I’m fascinated by people – people like Sean in particular.
People who are authentically showing up – unabashed in their optimism – showcasing their skills and talents & bringing positive change to the world.
Seams of Dreams is dope and that alone would earn a Spotlight, however Sean is a multiple threat and his insights into web3 and AI are well worth your time. So – take 5 minutes – hit play on Seams of Dreams and read on …
What song of yours should we be listening to while we read your answers?
Definitely “Seams of Dreams”.
Why this song? ;-p
Lyrically its the most lucid & versatile I’ve been in a while, and on top of that, I feel that it does the best job of articulating where I’ve been at as of lately.
If you could get one kind of live show happening in ATL tomorrow, what would it look and feel like, and how would you sell it to an audience that’s never seen you?
I’m grateful you asked this question, because its actually been quite a while since I’ve had an in-person live performance. Let me just paint this picture as idealistically as I can at a sensible level.
If I were to perform in ATL tomorrow, I would likely want to do so at a venue called Block & Drum. I would want it to be the most relaxing, absorbing experience. The lights there are warm & low, feels very speakeasy. There’s an abundance of plants, couches & booths. There’s an outside area with a stage with a massive screen that you can see from inside & out. I’d like the performance to flow from inside to outside & back as I move through the audience.
There would be hot tea served, with kettles of hot water & tea options at the ready. There’s a bar as welll, for those who wish.
I’d want the pacing to feel very immersive, very storyteller at a camp fire type energy, but with bursts of high energy for the excitement felt for an impeccable delivery of lyrical cadence.
Selling & marketing myself is likely an area I need the greatest improvement. Open to ideas here for sure. I’m very much the “hey come to my jam, I’ve got cool bars. No? okay welll tell a friend” type vibe 🤣
You wear many hats, but with your visionary hat on – what kind of future can musical artists look forward to?
A future of true ownership, and unencumbered collaboration. That’s my hope at least. To make the music feel seamless again & without the headache of so much red tape.
Instantaneous payments, automatic splits, and more independence — less of the conglomerates squeezing the artists dry for all their worth.
Of course, Web3 is the greatest opportunity & catalyst towards this kind of change. I’ve seen the efforts, however it will really take a move of mass adoption & a fundamental shift in the music-listener’s experience… it is not an easy chasm to cross. Sadly streaming services have raced the value of music completely to the bottom of the barrel. Now consumers are all too adjusted to paying $10 a month for the entire world’s catalog of music… and the artists have to fight for the attention of the masses to even make a living wage.
I imagine a world where music artists can look forward to people truly valuing their work, gleefully opening up their wallets to patron & support their creativity, and earning a life of abundance in that fashion with their core audience.
Beyond that, I am excited for a more integrated & thoughtful music experience. Having true provenance of musical patronage, keeping playlist curations onchain & immutable so that they don’t fade out of existence due to a platform being sunset. Music being heralded as the social unifier that it is.
You’re active on Farcaster, a web3 social platform, why are you spending your time there?
I’m hopeful honestly, that’s why. I like to engage myself where I feel a sense of gravity & alignment. Similar to why I use Notion. There’s just rational & logical considerations that made a lot of sense to me as to why I would select Farcaster over another web3 social platform.
A primary factor was the invite from @Colin, who founded Paragraph.com, a platform I was also exploring early on & for which I was also hopeful, providing feedback. That alone was enough for me to consider it thoughtfully, but once I got on there I actually found it quite intriguing to engage with the specific set of individuals I was seeing on there.
Yet the most convincing moment for me was when I saw that the Farcaster protocol was adopted by Coinbase & Coinbase Wallet. That was an incredibly bullish signal, and I was around when the announcement was first made. I knew that this meant Farcaster had the greatest potential to be the web3 social protocol adopted by the masses.
Plus, it was wide open waters, an untapped domain & very few Hip-Hop music artists like myself existed there at the time. So I felt that it would likely be a bit easier to stand out there than anywhere else.
WAGMI is part of web3 culture – how did that end up as a track (a very joyous track at that!)?
It indeed started with web3. I was around during the 2021/2022 NFT moon (& subsequent crash), but the ethos was very much WAGMI / NGMI talk all across X (Twitter). The saying was sticky and it really was a bullish phrase to encourage the possibility of everyone being able to do well within the space.
When I first released WAGMI, I did so as a NFT drop on ETH via OpenSea, a limited edition of 10,000. I also had other variations of the track I was going to release across other chains (sung version, screwed version, etc). I actually had the Lofi version on Tezos via Hic et Nunc; but then that one vanished off the face of the earth.
After the excitement died down & the sentiments around the WAGMI saying were waning, I didn’t want to let it. Beyond that, I genuinely felt like I had made an amazing song. And so, during some opportunities I had to perform live while with my Connected Camping family, I would perform that song.
My bro Christian Ahmed told me “I got one” — he really liked the song and wanted me to continue performing it. I of course felt even more of the same with that encouragement.
In my mind, WAGMI was a mantra that transcended a moment and the niche of web3. It was an ideal, a north star; an aspiration for which to strive. So I continued to speak life into it in that way.
