Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to not only a new episode of HER with Amena Brown, but welcome back to a new series on HER with Amena Brown and I am excited to welcome my producer and husband, priority is not in that order, just that he is both my producer and husband, Matthew Owen, also known as DJ Opdiggy. Hey babe.
Matthew Owen:
Hey. It's going to feel really weird is when I do this in post production and I add the applause, like...
Amena Brown:
Right.
Matthew Owen:
I guess we're going to see how I view myself if I give myself more applause or less applause.
Amena Brown:
Yeah.
Matthew Owen:
Something for me and my therapist to work out, I'm sure.
Amena Brown:
Okay. That's like exact facts. Exact facts. This series is called Road Stories and Matt and I have quite a few road stories because we started traveling and performing together on the road the same month that we got married.
Matthew Owen:
Wow.
Amena Brown:
So we have had at least... we've been married 11 years.
Matthew Owen:
11.
Amena Brown:
So prior to the pandemic, that's what, at least nine... eight, nine years that we were on the road together.
Matthew Owen:
Yeah.
Amena Brown:
Pretty heavy there, so...
Matthew Owen:
Date nights in weird cities.
Amena Brown:
Oh man, we have a lot of stories to tell y'all, so there are going to be a few to several, we're not sure how many episodes, but there are going to be more than one episode of us telling you a few of the interesting road stories we experienced. And those of you that have been here for other episodes where Matt has come on, which maybe we've only had one cause I think we did an episode for an anniversary a year or so ago. I think that might be our only episode.
Matthew Owen:
I think that's right, but I think it's probably right on a HER podcast that he only comes... You know what I mean?
Amena Brown:
That's fair. That's a fair point.
Matthew Owen:
The thespian motto from high school, I've carried it with me into many things in life and I say this is one, "Know your part and play it well."
Amena Brown:
That's it.
Matthew Owen:
So I'm honored to be asked.
Amena Brown:
That's it. So if you missed that episode, we will link to it in the show notes on amenabrown.com/herwithamena. You can go there and see all of the things. So to give you a little bit of background, you can get more of the background on the previous episode where we talked about our story, how we met, but so you have a little bit of an idea, Matt and I met as... became friends and collaborators, so in a sense what brought us together was the fact that we were building a show at the time.
And I was traveling, as some of you know, I was traveling very heavily in more white conservative Christian spaces back then and I was kind of tired of being sort of pigeonholed into this one poem at a time model and so I had asked my then friend, Matt, to partner with me as a DJ and musician. We pull together this amazing show and I want to say maybe two or three months before we got married, we got a booking agent and then before we knew it, we got married September nine, and I'm pretty sure two or three weeks later we had our first gigs together.
Matthew Owen:
Wow. That sounds wild. And I was there to see it the first time, but just hearing you recount the story, that sounds crazy. Yeah, my just friend Amena had asked me if I wanted to go into the studio with her and figure out how to build a show with a DJ and a poet. And I'll be honest, number one, I didn't know how to work with a poet. I knew how to make music for a rapper or for a singer or make something that I would maybe perform myself, but with free verse poetry, it's a very interesting thing because it's not like here are your eight bars, land here, and so I was just intrigued by, well let's see what happens. And here we are, we saw what happens. So it worked out.
But I do remember thinking that I had an idea that, "Okay, we're going to build this thing and ain't nobody going to pay for me to travel with you." So they're going to figure out how to... if this was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and if I'm the jelly, they going to figure out how to make they own jam. You know what I mean? They going to be like, "Well here's this track that we could play while you do your poetry. Let that guy stay in the ATL." And so I was like, "Ain't nobody going to take us on the road." And then for what a good four years we traveled off of that show.
Amena Brown:
That's true. That's true. It's wild to think now, and I made some decisions at the time y'all that I still can't believe Matt and I did this, but we got engaged on my birthday in 2011, so that was on May 20th, shout out to the May babies in the building. We got engaged that day so we decided to plan our wedding pretty quickly because we were in our thirties. It wasn't as important to me to have this amazing venue. I mean this was a lot of really before people had... before people were streaming their weddings. This was before weddings had wow hashtags and stuff like that. So I wasn't as concerned about what the wedding pictures were going to do on the gram or anything like that, that wasn't of concern to me. Also, to be honest, we didn't have budget to be on. At that time, Matt was working as a youth pastor at a church and I was traveling to churches, so neither of us were making excellent money at the time.
So we were trying to have a short engagement because we were ready to start our lives together, but also waiting a year to save up more money, to have a more extravagant wedding just wasn't a thing that we cared much about. So we were engaged with a three and a half month time to get married. Also, Matt's fiance, Amena, decided this is a great time to launch the show that we've been building for the past year.
Matthew Owen:
Makes sense to me.
