SharkFarmerXM's podcast
SJ McDonald from Lexington, VA 6-24-24
Unstoppable. Unshakable. But it rolls out for town. Unbreakable. It's unavoidable. You saw her later, but we're between the last start to loosen up your mouth. Hey, welcome again to Shark Farmer Radio. Hey, I'm your host Rob Sharky. We're in the studio today, just outside of Bradford, Illinois studio powered by Beck's hybrid. Actually, I'm lying. We're going. We are. It's fun, though. It's fun to mislead you all the audience. It's fun. Yeah, you're speaking in Vernal, Utah. And I was so excited when we booked the speech because I thought, oh my gosh, you're speaking the day before our anniversary. We're at 28 years. And I have wanted to go to Utah to see the arches, arches and canyon lands all around Moab, Utah for years. So we're going to do that after you speak. A tenth of what it's like in the pictures. Oh my goodness. I mean, it's definitely Instagram-y for sure. That is totally worth it. Yeah. So no, I'm excited. I hope we're having fun. I hope we're not sweating too much. Oh, you know, it's going to be pretty darn hot. Yeah, we're going to have to take the tank tops. But yeah. All right. Fun one today. We're going to go to, well, Lexington, Virginia, via Nashville, Tennessee. We're going to talk with S.J. McDonald. How are you doing, S.J? Hey, I'm so good. How are you all? Doing pretty good. You are currently in Nashville. Is that right? Yes. Nashville, Tennessee, home of country music. And Lexington, Virginia. I didn't even know Virginia had a Lexington. There are so many Lexington's everywhere, which is the Shenandoah Valley, right? Yes. We're sort of perched right between the Appalachian Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains. There's a really pretty valley between the two and it's heaven on earth. I have this feeling like when we were kids, you'd go to grade school and every day you'd stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Like you guys, after that, you would have to sing some John Denver song. Country roads, we can get into that right now. Because I don't know if y'all have heard the controversy about that song, but my grandma, she is born and raised in Virginia. In Virginia, Phil woman, she will just hammer this to no end. That country roads is actually about Western Virginia. And not West Virginia, yeah. Not West Virginia, because like the Shenandoah River is only in Virginia. Now, it's staying close to the border of West Virginia. So I'm like, I'll bring it up to Virginia people, but when I'm with West Virginia people, I'm like, I won't pick flight. Yeah, you have to, you have to look at the room, right? You know, S.J. on this show, what we've learned is, you know, you never say, you never say Trump, you never say Biden, you never say wind turbine. And I'm going to say, we're not going to get involved in this one either. No, it's a little too controversial. That's the controversy. Well, and grandma's always right. So yeah, I would go team grandma. You're so right. If you're listening, grandma, you are right. I stand by you. You are an incredible singer, but also grew up on a farm, huh? Yes. Well, you know, once I moved to Nashville, I realized that what I grew up on is considered a ranch, but they don't call it that where I'm from. Not east of the Mississippi. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I grew up on a cattle and turkey farm. My dad and my dad, daddy, that's what I call my granddad. I love that. I know. Dad, daddy, everybody start implementing that. It's a great name. It's a, I think I'm fifth generation. There's been a lot of McDonald's before me. Okay. It's a different than the restaurant, I'm assuming. I know. Yeah. When I was a kid, I was trying to get this count. Showing your ID. Now, when you're talking a turkey farm, you're talking a big turkey farm, right? Yes. So they have like two 800-foot turkey houses with a half of the house is for like babies because the baby toms get delivered right after they're born. And then there's a grow out. And that's like huge for the big end. Okay. Can you tell me a story, please? Because I've heard that you bought a guitar selling a 4-H market steer. Yes. I am the living proof that even if you're a terrible showmanship person in the 4-H, you can still make enough money selling your steer to buy a guitar. How old were you? I was about 13, I think. My brother, I have four younger siblings, but the oldest of my younger siblings and I were showing steers together at that point. We always picked them right from the farm. So they were big and meaty. They weren't those fancy club steers that everybody had. But we had a history of having like the fattest steers, like 1,400 pound steers every year. And I was so at that age, I was so just, I wanted to play music. And so I neglected training my steers. So they were never the best in the ring. They always went a little, got a little antsy. You're the one, you're the one that the steer got away from, the one that everybody talked about. That did happen to me at the state fair, I think it broke. But we made it and sold the steer at the Rockbridge County 4-H Stockman sale. And my grandma took me to get a guitar in Roanoke, Virginia, days later. And I picked up the most simple version of a guitar by Taylor Guitars. I kid you guys not every person in Nashville has this guitar. But I picked it up and I fell in love and it was cheap. I had a little money left over to put into the college fund because that's the whole point of the 4-H for kids. Aside from learning responsibility, but brought that guitar home and I played it to this day. That's awesome. And at 13, that's probably all you needed, I would guess. Yeah, that's all I needed. I did buy an international scout with some of that money at 1.2. Oh, there we go. All right, SJ. We do need to go to break. Today, we're talking with SJ McDonald's from Alexi, Kentucky. I'm sorry, Alexi, 10, Virginia. Yeah, it's now living in Nashville. I knew I'd do that. All right, we'll be back. All right, up to the break. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io. That's commonground.io. All right, Emily, her favorite town is Nashville. What'd you say? I mean, your city, favorite city. Well, favorite city, I mean, because I feel like it's a second home because we're there, tape and shark farmer TV all the time. And I just love the people. I mean, you know, you meet people from all over the world there. And when you tell them you're a farmer and you want to ask them some questions, I can't believe I don't get told no that often. You had to learn that doing the man on the street interviews because you would say, "Hey, do you want to answer some questions?" And there's a camera sitting right there. People always think you're going to be making fun of them. But what trick did you learn? Well, I learned to not say, "Hey, do you want to be on shark farmer TV?" I said, "Hey, we're farmers from Illinois. Can we ask you some questions? We all make fun." Use the farmer thing to break down that. That's right. And I don't get people. In fact, that's how we found SJ. Some good friends of hers, you know, we asked to be on the TV show and she said, "Oh, we've got a friend." And that's how we met SJ here. So you never know who you're going to meet. Never, never know. So funny. I give props to you, Emily, for doing that. And Rob, because I have this thing on my Instagram where I carry a miniature microphone. It's about like, I don't know, an inch or two long. I plug it into my phone and I do a thing called mini mic updates on my social media. Well, I sometimes take that mini mic with me downtown to Broadway to ask people questions to promote my new music. And it's nerve-wracking. Just walking up to people and being like, "Can I film you and ask you things?" It is not a fun job to ask people because people don't want to talk or whatever. If it wasn't for Emily, it would not get done. I will say that. Oh, you're sweet. I have had to learn a trick or two, though. Yeah. People want to be left alone. Yeah, you trip people. That helps. Like the elderly. I stick my boot out of town then. S.J., what age did you realize that you could sing? Well, probably about like, I say seven or eight, but I will say I've been singing since I came out of the womb. It was said by one of my aunts that when I was born, she was like, "Oh my gosh, the lungs on that day." I guess I was screaming really loud. It has always been what I wanted to do. Was your family supportive? Because sometimes when people say I want to go follow my dreams in Nashville, there's a lot of eye rolling. My family have never questioned it. I cannot tell you a single day that they have questioned it. And that's surprising, because all they know is the farm. I mean, and that's such a different way of life than it is in Nashville. But the moment I said that I wanted to go, they just said, "Okay." And when I'd give them random calls and be like, "I'm playing a show in downtown Nashville till 3 a.m." They're like, "Okay, be safe." They've always been very trusting. I've made a lot of interesting calls home being like, "Yes, but I got myself into." And they're like, "I can just tell they're on the other side of the phone going, "Okay, breathe." It's fine. It's fine. Well, and you know, you kind of went about this a different way. I mean, you've been on Broadway singing for like six and a half years, but you used that money to put yourself through Belmont University? Yes, I did. I will pre-visit with, I had some nice grants from FAFSA, which really helped. And actually, some grants for school through like the local turkey co-op that my parents worked for. They helped give me some scholarships, but everything that was left, I used singing for myself or for it. And honestly, I'm so blessed to have been able to do that because it gave me a little more financial freedom outside of college, less student loans to deal with. You know, that's a blessing. It's not on my notes here, Emily, but I think when you were reading the stuff about SJ, you said she played on South Broadway? Is that right? It's called Lower Broadway. Lower Broadway. What is... I just... I didn't know what that was. That's basically where y'all go downtown and there's a million bars. Oh, so I kind of like... And they all play time for me. The strip there where you get kid rocks and... Oh, gosh, I can't remember the old old one. The one that everybody started in. Yes, yeah, that place. Well, I've heard that's extremely hard to get to play there. How did you go about it besides being really good? Oh, that's sweet. Well, believe it or not, I found it my first gig on Facebook. There's a whole Facebook group of musicians for Nashville and my old guitar player from back in Virginia just happened to be on that Facebook group and found