Christian then went the extra lengths to encourage me that it was time to turn that song into a real record. So we thought up the WAGMI (We.Mix), brought on my bro Kareem Manuel who is the founder of We.Society (so it just made so much sense), plus Ebonee Davis, KP who reworked the original instrumental I produced, and Coletrane Williams who is a phenomenal artist & contributed some amazing backing vocals towards the end of the song (no seriously, he’s incredible go check out his album “Melody Black” with Yawny Keys).
And so that’s how it came to be what it is today, and I’m so very grateful for the journey it has taken to get here, and I hope there’s even more life that gets breathed into it each day.
What’s an app or piece of tech or just something that’s caught your attention recently?
I could go on & on about this to be honest lol. I have a Notion database to keep track of all the tech platforms & apps that I use or wish to keep an eye on. I’ll give 3 that may not be flashy but that I use heavily as of late & really improve my workflows:
- LeaderKey → a quick key launcher
- SuperWhisper → an AI voice-to-text too.
- Default Folder X → enhanced open & save dialog modals for Mac
What would you share with an artist who doesn’t know where to start with Web3 music?
Stay patient, stay flexible. Just because web3 is new, doesn’t mean the game has fundamentally changed. You still have to create, you still have to market, you still have to be consistent, you still have to sell. Pace yourself while exploring the new paradigms that exist. Don’t burn yourself out attempting to leverage it all at once. Do not let your perfectionism block you from necessary experimentation. Just get your work out there. Iterate in real time with your audience as best you can.
You talk about AI “validating” your inner visionary — what does that mean? How are you feeling about the “AI”
In the duality of Visionary & Operator, I feel that I lean more into being a visionary; however, I’ve had to be an operator to some grand extent throughout the years, as painstaking as it has been.
With AI, and the emergence of Agents now, I truly feel that I as a Visionary can really & truly begin to lean into my visionary mindset, and work on articulating that vision at the higher levels, rather than having to manually work through some of the monotonous & rote operational tasks that just had to be done to progress on my visions before.
I believe at this point AI is here to stay in one form or another, and I would be foolish not to leverage it as best I can. There’s so many applications for it, and ways that it can help alleviate operational pressures for me as an independent creative entrepreneur.
Even in the conversations of AI for use in creativity… I may have a surprising take on this. With generative AI across the various mediums (image, video, audio, etc.), many are concerned for many valid reasons. Copyright protection, ownership, royalties & payment for works used to train the models. These are certainly very real challenges that will need to be addressed with some real sense of recompense.
Yet & still… I knew since time immemorial, that art is about perspective conveyed. Art is more often than not what the visionary wished for others to be able to perceive. Its a matter of perception & feeling. Craft is certainly an aspect of it too, and just because AI is here, does not mean that craft or that quality of perception are going away. They are simply changing. And generative AI will broaden the expanse of those who consider themselves capable of being an artist; similar to how the camera opened up a new avenue of artistry for those who did not paint. Of course there will be a refute on this, as there has been in the past. Time will continue forward though, and change will be our constant as it has always been.
I’ve seen people put some lackluster, AI slop content out there… yet I’ve also seen some truly remarkable things done with the assistance of generative AI, and have genuinely gleaned a new perspective impressed upon me by these kinds of AI-wielding artist & what they are beginning to share with the world. Things that invoke a sense of wonder, and even while the matter is different, still with a sense of “how did they do this?” which is typical of traditional arts. And for those that know, when you dive into the weeds of some of these creations & their creators, sometimes there truly is still a deep measure of craft, consideration, perspective, storytelling & dare I say soul involved.
Lastly, let us say that my own artistry is used to train an AI model somewhere out in the world, and someone uses that AI to create something that has an expression that originated from within me… to that I say — how fascinating!
In the grand scheme of things, I feel fortunate to be even a very small portion of the pigment on the paintbrush of future artists.
AI is the closest current representation that we have to working with the totality of the collected consciousness of humanity. It is crude, it is not ideal, and it will have its drawbacks, but that fact remains. Unless we can unlearn our current society values, get rid of capitalism & all technologies, and relearn idk, telepathy & profound spiritual connection (which I still hope we can do), AI will be our proxy or splint until we get back there. A form of medicine with negative side effects that we can use until we can reclaim our spiritual unity & connection to that collected consciousness directly.
If you were granted a short audience with the omnipotent being and could play them one track of yours so that they would know who you are (in that moment), what track would that be — and why?
Quite a few tracks came to mind… and still I say, “Seams of Dreams”. On repeat ♾️
Mr. Wildenfree
Sean, also known as Mr. Wildenfree®, is a Lyrical Performing Music Artist, Creative Entrepreneur, Visionary & Technologist creatively expressing ‘Balance in Duality’ through the lens of gratitude. He is longstanding independent music artist that has dropped more than 11 bodies of work, with some currently available on major streaming platforms. He leverages his unique perspective to inspire resilience at the intersection of culture & the cutting edge.
As a Certified Notion Consultant & Solutions Partner, Mr. Wildenfree® has helped fellow Creative Entrepreneurs & Music Business Professionals systemize their operations through the Music OS template series, direct advisory & custom workspace builds. He has worked with not only music professionals but also nonprofits, brick & mortar creative spaces, startups, and community organizations.
For the music, visit: wildenfree.music