Amena Brown:
So we actually, in the middle of being engaged and planning a wedding pretty quickly, also were launching this show that we were going to do at the time. So we launched it in Atlanta so that we could get video of it, so we could see what it was going to do, so it's just wild to think that we launched the show in the time we were engaged and actually were able to secure some gigs shortly after.
Now, here's where the road stories gets interesting, y'all. We have all manner of types of road stories to tell y'all and some of this is really awkward, I think some of it's pretty hilarious now in hindsight and I do feel like we have a few cool stories to tell, like some cool stuff that we got to do or that we got to experience because we were people that traveled lot. I want to start with the merch table. I want to center our conversation around that today because you would be surprised about the amount of awkward conversations that we have had at the merch table. And for those of you who aren't familiar, because this story for us was beginning over 10 years ago, so even what was at the merch table.
Matthew Owen:
Man, first of all, remember having a merch table.
Amena Brown:
Oh my gosh.
Matthew Owen:
The idea that we would get to a venue and one of us would have to go and set up books, CDs, T-shirts. You're paying for these items to be manufactured and you have to figure out how to get them to the gig with you. So traveling with me, you're already carrying, for me, I was flying with my turntables, my mixer, all of my gear as well as clothing and toothbrushes and all that stuff. But then you got to carry books, CDs, T-shirts, hoping you made something that people are going to be like, "Yeah, let me buy," or else you're just dragging around all this stuff for nothing and then trying to set it up in a way and... Oh, oh, banners. I remember also banners.
Amena Brown:
Oh child, I forgot about banners, help us.
Matthew Owen:
Banner's a thing where it would roll out and there'd be a massive picture of you or a massive picture of me, and just going through TSA, first of all, going through TSA was its own experience because you're carrying this thing in your hand cause it's not really a good way to check the banners and they're asking you, "What is this?" And I don't know why, I always got asked, "Oh, are you a professional pool player?" Like-
Amena Brown:
Oh, that's interesting.
Matthew Owen:
Are those pool cues or pool sticks? And I'm like, "Shout out to Uncle Phil in the pool hall. I am not."
Amena Brown:
This is not an Uncle Phil moment. That's not what this is. People also thought sometimes they were fishing poles. They wanted to know we were going to go fishing somewhere and we were like, "Wow, we have the least cool story to tell regarding what is in this package."
Matthew Owen:
It's a massive picture of my wife's face and they looked at me like, "What?" They almost seemed disappointed.
Amena Brown:
I forgot about that.
Matthew Owen:
Then it goes into, "Well why do you have a massive picture of wife's face?" "Well my wife's a poet and she going to talk at this thing," and don't even bring up the fact that my turntables were going through TSA.
Amena Brown:
Yikes. Yikes.
Matthew Owen:
And it's like every time we would get to a venue, open up that thing and I would see that little slip that said, I was like, "Oh Lord, please help these things," where you show up just in time for sound check, setting up and there's like got to figure out something.
Amena Brown:
Yikes, y'all, thinking about that now the amount of luggage that we had to check and then you're limited. We each had... At that time, we each had two bags each that we could either afford to check or were able to amass enough mileage that we were able to have enough status that we could check those bags for free. So we had four bags between us we could check and then we had two items we each could "carry on." So there were a lot of choices being made.
Matthew Owen:
And having to use those weird hanger weights...
Amena Brown:
Yikes.
Matthew Owen:
... to make sure our luggage wasn't going to be over because they was going to charge you mad amounts of money.
Amena Brown:
Yikes. Because I do feel like we ended up, especially when you were traveling with your turntables, that's two pieces of "luggage."
Matthew Owen:
43 pounds each. Five cases.
Amena Brown:
Right, so then we would have to take one bag to be all of our clothing, which for me is more of a sacrifice, it's Matt having a corner of the luggage and me having all these shoes and...
Matthew Owen:
If I could pack one pair of jeans, I could rock it with three or four different T-shirts and we good.
Amena Brown:
Then we would have a bag that was the merch.
Matthew Owen:
Yep.
Amena Brown:
Now I think at a certain point we got sophisticated enough that we started having enough merch that we could ship, but it took us time getting to know other artists who were traveling to know that you could do that. But also it took forethought and planning because there would be times that... there would be times that we just didn't think about it and now it's two days before, it's too late to ship or there would be times where we were doing a bunch of gigs back to back and so you had certain merch you could ship to that gig, but then that merch was going to get shipped back home but we weren't going home, so then we had to have a certain amount of merch we could fly with and take to the other thing. It was a lot.
Matthew Owen:
Mental gymnastics.
Amena Brown:
It was a lot, y'all.
Matthew Owen:
Yeah.
