♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Clint Warren, a composer, a guitarist,
a singer, songwriter, and a producer living in Cleveland, in Ohio.
You can find the resources mentioned by Clint Warren during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
♪ Clint Warren - Reggae Beat ♪
Take it easy, take it easy,
Oh, you gotta, gotta slow it down now.
Take it easy, take it easy,
'cause life's not so serious, no.
Just listen to the reggae beat
and let the music take you off your feet
and get ready to grab a seat now
and take a step back and let your worries subside.
Take it easy, take it easy,
Oh, you gottta, gotta slow it down now.
Take it easy, take it easy,
'cause life's not so serious, no.
Why don't you take some advice and
listen to these words I've written for you.
Smoke some ganja and then unwind.
Take a step back and let your worry subside.
♪ End of the musical excerpt ♪
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Clint Warren, who is a composer, a guitarist,
a singer-songwriter, and a producer living in Cleveland, in Ohio.
Yes. Clint, welcome.
Thank you.
Okay.
I know you have a long career in reggae and rock and intersectional work
that we're going to talk about.
But before talking about your musical world today,
I would like to know a bit about you.
Would you mind presenting yourself and talking a bit about your background,
where you from, where you grew up?
Thank you. Yes, sure.
So at the moment, I'm a reggae solo artist, but I started off as a child.
If you can detect an accent, I'm from South Africa originally,
so I moved to the States when I was about 10.
But in South Africa, I was the host of a kids TV show.
It was like a pop culture show.
It was called Zap Mag, and we would have famous musicians come on.
One of the most famous reggae artists in Africa's history, Lucky Dube,
was one of my guests on the show.
So he's essentially South Africa's version of Bob Marley.
And so I got to actually perform a song with him on a keyboard.
I was kind of playing along, and he explained to me one drop beats
and how the keyboard is a major instrument in reggae because
it's more distinct and the guitar makes a different sound that doesn't rock.
And I was just so fascinated by that.
Reggae became my favorite genre.
As you'd imagine, reggae in Africa is very different
than reggae in the United States.
So I moved to Florida.
When I was 10, I got into American reggae, which at the time
the three biggest reggae acts were 311, No Doubt, and Sublime.
I was like, wow, this is a very different reggae, but it was cool.
Sublime combined reggae with some Spanish music and some ska
and stuff, ska predated reggae. So I got into all that.
I joined the Marines, continued to listen to Sublime and all those bands,
and I got stationed out in Southern California.
This was probably back in 2004.
And at the time, I got into some bands there, Huntington Beach sound,
which became known as the Dirty Heads now.
And I played in a bunch of bands.
And so music, up until then, was a passion of mine.
Unfortunately, in the Marines, I was injured in combat,
so I ended up in a wheelchair, and I lost the use of my right arm,
so could no longer play guitar or piano.
And I just edged out.
I decided to focus on, you know,
more of a desk job type of thing.
I ended up going to law school, got a law degree, ended up joining the Peace Corps,
became a legal advisor to the United States Department of State.
Still had a huge passion for music.
And I finally recently underwent a bunch of surgeries, three surgeries a year.
But you can see now, I have use of this arm again.
It's like a bionic arm.
I got an ulnar nerve transplant and all this other crazy stuff.
But it actually allowed me to start playing guitar again.
So I started playing guitar, started making music.
And I decided I'd like - Two years ago, I said,
I'm just going to focus on music full-time.
Normal law, gave up the practice of law, decided to become a full-time musician.
And now I'm finding out on social media and stuff, I've got fans
reaching out to me and they're like, Oh, we love your songs.
And it's mind boggling that a dream come true is actually coming true.
So between the moment you were injured and the moment you went back to figuring out
how to go back to music, how long did it take and what was the process?
It was a long time.
I was injured in Operation Iraqi Freedom that same year, 2004.
I would say from 2004 to really
2012-ish, I couldn't really walk.
I was in a wheelchair.
Well, the thing about, talking about - one of the reasons I joined this organization,
and I know we'll get to it later in the interview, but the stigma
with having a disability.
So for me, when I first got out of the Marines, they diagnosed me with PTSD,
and it wasn't really documented.
I crushed my knee, essentially.
A knee surgery, ended up with a blood clot, and it just rechaoss.
I lost all the muscle of my right leg, I had spinal cord injuries,
broke my cervical spine, and all that stuff.
So that's the reason I lost feeling.
But when I got out, they diagnosed me with PTSD, and they were like,
the conditions that they found out that I actually did have, 15 years later,
they said they were psychological.
They said I couldn't use my arms because I had depression and PTSD and stuff.
And they never actually did nerve testing to find out where
the disconnect was in the nerves.
