After 11 years of balancing life as a teacher and musician, Waia’u Walker has committed to music full time with a vast digital presence, a new solo EP and a role touring with Y La Bamba
Isabeau Waia’u Walker stopped going to school this year.
At 34, she lasted longer than most. The former Canby High School teacher opted to pursue music full-time this year and is finding her way in a world not organized by bells and class schedules. For the 11 years prior, Waia’u Walker balanced a daily schedule as a teacher with a moonlight gig as a musician on YouTube and on live stages around Portland.
“I’m my own boss, and it’s a lot easier to not show up for myself than it is to be late to school and have the principal call me in,” she said. “The beauty of some confines is it can jumpstart you and help you build creativity but it can also quench it. I’m still trying to find a groove.”
Now focused on a solo EP, a diverse online portfolio — including 19,400 YouTube subscribers — and live shows with Latin indie group Y La Bamba and by herself, Waia’u Walker has carved out a unique, young career as a musician riding the line between the digital and the physical.
“I have many parts, so when it’s spread out like this, it feels about right,” she laughed, sitting outside a coffee shop in Southeast Portland in February. Spread out might be an understatement on her online presence — songs and vlogs on her YouTube channel will lead viewers to a Patreon page (where you can subscribe for early access to content, merch, live chats and other perks) or to her Poshmark store (where you can peruse and purchase from her wardrobe). More online hopping will lead you to an Instagram, a Facebook, a Snapchat, a Twitter, a personal website, a Bandcamp and a newsletter.
“I don’t really know if I have all the resources to do this well, but I have this urge to do it and I know if I keep waiting, I’ll never be fully arrived,” she said.
In an effort to create a self-sustaining music career, Waia’u Walker has spun a web worthy of a millennial-driven branding campaign. But her digital persona feels far more natural than an Instagram influencer’s — her videos are shot at home, and are usually accompanied by a short dialogue with the feel of a jazz radio DJ easing you into the next song. This care permeates her social media, making a cold interface feel like a warm living room. Although she said her elaborate social media presence was mostly improvised along the way, this part, at least, was intentional.
“I think I reframed branding to be a deep-dive identity check: Who am I, really? What matters to me?” she mused. “It’s made it easier for me to promote myself if I believe what I’ve offered — whether you take it or reject it, it is me. My brand is people, and stories.”
The wind picked up and the sun went down and Waia’u Walker asked if we could move our conversation inside the coffee shop. “I’m still very much an Island girl,” she said. Although her wild curly black hair agreed, a thrifted red Budweiser bomber and tattoos lining her arms and poking out the sleeves gave indication that she had been in the Northwest for a long time, too. She’d recently spent nearly a month of the holiday season at home in Maui, and pointed out that it was the longest she’d been home in a decade. Born in Pasadena while her father was finishing school, they’d returned to the island before Waia’u Walker was old enough to remember. She lived there until she was 18, when she came to Oregon and studied history at Warner Pacific and then earned a master’s in education at George Fox. She’s now based in Oregon City with her husband, Tyson.
Those journeys have informed her musicianship, both in the songs she writes and the way she approaches the business side of things.
“I don’t believe that it’s wrong for someone to pursue music. In my mind though, the story I was operating under — and I was informed by my socioeconomic status growing up, my family, culturally — it felt scary and maybe a little irresponsible to just pursue music without a means of providing for myself,” she said.
This background affected everything, from which gigs she took to which songs she covered, in that constant balance of marketability and creative desire. From the get-go on teaching, she and her partner decided to invest those paychecks in an effort to build a cushion so she could pursue music full-time. That exacerbated the push and pull of finances and musical passion, and heightened the strain on her most valuable currency: time.
“When you have to be at the school at 7:15 a.m. and ready to go and you’re on at 10:30 or 11 p.m. the night before, it’s fun, but it’s costly,” she said. “I tried for 11 years to do both. I pushed up on every edge to see, ‘Can I still be a worthwhile teacher and a growing musician?’ And there were seasons where I thought I could, and then my body was giving out and I was tired. I didn’t want to be a shitty teacher, and I knew I would always backburner my music stuff for teaching because students are right there in front of you — real humans, real lives.”
That’s where YouTube came in. Her channel became a weekly accountability system to practice her musicianship and remind herself that she was working toward something.
“It was a refuge for me,” she said. “At that point I wasn’t sure if the 10-year plan was going to work. I wasn’t sure if I would get the opportunity to play live again, so that was a blind leap: ‘I’m just going to keep creating. And I’m going to trust that if I keep trying, at the very least I’m going to grow.’”
YouTube turned out to be more than just a refuge for Waia’u Walker. Views increased on her videos and she gained subscribers, and a sense that someone was listening. “I was dead set on finding my people, even if there were five,” she said. “I would rather it genuinely connect with a small group than broadly be a blip on the screen for a big group.” She still remembers the first comment from a stranger (“It was Balboa515.”) and the gratitude she felt when people would follow her from platform to platform.