someone looking for a singer on Wednesday nights at a bar called The Stage on Broadway. And it was my first week in town. I came to school with $2,500 in my pocket and I said, "I can make this work for the year." Looking back, I was very naive because, oh my gosh, that would have been a miracle. But I responded to the Facebook post. They said, "Come on down." I put on so much makeup because I was 18 and I was trying to look older. Just imagine, I look like a raccoon with how much eyeliner I had on. But by the grace of God, they said, "Yes, you can come sing in our band." And I played every Wednesday for a year. And then that band quit and I, by that point, had met other bands down there just through hanging out. And I got three gigs a week steady and I did that for like five years. So I always wondered about this because being a songwriter and having your own stuff, sometimes that is not what you get on Broadway. You know, Broadway, they want the same 12 songs that everybody wants to hear. Did you find out a challenge of playing for crowds like that when you had all these great songs that you had been writing? Yeah, it was definitely, I'd say the first three years, I wasn't as confident about myself as an artist. And I was just using it as a way to keep a roof over my head, keep playing Belmont University. But once I really got into it, I started to implement my own songs because the cool thing about Nashville is there's a lot of people like yourselves that frequent Nashville. They love coming down to hear their original music. So once I started to make relationships with people in the crowd, they would come back and they would come back after listening to my songs on Spotify and start to ask for them. So I sort of said, screw it. I want to be an artist. I am an artist. I'm just going to start throwing some of my originals in there. What did it feel like the first time that, you know, you're in the crowd and somebody asks for a song you wrote? It is a, oh my God, it worked kind of feeling. Like holy cow, it worked. Yeah, that had to be. So I couldn't imagine. There's got to be so many incredible victories you've had along the way, but that has to rank up there. It really has. And recently I've been playing some shows all over the country the past three or four years. Recently I played a show in Wisconsin of all places and I had people showing up driving like four, five, seven hours to the show. People I'd never met before who just found me online. I was like, holy cow. Well, when you got talent, they will come. All right, we got to go to break. Today we're talking with S.J. McDonald. We're going to talk about the more country music and I've got a lot of very dumb questions, but it's going to be fun. We'll be back. All right after the break. [music] This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io. That's commonground.io. [music] You know, a lot of people think they're busy in that. I was just looking at S.J.'s schedule, which is all this places she's going. My gosh, you do some traveling, don't you? Where are you going this summer? I caught the bug and I am chasing after it. It was sort of chasing me down. I'm going to a lot of places this summer. I'm playing in Iowa and back home in Virginia and I'm doing a bunch of rodeos. I randomly applied to seeing the national anthem at the Greeley Stampede in Colorado and at the Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming. AKA the daddy of them all. That is the daddy of them all. I'm going and I'm so nervous and excited and honored. I just randomly applied and didn't even think that it would happen. So here we are. I always thought it would be hard to do what you are doing because it's so oversaturated with talent. You go down to Broadway on Nashville. You're not going to hear a bad singer. There's a lot of great people there that have all this, but you're sticking out. If you haven't heard SJ sing, just go listen to her and you won't be disappointed. CMT, that's country music, television. Next up now, spotlight of the month of May. It's good to get validation, but to get that out of my gosh, are you still floating around? I am still absolutely floating. That's one of those things that you dream of as a kid. It's like the equivalent of RFD TV for farmers is CMT for musicians. I couldn't believe it actually happened because a friend of mine named May Estes, who is also an incredible artist, she introduced me to the people at CMT and I submitted a video. Again, it's just like those national anthems. I thought nothing would come of it. I hadn't heard from them in weeks and then I got an email that I was their artist for May. They played the video for my song "Break a Cowboy" three times a day for the month of May. That's so cool. That's fantastic. One of those emails that you stop and you go, "Oh my gosh, you're jumping up and down before you finish the email." It's working. Holy cow, I could tell the people in my hometown that I actually accomplished something. With a singer like yourself, we've talked to ones that signed a deal. We talked with ones that didn't sign a deal. I'd say there's definitely hard pros and hard cons to both. What's your situation? Well, I signed a publishing deal this past January with major Bob Music. That's the home of artists like Garth Brooks and a new guy that's popping up everywhere, Zach Top. Garth Brooks. I'll look at him. I'll look him up. I'll