So it really took complaining in the United States
is the Veterans Administration.
So you go to these VA hospitals and just once a week, I was in there
just saying, I still can't write.
I'm trying to go back to school and I can't use my right arm.
And they'll be like, Okay, we're going to switch your antidepressants.
So they did that for 10 years.
That's one of the things that led me to go to law school.
Part of going to law school, I found out
that basically the way that the VA runs,
I was able to challenge that.
You can't really sue the VA because it's a Department of the federal
government in the United States, but I could challenge those sorts of things.
So I started filing cases against the VA, and I got
outside medical opinions, and my case was that they should pay for this.
I went to a private doctor.
I got private nerve testing.
Well, that whole thing took 10 years of going through
the court system and everything.
So it wasn't until 2017, from 2004 to 2017, that I had
the first surgery in my arm, where they replaced my ulnar nerve,
which had basically been tied in a figure 8 somehow.
And they're not sure how exactly.
I guess, going through the routine of training for years and punching stuff,
like punching cement, and that thing.
Somehow the ulnar nerve was tied in a knot, and
leaving it that long, it damaged the nerve that it had to be replaced.
So it took 2004 to 2017 to actually start the surgery processes.
And then they were like, Well, that's not the only thing.
We have to do a carpal tunnel on both hands.
We have to do spine surgery. We have to do knee surgery.
We have to do abdominal surgeries.
It was crazy.
But you were still singing at this point, right?
Oh, I was.
So, I...
The positive out of all this is that
when I was a kid, I could play piano
and guitar, drums and stuff, but I never imagined myself being a singer.
I try to sing on my show, I try to carry a tune.
Everyone said I was completely tone deaf, that I would never be able to sing.
So because I was in a wheelchair, it forced me to sing.
I would try and emulate the notes on a guitar because I'd be trying to
explain to my friends who played guitar, You should try and play this.
But I couldn't show them how it played, so I tried to make the sounds with my mouth.
For 10 years of making these sounds, and finally, I guess I just
figured out how to sing along the way.
I see.
When you came back to guitar, did you start immediately considering,
Oh, let's record something, let's do an album, something like that?
Or did it take time?
No. It was...
When I was in high school, so I was about 16 or 17, I won
the battle of the bands from my high school.
I was considered one of the best guitarists in South Florida at the time.
This is 2002.
And when I picked up the guitar again after 15 years,
it was basically from scratch.
I could still remember the scales, I could still remember the chords,
but to try and get my fingers to actually press down the strings was brand new.
The mind guitar connection, it is not like riding a bike, in my opinion.
Yeah, for sure.
You need practice, practice, practice.
That's not a joke.
Okay.
So you recorded...
I know we are both part of RAMPD,
and that's how I discovered your work.
On the profile, you posted a video,
the song of the lizard.
Yeah.
I started digging a little bit into what you were doing at this time.
What I found interesting was the graphical part.
You were always having having a playful way to represent the graphic,
the animated films that go with these songs.
Can you talk a bit about what this whole process of these songs were,
where you ended up combining some of your songs with some of the other
artists, I think, singing on your album and this animated graphics.
Essentially, I've always been a fan of just funny cartoons.
There's a channel on YouTube, I should say, that I was inspired by.
It's called Mr. Weebl's Place, something like that.
But he makes these funny cartoons.
The most popular one goes like, "Benja, Benja."
And I thought, what if I could
make a funny cartoon like that, but make it reggae?
So this particular one, it's my actual pet Gecko.
Her name is Jacue.
I started singing to her.
It's really how the song came about. I'd sing to her in the morning.
Like, Jacue is a lizard.
And I just started drawing her
for some reason, and I was like,
Well, these drawings aren't too bad. I showed them to my friends.
They were like, Yeah, those are decent sketches.
So I decided to make the cartoon, which was immensely more difficult
than I imagined, to actually animate a character whose arms are moving.
In this case, for the music video, I have a cricket who jumps on her,
her backup dancers are these lady bugs.
And to actually get them to move was much more complicated than I thought.
But it was fun.
So I had...
Talking about social media, people reaching out to me
like, We like your songs.
I had one of the biggest reggae bands in the whole of the continent
of Africa reached out to me.
They're called African Reggae Machine.
And they're like, We like your songs. They're fun.
And we see that you're from Africa.
You got that African reggae feel and the American music and stuff.
And another amazing artist, a reggae artist, originally
from Kingston, Jamaica. He lives in Holland now.
His name is Y-Intel. He reached out.
He's like, Yeah, I'm a a fan of your music, we should do a collaboration.
So I just did a collaboration with both of them.
