in sales in the future. I had to market. I had to touch base with cold contacts. I had to deal in negotiations. I had to knock on doors, physically. I had doors slammed in my face. I had people send me photos of my flyers being burned in their firepit with the caption “thanks for the fire starter.” Seriously.
I faced rejection and disappointment. I had contacts choose other, more successful agents. I held open houses on the weekend for hours that had one looky-loo visitor, if one even showed up at all. Real estate isn’t for the faint of heart and neither is creating art. Keep your head down and keep moving forward. One disappointment is just another one to get out of the way on your way to success. On a short timeline, things can look pretty bleak. If you stretch out that time horizon, you’ll begin to see how things are beginning to work in your favor and success is inevitable if you can stick it out through the dark, wintery seasons of despair. Spring is coming.
What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
Getting in my own way.
This has been a theme in my life. I am a gold star, first ballot, hall-of-fame self-saboteur. I know my weak spots better than anybody and can exploit those any time I feel like it. I don’t do it on purpose, it’s subconscious. It stems from a story I’ve told myself since I was young. A story about who I think I am. A story that can find me sullen, distractible, depressed, anxious, and probably drinking to mask those feelings.
I’ve had many successes in my life often followed by a long string of poor choices that bring me back down to my comfort zone in a melancholy ennui. It’s a lot like the contestants of the game show, The Biggest Loser, who lose a crazy amount of weight during the show, but two years down the road are back to their original weight, if not heavier. They may have gotten their bodies to shrink, but their minds haven’t changed. They still see themselves as the people they used to be. It takes a long, long time for the psyche to adjust to a new reality. Unless you change your story about who you are and who you are meant to be, you will revert to your default settings. The mind loves its comfort zone, even if that comfort zone is far less than ideal. It’s still the self-perception that it’s used to.
I have been attempting to overcome my old self-perception for many years. I’ve made great strides and I’ve had many backslides. Much like the point I’ve made a few times already, I just continue to keep my head down and outwork my self-doubt. I’m working on telling myself a new story than the negative one I’ve embraced for far too many years. I am trying to build a stack of undeniable proof that I am who I say I am. I try to keep every promise I make to myself in the attempt to prove to myself that I’m someone I can trust. A house divided against itself cannot stand and neither can a mind in conflict with itself. I have taken a break from alcohol with the intention of removing any obstacle that may stand in the way of achieving my goals. Regret, it’s often said, is the truest pain of all, because there’s nothing you can do to change the circumstances once they’ve crystalized. I try to live with no regrets. I feel a sense of failure on this count because I have a War & Peace-sized list of regrets. However, when I succeed, those regrets will change shape. I will have taken all the terrible things I’ve brought on myself and alchemized them into a success story. Once this has been achieved, can they be regrets? I don’t think they can, because without them and the lessons learned therein, I wouldn’t be the man that I became. The war is not with the competition or the business. The war is between the ears, and every day requires a steady campaign to push against fear, sadness, doubt, regret, duplicity, anxiety, and the inevitability of our own death. Every day is an opportunity to tell myself a new story, and every day that I get up and strive valiantly, I become a better storyteller. I just need to make sure that I’m listening.
Contact Info:
Website: austinbsweeney.com
Instagram: instagram.com/austinbsweeneymusic
Facebook: facebook.com/austinbsweeney
Youtube: youtube.com/@austinbsweeneymusic