look him up. For me, the pros were, I get to focus solely on writing songs and trying to book shows because I'm independent elsewhere. I don't have a label or booking agent or a manager or nothing, except for somebody putting me in co-writes and rooms with people. It gave me that freedom. It got me mainly off of Lower Broadway, because Lower Broadway has been amazing to me, but that's not the end-all be-all for me. The end-all be-all is getting on the opera stage and basically living on a tour bus and being on tour. How Laney Wilson has been this past year, that's what I want to do. Publishing deal is basically I get paid to write songs, and that's my first city paycheck ever in my life. It's been making such an incredible difference in making it so that I can go travel the country and play shows, go these rodeos, write with these incredible writers that I look up to. That is my pro for it. The cons are you give up some of your publishing, but you got to give something to get something. Is a publishing deal different than a record deal? Yes. A publishing deal just involves the songs. They will take part of your royalties that you make off of a song, and that will go into the company because the company is paying you a salary. Now a record deal entails like they will pay a radio promotion team to put you on the radio. They'll call the grandal opera and get you on the opera. They'll hook you up with a booking agent and get you on the road. The record deal is the big end, but also a publishing deal is such an honor to have because there's only a couple hundred of those in Nashville. A publisher at another company told me that and that really put it into perspective about like this is really sort of a one in a million kind of thing. I was going to say there's 12 million singers in Nashville. If there's only a couple hundred of these, I would say that's pretty rare. Making your dreams come true, girls. That's what you're doing. It is, and it's all because of great people around me that support me. It's just like an ad where everybody comes to help each other. It's the same thing in Nashville. I truly believe that I would not be where I am today without the amazing people that champion me. Just like the friend that introduced y'all to me on the streets of Nashville, those are the reasons that we get where we're going. Does this publishing deal, again, stupid? I don't know. Does that get you on the radio? Apparently that's a separate deal. You know, just having like the online songs compared to getting on the radio. Yes, the publishing deal does not. But a publishing deal will get me in the room with hit songwriters. And then they will take my songs and pitch them to artists like Garth Brooks. If Garth Brooks was wanting to put out an album and needed a certain kind of song, if I had that song in my catalog, my publisher would send that to Garth's people and let them play it for him and decide if he wanted to release the song or not. That's fantastic. It must feel good to be around a table with creative minds and coming up with music. And I mean, that's just, that's got to be a shot in the arm. It has been an incredible experience. And I'm only six months into it. And I'm really excited to see just where I grow because you learn something more every day. There's no better way to learn about the music business than just be in the trenches. You're going to make mistakes, but that's just with anything. Yeah. Do you do that deal where they like take a bunch of writers and throw them in a room with like a loaf of bread and a bottle of whiskey and lock the door for four days until you come out with something good? I do that with some friends every once in a while. There's a group of girls that I write songs with that will about once a year go somewhere for four days, hold up in a house and maybe write three songs a day. I think they're eating better than a loaf of bread though. We do it good. I usually gain a couple pounds on those trips. We're eating good. Yeah. Do you like the writing part of it? I do. I love it. It's so exciting when a song comes together and you have an aha moment or like everybody in the room gets goosebumps. And you're like, "Well, I think maybe the song has a chance of making someone smile, making someone cry, changing their life." That's how I felt about a song that I played on RFD TV last week called "Right Hand Man." I wrote it about being my dad's right hand man. It goes, "Daddy's little girl was his right hand man." It's the only a firm girl could write that because the line in there about they don't sell ballerina shoes at TSC. No, they sure don't, but they sell a lot of Justin Boots. SJ, if people do want to hear you want to find you social media, internet, all that stuff, where did they go? I am all over the internet. I like to say I'm on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, farmers only name it. Boy, a lot of young men just perked up didn't they? Yes they did. Oh my, so my socials are just SJ, McDonald music. And that's S for spicy, J for jalapeno, and McDonald for, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. I'm all over me. SJ, congratulations. It's one thing to hustle and be successful, but you gotta have the talent behind you. All you gotta do is go listen to her stuff and you will know what I'm talking about. Thank you SJ very much. Everybody else, we'll catch you next time. [MUSIC]