Fyre Byrd: Independent Artists Find a Supportive Community
To expand their music career, Breeze and Samtré traveled from Australia to the United States in October 2021. The Aussie twins have played music together since they were kids and saw it as a viable career path as they grew older. Music became part of their identity, so they followed their instincts to pack up and go to Music City, USA. And then they discovered HOME . . .
Samtré - We moved out of the country with one suitcase and a backpack each.
We’re here to take our music as far as it can go.
Breeze - When you make a move like that, you have to commit. You do have to be a little bit insane. But, the insanity is really a certain type of drive that pushes you towards discomfort. Over the last 8 months, we’ve learned what discomfort truly looks like.
Samtré of Fyre Byrd
Discomfort keeps you on your toes…but it can also break you. In a weird way, this experience has been encouraging, in the sense that nothing can scare us now—we’re already doing the scariest thing we’ve ever done.
B - When we were in Australia, we were touring heavily.
We toured with Catfish and the Bottlemen, and witnessed how being a successful touring artist actually works. The incredible feedback from the audience fueled everything else.
However, Australia is limited on venues to book. Even if you did big arena tours, there would only be about 4 shows. When we toured with Catfish and the Bottlemen in Australia, we were lucky to get 5 shows. By the time the 5th show comes around, you’re left wondering what’s next. It’s very limited in that way.
In contrast, US tours book like 20 to 26 shows a month for maybe one leg, and then they will come back for another leg or book 3 months worth of shows. For that reason alone, we saw moving to the US as a better option to build our music career.
B - Building a career as an independent artist
Breeze of Fyre Byrd
fully on your own requires a wide variety of skills. We’re really skilled at making music and performing it; we willingly put in the time to master those skills. But do we also want to put in countless hours for everything else to be just as skilled? Or can we find someone who has already put in the time to master those skills?
S - Before we moved and joined HOME, we never felt like we had anywhere to go to find the help we needed. We felt forced to figure out things on our own because that’s what a majority of independent artists around us did. While a lot of music creation and business development can be DIY, it's really hard to learn everything you need from just educational content on the internet because you can’t ask the content questions you have.
B - What’s great about HOME is that, not only do we have the freedom to ask any question about anything, but we also don’t feel like we have to prove anything to get the help. Whether the question be about direction, the brand, a song, or whatever, we simply ask and receive an answer. It’s as simple as you want it, no strings attached.
S - Because we’re still going through the Visa processing, we’re limited on what we can do at the moment. So we’re forced to use this sort of downtime to be patient and look deep to answer “What can we do in this time?”
B - Before discovering the resources at HOME,
we could only work on our laptop using GarageBand. Now we have the capability to work with a lot more tools here, and receive the education to use those tools. Plus, the Weekly Activations make networking with other HOME creatives easy. We’re able to meet people—even people that we wouldn’t have guessed could help us—just by listening to and learning from other artists’ processes. And those valuable resources are all in one spot, so we don’t have to go out and find them. In a way, it all comes to us.
S - When we joined as Elite Artists, we thought, “back home needs something like the HOME music community,” because where we come from in Adelaide, creatives collaborate only within their friends group. Even then, the collaboration is very me-focused and tunnel visioned. It lacks an encouraging atmosphere that motivates you to achieve more. They hit a wall when they need to progress since they simply don’t know what to do to grow.
B - Or they’ll hit a wall when they receive the same response from people of “Oh, I can’t help you until you get your numbers up.” Whereas, HOME gives artists breathing room to build up to something and see which steps to concentrate on to get there. Having more focus on our music career has been a huge thing because we’ve been independent for a long time, which does get very exhausting.
It’s very easy to ask for help at HOME and people are very happy to give it to you with nothing attached. That’s how giving and receiving help should be; you never know where people will end up in their careers.
S - For example, we had a Zoom call with Logan, and he went through a flowchart of different pathways for artists. Before we met Logan, we had always thought we were quite focused on what we wanted to do. However, his curiosity made us dig deeper.
B - We’ve always wanted to be a live band. That's what we want to be known for, but we also really love creating stuff. We describe it as a sort of creative ADHD—like we can’t focus on one thing.
Logan asked, “If you like playing live, would you want to be backing musicians? Would you care if you were performing a song somebody else had written?” We’re not interested in being a backing band or performing other songs, so that made us realize that we can’t always just focus on doing shows. Now there’s this whole other element. We also need to build our brand and create other things. Logan added more stepping stones to our end goal to help us see how to use our hyperactive creativity to our advantage.
S - Our path feels easier now
because we know exactly where we want to go, what to look for, and opportunities we can let go.
B - There’s so many pathways in music, especially in this town. You can do music for sync, co-writing, or publishing, etc. While that all sounds really amazing because that’s potential income—which is what we need at the end of the day—it’s still another skill that takes your time and energy.
S - Instead of agreeing to everything, we’re able to think about how we can actually align opportunities with our vision, rather than expend our creative energy into some other box. We’ve got some new ideas that we’re really excited about.
B - The recorded music we release is different to our live show because we sample the drums for our recordings to allow more creativity. In a live space, we don’t use backing tracks, so the drums are more raw and in your face. Our show is like, “Hi! We’re here!”
We plan to do some live recordings in HOME’s Live Room to build the anticipation and let audiences know what to expect when they see us perform. Eventually, we want to stream our show. When we start releasing, we want to do a single every month and have the live versions coincide with them.
S - Additionally, we’ve been able to focus on building our brand.
Logan has a lot of really good brand ideas. He’s really good at seeing what we’re already presenting for our brand and suggesting where we should lean in heavier or be more specific. For example, he told us when he clicked on our Instagram, the bio hooked him. It says, “We’re here to start rap beef with The Rock,” but Logan didn’t see anything in our feed that tied back to rap or The Rock. So now, we’ve started this TikTok reel campaign where we’re producing Dwayne Johnson’s hip hop record, but he doesn’t yet know it. It’s so dumb, but we love being dumb like that.
B - Now we’re all over The Rock’s socials finding sound bytes to piece together to make songs for his hip hop career. The bio came from when he actually did release a rap song. The Rock actually rapped, and I don’t think a lot of people know that. It’s so funny. The song is called “Face Off” by Tech N9ne.
S - On the horizon, we’re producing The Rock’s debut album. We’re doing it whether he likes it or not.
S - By the time our visa allows us to start releasing stuff
and actually do things, we’ll have heaps of content ready to pull the trigger on as soon as we get the green light. Because we’re in a space at HOME where we can pair up with all sorts of people, look at educational material, and chat with Logan to help us figure out what to do, we have all the resources we need to freely create and grow our brand.