Show notes
What does it feel like to do what you love on stage in front of a ton of people? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Lani Love will explain how she relaunched her career from working at an advertising agency to becoming a professional deejay. Lani shares her thoughts on how to evaluate which opportunities to pursue and how to balance your career and family interests. During the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll discuss the importance of giving yourself some credit, especially when you feel like you’re constantly falling short. Key Career Insights At some point, you have to learn to trust yourself and give yourself credit for all your accomplishments rather than being so hard on yourself. There may be times in your career when you have to take a step back in order to focus on more important things in your life like family or health. That’s okay. Some opportunities that seem really perfect for you may simply not end up working out, but you have to trust that another opportunity can and will come up if you’re patient and persistent enough. Tweetables to Share Even if a perfect opportunity gets away, you have to trust that another opportunity will come around. DJ Lani Love Tweet This Wondering if I could do morealso means constantly feeling like I’m not doing enough. Joseph Liu Tweet This Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think back to one year ago today, then think about all the progress you’ve made over the past 12 months with the things that matter to you. What’s one area of your life or career where you want to give yourself a little more credit? About DJ Lani Love Lani Love started her post-college career working in advertising in New York City. On the side, she started deejaying as a hobby, interning with DJ Morsy. When she moved to Chicago, deejaying really picked up for her, and she decided to leave her full-time job to pursue music instead. She loves deejaying for brands and businesses at intimate press events, in-store trunk shows, and large scale outdoor activations. Check out Lani’s interview featured in Rent the Runway Follow Lani on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Listen to DJ Lani Love’s full tracks featured in this episode of Career Relaunch: https://soundcloud.com/djlanilove/viet-kieu-lani-love-x-rich-priors https://soundcloud.com/djlanilove/wyl/s-dUtZs https://soundcloud.com/djlanilove/wyl/s-dUtZs LISTEN TO MORE OF LANI’S MUSIC Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Lani know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to Audible for Supporting Career Relaunch Thanks to Audible for supporting this episode of Career Relaunch. Audible is the premier provider of digital audiobooks, offering over 180,000 audiobook titles for listening anytime and anywhere on your favorite device. Career Relaunch listeners can download a free audiobook download and get 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/careerrelaunch. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I am more creative and more capable than I gave myself credit for in the past. Learning to trust myself and believe in myself has been something that I’ve learned through all of this. Joseph: Good morning, Lani, and thanks so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch. Lani: Good morning! Thank you so much for having me. Joseph: I am really excited to talk with you today, Lani, because you are the first DJ we’ve got on this show. I want to get into all those details about your life as a DJ and how you became a DJ, but could you just kick us off by letting us know what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life? Lani: I am DJing, but I’m taking things to the next step and focusing on production and song writing and just trying to figure out work-life balance, the constant battle that everyone has. Joseph: Can you tell us a little bit more about that song that we heard in the intro? Maybe that’ll give us a good way of starting the talk about this topic of DJing. Lani: That song is Việt Kiều. Việt Kiều is a term that’s used for Vietnamese people living outside of Vietnam. You could be born in Vietnam and live somewhere else and be called Việt Kiều, or you can be American born, like myself, but have Vietnamese heritage and be a Việt Kiều. It’s inspired by my experiences as a Vietnamese-American. I wanted to make something that incorporates the two languages that I’m fluent in, Vietnamese and English. The kind of fun thing about making this song, Vietnamese is a language that has a lot of tones. I think it’s six tones or something like that, compared to most languages which have four. Trying to create lyrics that complemented western musicality with Vietnamese words is very interesting. It was an exercise, because the language has so many tones, and the way your voice fluctuates affects the actual word and what you’re saying. Joseph: I know in that song, we didn’t get a chance to play the whole thing, but you go on to talk about the Vietnamese language. [Việt Kiều song] ‘Vietnamese is an interesting language. The words and grammar rules are simple, but if you didn’t grow up a native speaker, pronunciation can be a little tricky.’ Joseph: How much does your Vietnamese heritage influence your actual deejaying or your musical style? Lani: More than anything, it probably just influences my work ethic. I didn’t listen to too much Vietnamese music growing up. I think I was exposed to a lot of it, but I don’t think it, on a huge level, necessarily influences my musical taste or style. It’s something that is part of my childhood and upbringing. I think, more than anything, it’s just being a child of an immigrant impacted my work ethic. Joseph: Absolutely. I am kind of like you. I am Taiwanese, but I was born in the United States. There are similar terms for people who are not born and raised in Taiwan but are Taiwanese. It’s hard for that aspect of your life not to influence who you are. It’s very interesting. Out of curiosity, is that your voice in the song that is going through the Vietnamese lyrics? Lani: Yeah, that’s me. Joseph: I’d love to get into that later, just how you actually go about creating each of these songs. Before we go back in time, can you also just give us an example of some of the places where you have deejayed? Lani: I started deejaying in New York. I played at various bars and clubs there in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I moved to Chicago, just like club, nightlife scene but started doing a lot more retail, brand, and corporate events. I did a little bit of that in New York, but Chicago is where that really took off for me. Now, I’m LA-based, doing the same sort of thing. I often travel for gigs. Sometimes, it’s a corporation or a big company like Tesla Motors. I deejayed in San Francisco, their showroom opening. I did that for them. Upcoming, I am teaching a conference in Texas at the end of next month. I kind of float around for various gigs. Sometimes, it’s for fun, like me adding a gig to existing travel, like my recent Vietnam trip. Joseph: I want to go back in time a little bit with you, Lani, and just explore what you were doing before you were a DJ. I know you were not always a DJ, and you were working in the advertising industry. Can you just tell us briefly about your time in the advertising industry? Then we can move forward from there. Lani: I was a brand strategist for about eight year, full-time, 40 hours a week, realistically 50 plus. I worked with brand clients to identify better ways to connect with their target audiences. Sometimes, it would be a branding issue, like a way they talk about themselves, the product attributes that they were highlighting. Other times, it was a communications or channels issue. They weren’t engaging enough with their audiences on various social or digital platforms. I worked with a lot of packaged good brands, like Pampers, Kellogg’s Cereal, Mike’s Harder. I would just write creative briefs that would help guide the development of ad campaign. Joseph: I remember when I used to work in brand marketing, where you worked with a lot of agencies like yours. On the one end, that kind of work that you just described, Lani, sounds really exciting and really rich. At the same, from the people I knew who work in agencies, I know that sometimes life at an agency also has its challenges. I’m just curious, what made you decide to leave that world behind? Lani: I worked on a lot of big agencies, the Saatchi & Saatchis and Leo Burnetts of the world, where I think I got lucky with both teams. I had really great bosses, co-workers, mentors. I think when you work for bigger agencies, sometimes you’re also working with bigger clients, which means they are slower to change. The work can be really stressful, because there is so much at stake with large budgets. You might not get the creative fulfillment that you are hoping for a career in advertising. When you look at the talent in agency life, there are so many creative people and people who are really excited to tap into their creative potential, but if your client is not ready for it, or if your agency maybe isn’t supportive of it, you don’t get to use your creative mind as much as you’d like. Joseph: At what point did you start to figure out that you wanted to walk away from that world and start to pursue life as a DJ? Lani: I think it was two parts. One, like what we talked about, is advertising careers having their various challenges, maybe not being as creatively fulfilling as one would like. The second thing is just deejaying was really picking up for me. I went from playing about one to two times a month to one to two times a week, and then I got to a point where I was playing three or more times a week. I just felt like, ‘Maybe there’s enough momentum here for me to see what would happen if I gave this more of my attention or all of my attention.’ Joseph: I am trying to imagine. You are working full-time, 40, 50, maybe more, hours a week during the day in your day job. How did you actually get started as a DJ? Lani: I started as an intern for this DJ Morsy out of New York. This was pretty much the same time I started working in advertising actually. I’m originally from California. I had been a California girl my whole life. When I moved to New York, I literally didn’t know anyone. I think I had three casual acquaintances, a friend from college radio, a friend’s ex-boyfriend from high school. I really didn’t have many close friends. Moving to New York, I felt like if I am going to make this move worth it, I need to pursue everything that I’m interested in. Sometime during my first year in New York, I was like, ‘I need to learn how to deejay,’ because has been a goal of mine. All through college, I was just too shy and timid to really pursue it. Also, deejaying was more cost-prohibitive then, because you had to get the turn tables. Controllers weren’t an option. I started shadowing this guy that I met in Brooklyn. I had been following him on Myspace for years. He was nice enough to work out an arrangement with me, where we would meet up once a week, did the intern type thing. He would spend some time showing me the fundamentals of deejaying, beat-matching, transitioning, blending. I really owe him for helping me get started. Joseph: This world of deejaying is something I know absolutely nothing about. At the same time, I think probably everybody listening to this show has, at one point in time, crossed paths with a DJ if you’ve attended any sort of event or a party. I would love to talk a little bit more about your life as a DJ, Lani, and get into some of the details of it, because I think it’s a really interesting world that most people probably don’t really know much about. I want to start by playing a quick sample from another one of your songs called Candlestick Flicker. [music playing] Can you tell me a little bit more about that song and the inspiration behind that song? Lani: This is a song that started in the studio with my friend, Nick Scalise. I took it home and made it into what you hear now. Nick started a bass line and some drums and all of that. When I took it home, I rearranged the drums a little bit, chose different sounds and instrumentations for the bass line, and added the various flourishes to make it feel a little more lively. Nick is an extremely talented musician and producer. The cool thing is, working with a friend, you get a different perspective, different ideas, but I’ve had a different vision for my music. He comes from more of like an indie-pop world, and I have aspirations to make dance music. I like a little more bass in a lot of my songs. Joseph: Can you just walk us through your process of creating a track like this? I know in this case you were building off of your friend’s track, but how do you actually go about creating a new track? Lani: They sometimes start with the bass line. Sometimes, it’s a melody. I’m really melodically driven, so I often hum little rifts and top lines to myself and then will sometimes record those and see, ‘Can I try to build around that?’ and then make it into hopefully a song. Sometimes, it’s an idea, and it’s like, ‘This is just a snippet that doesn’t have legs.’ Other times, I build something out, and I am like, ‘Wow! This could be a song. This can be fun.’ With Candlestick Flicker, for example, just when I was choosing the different sounds, I felt like the tempo of it or the rhythm reminded me of an actual candle and a darker setting. I started thinking about what happens in a night club or around candles, I guess. Dimmer lighting, people get a little close, because you don’t see all the details. Everyone looks a little more attractive and sexy. Joseph: Speaking of night clubs, we’ve talked a little bit about your process for creating these tracks. I’d love to switch gears a little bit now, Lani, and talk about the experience of actually being up in front of a crowd deejaying. Can you just take us to one of your first moments, when you were up in front of a big crowd and deejaying for the first time? What was going through your head, and what was that experience like for you? Lani: One of the first times I deejayed for a crowd, probably in New York with my friend Morsy, I mentioned. The earlier gigs, a lot of it is just thinking to yourself, ‘Don’t mess up.’ The technical part of it, blending of songs, the various knobs on the mixer, it’s just not as instinctive as it would be once you are a seasoned DJ. You’re thinking, ‘I want to play this song, because it is cool,’ but you don’t really know how people will respond to it, because you just aren’t as seasoned. I think a lot of it was just freaking out and being like, ‘I hope I am doing this right. I hope this sounds okay. I hope I don’t clear the dance floor.’ I don’t know that everyone worries as much as I do, but I take deejaying pretty seriously. I just wanted to try my best to be good and play something that was different but still fun and familiar. Joseph: That would seem like an immense amount of pressure to me to be up there, where the entire life of the party kind of rests on you. Do you have any thoughts on how you managed that? It…
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