Amena Brown:
So let me give you an idea of what the merch table is, which I think most artists still, when you go to just even general concerts and stuff like that, there's still a merch area. It's just very different than it was when we were starting out together. So the types of events we were doing at this time, I would say tended to be probably half very large events, events that were in an arena, events that were in a large ballroom in a hotel, events that could be anywhere from 2000 people up to in a big arena of 18,000 folks. So this is what made you have to get to a point as an artist that you had a banner because you needed something that was big enough that people would know, "Oh, they just saw you on stage."
Matthew Owen:
Oh, that's that person.
Amena Brown:
Yes, this is where they go to buy your things, and of course back then you typically would have... Well for us we would've had CDs, we both had our solo artist CDs, but really all of my CDs were not technically solo because Matt made all of the music that people were hearing if it had music to it. So you would have your CDs there. We tried a run with various sundry shirts.
Matthew Owen:
Remember your first shirt?
Amena Brown:
It was so ugly. My first shirt I tried to design myself was so terrible. By the time Matt and I became friends, he was like, "What does this look like? What is this?" And I was like, "I was trying to go with a metallic foil," and he was like, "Yikes. You can't..."
Matthew Owen:
When you're talking to an artist, you have to tiptoe in, especially just getting to know you and even still being husband and wife for us to still be doing this together, it is still... you got to enter it with a certain... you got to tip your toe in the water and so you don't want to be like, "Ugh, you like this?" But it's like, "So, tell me about this shirt. What do you think about it? Do you like it? You like that? That's what you were going for?"
Amena Brown:
Yikes. And then sometimes too, this changed over time, but in the beginning you may not be getting paid a lot to go and do the gig, so you're hoping you're going to make some extra money at the merch table.
Matthew Owen:
Yes.
Amena Brown:
Now where it gets tricky is T-shirts are, quiet as it's kept, not cheap to produce and then you typically have to order such a large amount of them that you had to have money, you had to basically have an account that was just for merch so that when you sold merch you had to keep a certain amount of money so that you could spend a thousand dollars on shirts.
Matthew Owen:
We still have a checking account in our business account that's called the merch account.
Amena Brown:
It's called the merch account.
Matthew Owen:
Neither one of us have set up a merch table in...
Amena Brown:
Years.
Matthew Owen:
Pre pandemic.
Amena Brown:
Years.
Matthew Owen:
Yeah.
Amena Brown:
And even I think the gigs that I was still doing where I was selling books and stuff, a lot of times by then bookstores and stuff were running the sales and the table, so I didn't have to ship them, I didn't have to figure out where they went...
Matthew Owen:
You're right.
Amena Brown:
I didn't have to handle the money. So it has been years since either of us had a merch table, but you had the shirts because even though they were kind of pricey sometimes to get them made, if you bought a certain amount, you could get really good profit margin on them because you could charge... I mean, many of you experience this when you go to concerts, the shirts could be... I mean back then they were like 20 bucks, which was like a lot, now you could go to a concert, we've gone to some concerts recently, the shirts are $40, $50 in the venue. So if it's costing you $5 to make this shirt, even $7, and your profit margin is you just sold that for 40 bucks.
Matthew Owen:
See that's another thing you just brought up is that certain venues also want a percentage.
Amena Brown:
No, big facts.
Matthew Owen:
So they're going to have one of their people there selling things and then at the end there's a count where you have to stand there and they have to stand there, that way they can come up with how much money you got to give back to them.
Amena Brown:
Yes. Yes.
Matthew Owen:
Or they would take their percent out and they would give you a check at the end of the night, however they worked it out. You didn't know based on what city you were going to, if the venue was then going to be like, "Oh, sorry, we get 10% of that." So when you're buying these shirts and shipping them, it was hard to figure out.
Amena Brown:
Yeah because it's like that's turning out to be a lot of cost. The cost of producing the merch, the cost of shipping it and then you get there and they're like, "Oh that's our 10%," sometimes at certain arenas that's our 15 depending on where you were and taxes and all the rest of it. So there was a lot that went into that merch table. CDs, it is very sad and unfortunate for a lot of us as traveling artists that everything went to streaming because CDs was the perfect piece of merch to have at your table. They cost less than two bucks to make and you could sell them for $10.
Matthew Owen:
I was printing them from the house at one point. I had a printer that you could print on top of the CD, the print, the cover... Oh my gosh. I try to tell young artists, like I get a lot of rappers coming up asking me, young kids want rap stuff and young artists come up to me asking me about stuff and talking to them, I'm be like, "Man, once upon a time you could show up to a venue where no one had ever heard your name before and if you got in there and you put on a show and you made them people feel something, you going to come back to your merch table and them CD's going to be gone."
Amena Brown:
Man.
Matthew Owen:
And at like 10, 15 bucks a piece, man, you know how many streams it would take? Oh, come on, man. Wow.
Amena Brown:
That was a time.
Matthew Owen:
What a era.