So it's like a remix off that New Caledonia song where I've got
the music video with them.
We actually called it "Jacue, the Gecko song,"
and I'm about to try and make a
better music video to go along with this.
That was my first attempt at drawing.
And now that I know what to expect
with animating that's moving, I think I
could do a higher quality video the second time around.
There was not only one, right?
You did a bunch of animated songs.
I did one for my dog, if you can see her. She's here.
But she is basically Lampurana.
There's a song about her, and the music video is basically about her.
She's just running around terrorizing my friends and her pets sitters and stuff.
Yeah, we have influential pets in life.
Yeah, for sure.
Even your album covers of your EPs or of your singles
have some graphic content on it.
That's you, right?
Yes. I draw all the artwork for all my songs.
Again, much more complicated than I thought
to actually sketch something and get it into the format
that it could go on like a cover art
that can be printed or uploaded,
people could see it on their screens and stuff.
They're really beautiful.
Thank you.
For example, there is one drawing of a lady playing the guitar.
Yeah. This is wow.
I really like your style.
Oh, well, thank you.
Okay, so what is in the news now?
What are you working on right now?
Speaking of collaborations, I have a bunch of collaborations coming out between now
through November, I want to say.
I'm going to have a song coming out about once every 2-3 weeks, and an album
is coming out in two weeks from now.
So it's my first actual album.
The last thing I released was technically an EP
since it only had five songs in it.
So this will be a full 12 song album.
I took some of my most popular songs,
and there'll be a few new ones on this album.
Is there a specific one that you really like on that new album?
I would say my favorite, I did a remix of Ziggy Marley's song Beach in Hawaii.
There's going to be a remix of that.
I think it'll be the 12th song on the album.
That'll probably be my personal favorite.
Who are the artists collaborating with you?
Let me think.
In order, the first one is Sunburnt Sky.
He's an awesome reggae artist out of Utah.
Let's see. Next in order, I think is -
I mentioned Y-Intel and African Reggae Machine.
So that song Jacue be on there.
Who else?
Jubba White. I met him when I lived in the Pacific Northwest.
So I just moved to Ohio.
I used to live in the Portland, Oregon, area.
And there was this reggae artist who I performed with there, Jubba White,
also one of these O'G's from Kingston, Jamaica,
now living in the Pacific Northwest.
But he has a voice, in my opinion, that's on par with Ziggy Marley.
If not, now, I don't want to dare say he's better than Ziggy Marley, but I would say
we're working on a song in the particular way that he sings it, I think, is better
than a lot of Ziggy Marley songs.
So I was blown away by him. Jubba White is his name.
He'll be on there.
A reggae artist out of Southern California His act is Summerland Feels.
He sounds just like Justin Timberlake, except a reggae version.
But he's one of the most phenomenal voices I've ever heard
out of anyone I've collaborated with.
So also very excited for that song.
And any tours or are you going to do a promotion tour, a series of concerts?
So unfortunately, I took a break from playing shows and stuff
from the surgeries I mentioned.
I'm still healing up from a recent one.
Unfortunately, I don't think there'll be any shows until
the beginning of next year, 2025.
Okay.
Well, tell us. We can announce that to ArtsAbly's auditors.
I have a question about...
We were mentioning these healing processes and the fact to accept your disability
and things like that.
With the years, you've learned how to adapt to your different needs and things
like that in your artistic practices.
For me, it's something that is called Disibility Arts.
I was wondering if you could tell us what it is for you to work in
that field of disability arts.
Well, I think...
I've been disabled since 2004, since I got out of the Marines.
When I first got out, and I'm showing my age here, they used to call it
handicap back then, which is an offensive term, so they changed it to disabled.
I still personally think there's a lot of stigma with the word disabled,
and it's it has taken me 20 years to realize that there can be
actual advantages to being disabled.
So one of the advantages that I've figured out that I have, I'm hard of hearing.
I'm one of those people who use the 3M earplugs, which doesn't work.
I'm part of that whole class action.
But when I got out of the Marines, they're like, You're very hard of hearing.
I do actually use hearing aids.
And I've been in a situation, I played a show where the sound tech
on stage pulled my hearing aid out of my ear and started yelling at me.
He's like, We have on stage monitors. You don't need in ears.
And I was like, I wanted to yell at the guy like it's a hearing aid.
And it's like a $10,000 hearing aid that he just yanked out of my ear.
But what I figured out is that from being hard to hearing,
it's allowed me to hear certain tones that most people can't hear, like
specific bass tones and things that from
people I could collaborate with.
I'll send them a mix that's adjusted to my hearing specifically.
And when they hear the mix, they're like, I can hear multiple bass tracks in this.
