Normally when a singer writes a song about their financial status it is filled with braggadocio. It’s second nature to hear artists rotely recount how many Bentleys they own, the vintage of champagne they prefer and the copious stacks of hundreds they sleep on at night. Teddy Swims—a tattooed teddy-bear-come-to-life with a voice that will make your jaw drop to the floor—goes the opposite direction, marveling at his newfound deliverance from the bottom.
“When we wrote ‘Broke,’ it was right before the pandemic,” Swims says. “We had just gotten off our tour and it was our first time out in L.A. It was coming from that place of ‘I just came up on money.’ Finally, we had made it.”
As he was sitting in L.A. and waiting for the rest of his team to drive out from Atlanta, he started to fully grasp how different things were going to be from here on out. The band was getting ready to record and the label wanted to put them up in an AirBnB in the hills for a month. The cost? $30,000.
“I broke down at the time because I was so angry,” Swims recalls. “No, absolutely we’re not going to spend that kind of money, I refuse to spend that kind of money. That’s my little brother’s college tuition coming up this year, I can’t spend that kind of money on an AirBnB.
“They told me, it’s in the label budget, they’ll take care of it,” Swims continues. “They had to break it down and be like, ‘It is important because this is the way we get the word out, make you bigger and make the change that you want to change, to be what you want to be.”
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Denne historien er fra January 2021-utgaven av Inked.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
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