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Kina Grannis – Finding Community Through The Internet

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[Kina Grannis – Finding Community Through The Internet]

[Kina Grannis] Source: LYBIO.net
Hi, I’m gonna start out with a song:

[Kina Grannis – Message From Your Heart]

Don’t break me, I bruise easily
The source of both your love and misery
I am steady beating endlessly
While you are dozing
Dreaming pretty things
I don’t work for free
Please take care of me

This is a message from your heart
Your most devoted body part
Taking blood and making art
This is a message from your heart
Pounding away into the dark
You could thank me for a start
This is a message from your heart

Don’t hurt me, I bleed constantly
My effort to leave me blood flow back swiftly
My rhythm soothing like rain drops steady
On foggy windows when you gaze outwardly
I don’t work for free
Please take care of me

Every time you sleep
Bum bum bum bum
Bum bum bum bum
Bum bum bum bum
Every time you eat
Bum bum bum bum
Bum bum bum bum
Bum bum bum bum

Thank you.

[Kina Grannis] Source: LYBIO.net
All right. Hello, everyone, how is it going? My name is Kina Grannis. I’m a singer/song writer from here in Los Angeles. And the song I just played for you, “message from your heart”, it’s been an incredibly important song in my story. It’s really the song that started everything for me. It won me a deal with the major label and it also helped me realize that I didn’t really need one.

But my story starts out much like anyone else’s. I started playing in high school and by the time college came around, I was playing every opportunity I could; open mics, coffee shops, sketchy bars, I was busking on the side of the road. And really, I was waiting to be discovered and at this point, I really felt that the only way to make it in the music industry was to be signed to a major label and so that’s what I thought I wanted.

Then I heard about a contest, it was called Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl and the prize was not only getting your music video played during the Super Bowl, but getting the very thing I wanted, getting signed to Interscope Records, so it was huge.

I made my first ever YouTube video, entered the contest and promptly forgot about it. But surprisingly, two weeks later, I got a call from a lovely man named Rudy, who told me that I had made it into the top 10 finalists of this competition.

And he told me that the winner would be determined by online voting, daily voting for a month. So immediately, I’m thinking like okay, so I’m going to be telling everyone I know, everyday for the next month to vote for me, what is more annoying than that, they are going to hate me.

So I’m thinking what can I do to make this feel more right? And I decided if I expected something from them I should probably be doing something in return. So I decided for as long as I was in this contest, I was going to make a new video everyday and put it up on YouTube. So I started doing this and at first, all the views, all the comments, it was from family and friends, which was really all I ever expected. But slowly, I started seeing comments from people I didn’t know and the video views started growing and that’s when something clicked me. This whole time I felt like I had been pouring my heart out into this void that was the Internet. But really it started feeling like there were all these people out there in the world that were looking and trying to find something to hold on to, to grasp on to and connect with and we kind of found each other out there on the Internet.

[Kina Grannis] Source: LYBIO.net
So around my videos a community starts to build and they eventually named themselves Kinerds, which uh – there is one of them getting her Kinerd tattoo, that was fun. But they are amazing people and they really became my online family during the course of this contest.

Well, something was working because I ended up making it into the top 3 and come Super Bowl time, they sent us all out to Phoenix, put all the finalists in a room together in front of a TV and basically told us we would find out live who is winning. Yeah – Oh, my goodness; that we would find out as soon as the first quarter ended; who won one of our music videos would air on TV. So at this point I’m feeling very sick, I hate this. But I remember it very clearly, the screen – the first quarter ends and screen goes black, which is the beginning of the commercial, it’s very dramatic like that. And then before I could see anything, I heard my guitar start playing and I lost it and I was there with my family and we basically crumpled into this sobbing heap.

This is a picture from the newspaper the next day, looks like someone died. I assure you we were incredibly happy at this moment. I actually have a fun little video of my family back home in LA finding out too.

[Video clip plays] (She won! She won!)

So that was that, there was a lot of crying. Thank you.

It was a very intense emotional time, but eventually it set in. I won and 95 million people had potentially just heard my song and I was signed to Interscope, I had it all.

[Kina Grannis] Source: LYBIO.net
But lots, lots of months went by of waiting and nothing was happening and by the time I did get that meeting with the label, it became very clear that we kind of had different visions. They wanted me to scrap the album I had already written and write a new one with song writers that they choose.

And for me, music has always been very personal, something that I do in the middle of the night by myself, for myself and so the idea of sitting in a room with a stranger writing a song I don’t really care that much about, it didn’t really appeal to me all that much.

Now meanwhile, those six months that I was waiting not talking to the label, I was talking to all of these people online and I was still doing weekly videos, I was basically living and breathing social media and it was amazing my numbers were growing and this community was building online. And at some point I started realizing these people are supporting me because I’m me and because I’m making music I want to make, not the music some label is telling me I should be making.

And so eventually, it gave me the confidence to think maybe I can do this on my own and I did just that. I ended up leaving the label to make my album on my own. And I released it basically with the help of my family and a small army of Kinerds online and that first week it chartered on Billboard and iTunes and basically our brains are exploding. But we’re like, oh my gosh, something – something is working here and it was an incredible feeling.

From there, I started touring, which was incredible for me because for the first time ever I was seeing this world that I’d built online in real life. And I remember playing shows and recognizing faces in the audience that I’d only ever known in the context of like very tiny profile pictures on Twitter and Facebook. So it’s really incredible. I did meet and greet after all the shows and met everyone. For me mostly it was a time where I could finally thank these people face to face for allowing me to do what I love everyday.

But another thing I noticed while I was on tour is that the songs that they were most excited about where my original songs that I had made official music videos for. And in a sense in this new way I was creating that these music videos kind of acted as radio singles, so it seemed to make a lot of sense to put more time and energy into making really great art for my original songs.

That led me to my most ambitious project to date, which was a project that took nearly two years to finish. It was a stop motion animation video made entirely out of jelly beans, a quarter of a million jelly beans. I forgot there is one of my Kinerds, but here we go, they are all jelly beans.

[Kina Grannis] Source: LYBIO.net
So we embark on this project, did not expect it to take that long. Finally, we finish it. It was self funded, everyone donated their time and think goodness it did end some day. I ended up releasing it out into the world via my social media networks at mid-night one night. And by the time I woke up I found that it had played on Good Morning America. What! So that was cool. It kind of just kept spreading, people liking and believing and sharing with friends and before I knew it I was playing on Ellen and Jimmy Kimmel live and it was covered in Time Magazine and so it was a really amazing thing that happened from this. And I was so successful in fact that I decided to go on a third headlining tour in support of my album Stairwells. But this time it was a world tour and this time it was sponsored by Jelly Belly. So it worked out kind of well. Thank you.

So as you can see it’s been an interesting exciting journey for me and I would have never imagined five years ago that I would be doing the things that I’m doing today.

But I certainly would have never imagined that it all would have started connecting with people all over the world from a laptop in my bedroom. So it’s not the most typical of paths, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Thank you so much. It’s been such an honor to talk to you.

Kina Grannis – Finding Community Through The Internet. The song I just played for you, “message from your heart”, it’s been an incredibly important song in my story. Complete Full Transcript, Dialogue, Remarks, Saying, Quotes, Words And Text.