And I'm like, Yeah, well, there are multiple bass tracks in it.
But I guess usually when people mix things, it's not mixed in a way that...
They're accentuating certain tones
that you'd hear in a final mix.
But for someone to sing over it, I was told that having these layered bass tracks
is actually very helpful to them because reggae specifically,
hip hop too, the vocals follow the bass line.
So in all these other beats, these guys I collaborated with,
they were trying to guess where the notes were,
or they're trying to emulate the guitar or piano with my songs.
They're emulating just the bass line because you could barely even
hear the high tones in my mix.
And they that that really helped them.
So in a way, they call it disabled, but I think it's just different in a way.
Yes, I'm hard of hearing certain tones, but I can also pay attention
to other tones that I can hear.
Yeah. Plus with hearing aids today, there is no issue with connecting that
in Bluetooth or have some systems that would allow you to
fully integrate that into the existing system.
Yeah.
Then there was the part about
regaining some mobility also that must
have impacted your way of playing, coming back to your own integration
of all these instruments and your voice.
It has.
I've gone from essentially being in a wheelchair.
Sometimes on a good day, I could feel my legs,
on a bad day I couldn't feel them, that type of thing.
So it varied. But now just to be able to,
I don't know, stand up at a mic is almost
like a terrifying thing that I can now stand there the whole time.
I can hold the guitar the whole time.
Whereas before, I don't know.
I feel like a kid again.
The best way to put it is regaining my mobility,
It feels like I'm a kid.
I'm like, Can I stand for an hour?
Can I stand for two hours?
It's like a test, and I'm finding out a lot of the times.
I think the last show I played was in May,
and I was up there for two hours on stage.
I could feel my legs the entire time, which was insane.
Yeah.
Well, it's great.
So you're regaining and regaining, or is it fully regained now in your-
No, it's not fully there.
Unfortunately, same thing with my arm.
The nerves in my back have been damaged for so long.
There's not a lot they can do with it, but what they are doing is
I get a lot of rhizotomies, radio frequency ablation sort of things,
and a little pack that basically
interrupts electrical signals being carried out there.
And from them doing that, that somehow stop my legs from going numb.
It somehow by them blocking certain signals and allowing
other signals to come through,
somehow that's working for me.
Okay.
Well, I have a last question.
We were talking about collaborations and we were talking about artists with whom
you have been discussing your music.
But I was wondering if you had some - Who are your inspirations?
Who are the people who really counted in your journey as a musician?
If you have one or two names to give, who would it be and why?
For singing, I think my biggest influence is David Bowie.
As a kid -
I should go back to when I was a kid. Lucky Dube introduced me to reggae.
But prior to that, I was a David Bowie fan for some reason.
My friends at the time listened to, I don't know, Michael Jackson
and pop artists like that.
Back then, it was like the Michael Jackson-Prince thing.
For some reason, I liked David Bowie's songs.
And I think when I was a little kid, I would try and sing his songs.
And now, most of my fans who reach out to me always say that I sound, I sing
just like David Bowie for some reason.
It could be the South African accent.
And guitar-wise, I personally think the best guitarist who's ever
existed, and I know a lot of people get offended by this, is Jimi Hendrix.
I know people say, Oh, there's better guitarists than Jimi Hendrix.
There's better soloists than Jimi Hendrix.
But I think the way that Jimi Hendrix played, he didn't just play solos.
He would make his solo part of the song.
And the way he wrote his solos was basically like words
in the song that he would sing.
So he would sing the entire song.
You got the entire song, and he would take some of the words out
and replace that with guitar riffs.
And that's the exact thing that I try to do in my songs,
which is extremely hard to try and
convert lyrics into guitar sounds.
That you have to either be the best guitarist in the world or become
the best guitarist in the world, because to really transcribe it, it might be,
I don't know, half a band might actually be the lyrics that someone's singing.
Because the way people sing, it's not just hitting specific notes.
You have all the sharps and flats in between just naturally with the voice.
And he was able to mimic those exact sounds on his guitar.
And for that, I just think that's something that I've been playing guitar.
Let's see.
I would say prior to the Marines, when I hurt my arm, I was playing
for about 10 years.
And then recently, I've been playing 10 to 12 hours a day for the last four years.
So I feel I feel like that's a lot of hours invested in the guitar,
and I still can't play like Jimi Hendrix.
I think that those two guys are the biggest influences to me.
Well, thank you so much for this conversation.
It was a pleasure talking with you today.
I wish you all the best for everything that you're doing right now.
Thank you.
And yeah.
Have a fantastic day and talk soon.
Thank you.
Bye.
♪ Closing theme music ♪