New Heights, Going Solo, and Creating Fanded: A Conversation with Travis Atreo

MIXED ASIAN MEDIA - December 17, 2021

By Lauren Lola

The day before his interview with Mixed Asian Media, Travis Atreo was announced as a nominee for Best Global Recording of the Year at this year’s Awit Awards, for his song, “Fix Me,” featuring Amber Liu. He was in shock, as he had never been nominated for an award of this magnitude before, but is super grateful and appreciative of everyone who had collaborated on it.

“When I heard the song, I instantly fell in love with it,” he stated, “and my friend Jonny [Keenan], he wrote it from the perspective of a person going through a breakup and feeling really insecure about themselves and losing their own identity. From all the things that Amber has been through in her career and all that, she really resonated with the lyrics a lot. So it ended up coming out really great, and I'm just honored that people resonate with it. Honestly, that's the biggest thing.”

It's been years of hard work and perseverance for Atreo to get to this point. Prior to making a name for himself as a singer-songwriter in the digital space, he was brought up in Federal Way; a suburb about half an hour south of Seattle. While he had a really good childhood, he didn’t live in the safest neighborhood, with all the crime that would take place.

He also talked about how his family was poor, but didn’t realize it as he was growing up, as his parents shielded that reality from him as much as possible.

“I thought that my mom loved Kix,” he said. “I thought that she just loved buying it. And lo and behold, years later I realized that the reason why we got so much Kix cereal growing up was because we were on welfare and a lot of it was government issued.”

While Federal Way has a predominantly Korean population, Atreo – who is Filipino and Spanish on his mom’s side and Filipino and Scottish on his dad’s side – was brought up both in a Filipino household and church. He hasn’t publicly spoken a lot about being mixed-race due to the Filipino community being very inclusive, so he never really felt that different.

That’s not to say he hasn’t struggled with the nuances of his mixed-race identity though. As he elaborated, “Obviously, being mixed race, is very interesting sometimes, from a community standpoint, and I think people just don't know a lot of the time, especially a lot of Filipinos and people in Asia don't necessarily know. So it can be difficult. I've definitely wrestled with that in my heart of hearts growing up, sometimes being like, ‘I don't look like them.’ But again, like I said, I think that my upbringing was really aided by the fact that all of my best friends grew up in that church together and no one ever made me feel any different.”

It's from his involvement with the church that began his journey in the music world. At 13, Atreo started leading praise for the church band. His grandmother Cecilia — whose name he has tattooed onto his left forearm — encouraged his mom to sign him up for vocal lessons when he was 14. She also was the one who gave him his first guitar at 15.

“She taught me my first chords,” he recalled. “She was an orchestra teacher, actually, and a school principal. My entire life is like, it was always her dream.”

A year after graduating high school, Atreo helped form (and became the lead singer for) the Seattle indie rock band, New Heights. Having been a part of it for a majority of his 20s, he really felt he became an adult through being a part of that experience. Formed in the early years of YouTube and social media, such platforms were not recognized as the tools they’ve come to be for independent creatives now. That’s why, in the beginning, New Heights would go on tours to perform in order to gain a following.

“We made some smiley faces across the U.S. I like to say,” he reflected, “and when we came back, it was like we realized that the Internet was such a great tool for people. That's when we decided to start partnering with YouTube artists in California, and we started doing covers and things like that. And then that's when [our single] ‘Peaches’ really started to take off, and it was because of that whole discovery, right? Because we realized the potential of YouTube to help break an artist was massive.”

New Heights disbanded in the mid-2010s over not being able to make the band a full-time job. While Atreo hopes that they can do another album and tour eventually, he wishes his former bandmates well and stays in touch with them as much as he can.

In an effort to take on a new challenge, Atreo moved to Los Angeles to become a music producer, not thinking that he would ever perform again. He was managing the studio of a friend of his, Jon Chang, who, at the time, managed several Asian American independent artists popularly known through YouTube like Jason Chen, Clara Chung, and David Choi.

The two had this arrangement where Atreo would both help create their cover songs, and also mix and engineer their originals. The trade-off: he could use the studio for free for his own projects.

While he started off producing for other artists, he eventually started recording his own music. “I missed creating something for myself,” he said, “It was because of my fiancée, Ally [Maki], and her best friend, Colton [Haynes], when we all lived together, they were both just like, ‘You should just do it for yourself. You've been creating music your entire life for the band, but you should just start making things, even if it's a cover, just start doing it.’”

And so that’s what he did. He started off by doing covers and monetizing them through a company called Soundrop (formerly known as Loudr). With the income he was generating, Atreo felt motivated to give a go at a solo career. Taylor Swift sharing his cover of her song, “Style,” on Twitter sparked additional belief in himself.

“I really took that as, ‘Well, if she believes, or at least if she was compelled enough by something I did that she tweeted about it, then maybe I should give this another shot,’” he reminisced. “I just used it as a signal of what's to come. So I was like, ‘You know what? I'm going to try this one more time, and let's see what can happen.’”

A lot has happened since. To date, his music has been streamed over 250 million times and listened to by 30 million people. The statistics boggle Atreo’s mind even now, but he remains grateful for the dreams that have panned into fruition.

As a solo artist, his songs are notable for their earworm-worthy melody and endearing lyrics. The former is what initially draws Atreo in when crafting a song of his own. An example is his biggest original to date, “Somehow,” where the chorus came to him before going into the studio and figuring out the rest.