“I don’t want to disappoint people. So when I was younger I would hold a lot of my goals close,” she said. “I was still aspiring toward them, but to let people in on them meant that if it didn’t work out, whatever that looked like, then they knew.”
The turning point — when her online musicianship went from hobby to focused passion — was when she felt comfortable enough with her subscriber count to email friends and family to ask them to follow her. She said it was when she confessed she was really putting herself into this.
“I think we put too much attention on looking like we do things with ease,” Waia’u Walker said. “But that feels so false, because I am genuinely trying. I am going to bed later so I can edit this thing. I am waking up early so I can learn this thing. During my lunch break at school I’m listening to a song or writing lyrics during a staff meeting. I’m genuinely trying and I want to communicate that to people.”
Progress is a tough thing to measure as a musician. Artists don’t always know how many people are out in the crowd or remember how many compliments they heard after they got off stage. That might be one of the biggest differences between musicianship in the digital and physical worlds. Moments are measured in view counts and subscribers, numbers that may have their emotional ups and downs but are at least honest and exact. And they can be reassuring when she feels that no one is listening — like when a friend pointed out that her subscriber count was close to how many people could pack into the Portland Timbers stadium, Providence Park.
“It doesn’t make me think I’m badass, but it just helps me remember that the investment wasn’t for nothing. These are real people listening,” Waia’u Walker said.
In a backwards sort of way, her career beginning so grounded in the internet made the numbers matter less. When no one was listening but her and her husband, she didn’t have any trouble “booking gigs” on her YouTube channel, even if that was just her playing in an empty room. The challenge of all that silence made her realize she wasn’t doing it for anyone else.
“It’s a lot of work to show up for your own idea, before someone else fully believes in it,” she said. “That was hard for me because I’m like, ‘Well, what if that’s stupid?’ But fuck if it’s stupid, it’s yours.”
“I’m not looking for one viral video; I’m looking for people to subscribe to me for the long haul,” she said.
And in that interest, Waia’u Walker lives in two worlds, as adept at managing live dates as she is at maintaining her digital presence. It’s been particularly key in the last few weeks as Portland and the world navigate the spread of COVID-19. Waia’u Walker said that having a stable online community has made this strange time feel much more normal for her, despite the financial and social cost of canceling or postponing live performances. But even in more normal circumstances, Waia’u Walker maintained that a musician able to balance both digital and physical would benefit from both and spoke hopefully that more live musicians would appreciate the digital side of things and vice versa.
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Although she’s out of teaching this year, Waia’u Walker slipped regularly into this mode of speech. Her tone was not quite preachy, but definitely carried the air of openness and invitation to learn that you find in a classroom. She realized what she was doing halfway through a response. She stopped abruptly. “I started talking about it as if it was a class,” she laughed. But this is key to how Waia’u Walker approaches her work. She hosts a video series on her channel dedicated to bringing on local craft workers to talk about their art and she talks directly to the camera in her solo vlogs about her process — what works for her and what doesn’t, the paths she recommends and the ones to stay away from. She hasn’t stopped teaching.
“The idea of unleashing possibilities for other people is a good carrot for me to give my time and attention to learning something,” she said. “Sometimes what helps me stick with it is, if I can learn it and refine it, then I’ll be able to share it with other people.”
Y La Bamba plays into this too. Waia’u Walker has been close with frontwoman Luz Elena Mendoza for a few years, and now counts her among her best friends. Waia’u Walker began to fill in regularly as a “singer and shaker” in the group’s lineup. The Portland-based band tours regularly and is flexible in its make-up in a way that allows Waia’u Walker to pursue her own goals, but still be a part of something larger when the opportunity presents itself.
“I’m really content right now with the shape of it, just really grateful to get to be a part of the band and grateful that even in its weird adolescence where it’s kind of growing a bit, and we don’t know what we can fit in, that somehow that’s worked really well for me to do my solo stuff,” she said.
Her absence from the classroom this year has allowed her a more full role in both capacities. For her solo work, that’s led to a 6-track EP — recorded and mixed by Ryan Oxford of Color Therapy Recording — out on streaming platforms April 26, or April 3 for Patreon subscribers $5 and up. The Better Metric EP is self-released, financed by her subscribers and online resale business. She plans to celebrate with a release show at Alberta Street Pub on May 9 (pending the impact and spread of COVID-19, it may be virtual).
She pointed out that the final product of the EP looks a lot different than her work on YouTube because the process to make it is so different.
“A lot of it is facing some fears, being intimidated about that setting and my ability to navigate those settings,” she said. “It’s one thing for me to hole myself up in my room because I can experiment all day long, I can make mistakes and repurpose those mistakes. When you’re in a studio, for me, it takes a bit more work to show up for myself and not totally conform to what the producer is wanting.”
This was the through-line of Waia’u Walker’s responses, and her identity as an artist: showing up for yourself. She played to the winos and to single-digit view counts for years, believing in herself enough that she didn’t stop until the crowds came and the comment sections filled.
“It was discouraging when I didn’t feel like people were watching,” said Waia’u Walker. “But it was almost like a test of myself unintentionally, because I still loved it, even if nobody was watching.”
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