Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Brue.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
We both played in different bands previously & met through a mutual musician friend of ours. I had been burning out on my previous band & at that point I was ready to make the songs I wanted to make without worrying about radio, online success, touring etc. I locked myself away for a year & a half in a 1974 Airstream on the East side near MLK/51st street & began to learn how to produce/engineer so that I could record my own demo’s. I later showed David some of the songs I had been working on (I had known him for about a year at that point) & he encouraged me to record them professionally. That first project/EP together is what would eventually lead to MISSIO.
In our first year we would go on to see a crazy amount of blog success overseas & our first single landed on Hype Machine at #11 which would later work itself out via a SXSW offer. David has always been tech saavy & I needed help figuring out how we were going to play the songs live – we slowly progressed until we showcased at SXSW & started to see interest.
After the initial phase of the band: Dwight Baker (producer/engineer/owner) of MATCHBOX Studios in ATX started to come join sessions as we primarily work out of Matchbox Studios & would help us craft our debut album ‘Loner’ which would eventually lead to management, Sirius XM – Alt Nation debuting Middle Fingers, & a major label/publishing deal with RCA Records & Warner Chappell.
Since our debut album we have been luckily enough to tour the world with the likes of MUSE, 30 Seconds to Mars, Yungblud, K.Flay, Nothing But Thieves, & many more. We have had the opportunity to play on Conan O’Briens Late Night Show, Austin City Limits, Lollapalooza, FireFly Fest, BottleRock, & major festivals in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, & Hungary. We have partnered with Victoria’s Secret, EA Sports, & Shiseido for global tv/commercial campaigns & have gone on to release three studio albums in three years acquiring a total of 1 billion global streams. We are currently signed w/ BMG & Kobalt globally & co-manage our band together.
We never would have been able to imagine that the songs we wrote in South Austin years ago would have been able to allow us such amazing opportunities in this life. We try every day to never take that for granted.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has been an absolutely amazing journey, but we both never fully expected to experience the number of obstacles we have in the past five years. With every growing business there are a variety of hurdles to jump over, but because we were new to the music business in general we had SO much to learn. Often times learning/growing has to come from challenges.
One of my favorite & worst stories was when we had a tour manager that decided he was going to quit half way through one of our tours for personal reasons & left us out to dry on a very large scale headline tour. It happened to be a couple days before we crossed international lines into Canada. Last minute on the day of the show- our driver told us he couldn’t get into Canada for legal reasons so we would have a fill in bus driver take over for the day. At 6a we’re unloading our 25 merch boxes into a hotel in Buffalo & transferring drivers only to find out the new driver had never driven a bus with a trailer on the back. We finally make it to Toronto after the driver gets lost for over two hours making the crew at the venue super mad that we missed our load in time. We finally get to the venue & the driver then tells me that they don’t know how to parallel park the bus. Haha. I have crew guys yelling at me to hurry up while I’m literally guiding our hired bus driver how to parallel park a bus & trailer (which I’ve never done myself.) To say we felt like quitting & going home that day is an UNDERSTATEMENT.
Anyone who wants to get into the music business should understand up front it truly averages out to about 80% business & 20% music. An artist has to be willing to work their asses off & know how to do a variety of different things in order to be successful.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We are a band that believes in immense authenticity & vulnerability. We strive to write about our real life experiences in hopes that people around the world will feel valued, accepted, & understand that there are other people in the world who do understand them.
It can be challenging to categorize us sometimes because we offer such a variety of different styles from Alt-Hip/Hop to hypnotic pop, but we also have a cinematic side of us like our SKELETONS series of stripped & re-imagined songs with string quartets. As long as we can continue to be as creative as we can be & genuinely love the songs we’re making then nothing else matters. Truly.
I think a common mindset for artists who are trying to achieve success is that they think writing a radio “hit” is the end all be all. The reality is – create something you love that sounds different than everything else being heard on platforms & I would bet that song will reach a much higher platform than a song that sounds like what everyone else is doing. I personally think that mindset is limiting for the art to be as pure & impactful as it can be.
What does success mean to you?
We’ve found that our definition of success has changed a lot over the years. I can only speak for myself here, but I’d say early on my idea of success deep down was getting rich. I didn’t even necessarily care about being a ‘rockstar’ – I wanted the $ that came along with the lifestyle of being a rockstar. After experiencing some amazing things & opportunities my idea of success has shifted.
Success to me is now defined by freedom. Freedom from owing somebody money & being in debt. Freedom from people trying to control our art. Freedom in being able to say what we feel like should be said to help impact people when we want to say it. Freedom to make decisions for ourselves. Everyone in this business is trying to get money from artists. I don’t blame them either – that’s the music industry – it’s what we signed up for. But, when decisions can’t be made & permissions for certain things can’t be requested & it continually hurts the art & the artist – that’s not freedom.
Success is working every day on something we love so that it never feels like work. Success is having the ability to stop working when we choose & to have the ability to spend time with our loved ones, or go on a walk with our dogs & not have to feel guilty that we’re letting a boss down. Success is having an understanding that it doesn’t matter how much money somebody has – that doesn’t always equate to authentic happiness. If we can continue doing what we love & all the while be able to cover our basic costs – I’d say that’s a lifetime of success.
Contact Info:
- Email: mgmtmissio@gmail.com
- Website: www.missiomusic.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/missiomusic
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/missiomusic
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/missiomusic
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/missiomusic
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2HOMW1liAxI3URnEq95SMS?si=LTepRYR8QlCAC-DtyTbclg
Image Credits
MISSIO.