“It usually starts with melody for me because it's that silver bullet into my heart,” he explained. “If I hear a song and the melody is just beautiful to me personally, they could just hum the melody and I'll just be in love. So my process as an artist usually starts with the melody of something.”

As a producer, it’s the opposite approach, as he works on songs that have already been created, and the next step is for him to add to it. Atreo has his own production company where he has a couple of good friends working with him on this now.

While Asian American artists like Olivia Rodrigo and H.E.R. are dominating the music scene now, for the longest time, that wasn’t always the case. Even when Atreo was still with New Heights, he was made aware early on that people like him were an uncommon sight, and in the case of his very first performance with the band, unwelcome.

“It was a Battle of the Bands. We were the only full Asian band,” he recalled, “and during our set, this angry white guy, just one guy out of nowhere, just starts screaming, ‘Go home.’ And he's screaming at us, and he's looking at me, ‘Go home. Go home.’ We're like, ‘What is going on?’ It took us a long time to even realize that it was a racist attack.”

His dad was at that first performance. A Marine veteran, he was quick to silence the racist by shouting back, “You go home!” and later got him to apologize to Atreo and the rest of the band.

“Even though I don't recall that story a lot, I think it still has an impact on every decision I make to this day,” Atreo reflected. “I think it's still so much of that reminder to me that even with all the progress that we've made, there's still so much more to go. And on top of that, we can't just rest on our laurels. We can't expect the world to do the things that we want them to do, like be inclusive. We have to do the work, and we have to put in the time and the effort to build these systems that actually and ultimately benefit our people and all Asian Americans in this country.”

His desire to build systems that actually benefit people is what led him to create Fanded; a crowdfunding platform that allows fans and superfans to invest in the projects of their favorite independent artists. It goes beyond similar platforms like Kickstarter, where one donates to a campaign and receives a perk in return.

“For us at Fanded, we're here to say, ‘Well, if you're investing in an album, then there's a third perk, which is you get to share in the potential revenue of that, and then you also get to own a piece of that IP, of that album that you can then sell and trade on a secondary market at a different time, if you'd like,’” he explained. “But it really is just about fans supporting their favorite independent artists, and especially for artists that don't want to go the traditional route of signing to a label.”

The main issue for independent artists like Atreo is that they have no label or someone to infuse capital into their projects because they take time. While he did sign a distribution deal with Warner Music Philippines prior to the pandemic in an effort to create inroads to the country, he still needed financing options. The ones that were available to him were to either sign a label or sign a contract with a company who would purchase 50 percent of his portfolio; neither of which he favored.

“I started to look at crowdfunding, and I started to look at equity crowdfunding,” he said, “and it all just started to make sense. I felt like the thing that I learned was global pandemics, and global events, they end up accelerating the rate of technology and new tech adoption. And I knew that in this pandemic there was going to be a lot... I mean, look at the crypto space, look at everything that's going on. The world has accelerated.

“I started to examine the world and started to examine just the economic forces at hand, and I just thought, ‘I think that the world is now economically aligned for something like Fanded to exist.’ I don't think it could have existed before the pandemic, but now that we're in this and getting hopefully on the sooner end, I think that the world is finally ready for something like this.”

Atreo credits his grandmother Cecilia for the creation of Fanded. The same woman who encouraged his early music ambitions could have pursued a similar path as him, had she had the resources to do so.

“My mom told me this story. She goes, ‘Growing up, your grandma would always sing these songs in the house,’” he explained, “and my mom always thought that they were just like Filipino folk songs, like old songs, whatever. One day my mom asked her, ‘What are these songs?’ And my grandma said that they're her songs. She just doesn't write them. She writes them in her head, in her heart, but she doesn't write them down. I mean, to be able to memorize all those songs and write them without writing them down is just amazing.

“But my mom was crying,” he continued. “She was saying that if my grandma had lived in a time like this where something like Fanded existed, she would have actually written them down because it would have meant that she could possibly have had a career. And I think the thing that I'm so excited about Fanded for and why I'm so passionate is because I feel like it's the culmination of my entire life journey and my grandma's journey together. And I tell my mom every time I talk to her, I'm like, ‘Grandma's vision is coming to life.’ Because all she wanted to do was help people see their potential.”

Fanded is scheduled to launch next year. While the specifics of when is unknown at this time, Atreo is aiming for January. The first project that’s set to launch from it is the new album of fellow independent artist, AJ Rafael.

In the meantime, throughout the holidays, Atreo is releasing a series of music videos on his YouTube channel for his EP he released at the beginning of the year, Digital Feels; a compilation of acoustic versions of his favorite original songs.

As far as new music goes, he has had an album in the works for a while now. Listeners can also expect for it to come out next year, once he has figured out how to strategize and go about it. “I think what we might do is release singles monthly. And then once all of them are released, they'll all be in one album for everyone,” he commented.

Lauren Lola is an author, freelance writer, playwright, and screenwriter from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of the novels, An Absolute Mind and A Moment’s Worth. She has written plays that have been produced both virtually and in-person for theatre groups on the West Coast of the United States, and has penned the short films, “Breath of Writing” and “Interview with an Aswang.” Aside from Mixed Asian Media, Lauren has also had writing featured on The Nerds of Color, CAAMedia, PBS, YOMYOMF, and other outlets and publications.

You can find Lauren on Twitter and Instagram @akolaurenlola and on her website, www.lolabythebay.wordpress.com.