Amena Brown:
There were some times that we were really struggling financially and sometimes it depended on the gig, if you were going to actually get paid when you got there. Sometimes they were like, "Oh we only mail checks or we only send out checks on certain days of the week." So you went and did the whole gig, and thankfully we had a system with our booking agency at the time where there was deposits and stuff they had to pay, but that still wasn't money you were walking away with. Even the deposit they sent to our agent, we didn't see that money until we played the gig, until we got home. So sometimes the merch table was how you were getting ready to eat food that day or the next day because a lot of that at that time was cash.
Matthew Owen:
Cash, yep.
Amena Brown:
This is before there was cash app and all the rest of those. I mean we had a square where people could use credit cards but we would get a lot of people coming by the merch table buying stuff in cash. If they really enjoyed what we did, sometimes they'd be like, "I only got a 50 and I want a T-shirt and I want a CD," and then it would not work out evenly. We would need to give them change and they would be like, "I don't want the change." People would do that at the merch table. So there was a lot riding on how those sales went. So to give y'all an idea of how that set up was.
In the smaller spaces we went to, that typically would be more so smaller Christian colleges at the time, smaller churches, you would still have the merch table situation there, but it would just be less people, it'd be a smaller thing. Sometimes it would be a little more intimate and sometimes I was great and sometimes I was not so great with the things people thought they could say to you. So the merch table was there in all these different aspects from the little small church that you went to that only six people came up to the merch table to the arena that you were in where there were 18,000 people.
But here's another thing I want to tell y'all. We would do these arena tours, this happened to us probably at least a couple of times that we've done these together and separately we also both have done arena style events, and the thing about an arena that's interesting is when you are not headlining, when you are on a bill where there might be six other artists, your merch table's there, but the people may not know who you are when you get there and then they have to remember you and five other artists, seven other artists. So that all depended on where you were, how well those people knew you, how long you got to perform comparatively to the headliner that may have had an hour set.
Maybe we had had 10 minutes earlier in the night. So now at the end of the night they have to remember us enough to want to come by the merch table. A lot of things were going on y'all. Let's talk about weird things people say at the merch table. I want to begin the conversation, Matt, with, "I've never heard of you," because you would have to set your merch up, especially if you were in an arena situation, you would have to set up your merch prior to the event.
Matthew Owen:
Yes.
Amena Brown:
So people would be coming in to get their seats and it'd be like us and maybe in, those of you who are familiar with Christian market, meaning like Christian artists that sell albums and those parts, there would be Christian artists whose names were very big, maybe because their songs played on radio at the time or because if they were worship artists, people knew their songs from church or there were all sorts of things. So there was some artists that people walked in like, "Oh, they know this band. Oh, they know this artist." And then there was us.
Matthew Owen:
And then there was us.
Amena Brown:
Where a lot of them did know us, and the wild thing about an arena show is in our experience, and maybe this is a Christian market thing, most of those arena shows weren't in a big major city. You weren't in LA in an arena, you weren't in New York in an arena, you weren't even in Atlanta in an arena. You were in Macon, you were in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Matthew Owen:
Maybe Orlando if you're lucky.
Amena Brown:
So you're not dealing with people who are metropolitan. You're dealing with people who are like, "I came to this because I want to hear some Christian music," and they're walking to the merch table and would walk right up to our table and be like, "What do you do? I've never heard of you."
Matthew Owen:
My favorite was when they would pick the CD up and flip it over on the back and read it. I don't know if they were looking for a song they maybe knew and didn't know it was me or you, or if they're looking for a featuring insert name of whoever and when they didn't see it, they just kind of... this puzzled look and put it back down. You don't know me, I don't know you. It's okay.
Amena Brown:
They would also say, "Is this Christian music?"
Matthew Owen:
Yes.
Amena Brown:
That was a big question that we would get all the time.
Matthew Owen:
Yes.
Amena Brown:
And in my mind that was always kind of funny because I don't think, even though Matt and I both were performing our art in Christian spaces, for us there was a difference between artists who considered themselves Christian so and so, they considered themselves a Christian rapper, a Christian singer songwriter, they were a Christian band and then there were those of us who were like, "We are Christians, but that's not necessarily a qualifier, a title or whatever that we have." And so whenever they would say that, it was always kind of funny to me because I'd be like, "I think I understand why you're asking that question and I guess some of this art we made was Christian," but then I would be like, "Nah, you might want to go two tables down."
Matthew Owen:
They are very explicitly... Well it was always wild to me for my stuff specifically is because my role in most of these events was I would be on for an hour up front. Everybody's walking in so it's my job to get that crowd on 10 that way by the time the first band comes in... And then sometimes I would be there to keep the momentum going between bands. I'm on the microphone, I got the crowd chanting, singing along. So it's a lot of instrumental music. I'm not up there making a point. I'm not up there delivering some form of a message. I am very much so entertainment and I love it. I'm an entertainer at heart. That's what I do, it's what I love to do and so in the music that I was making was mostly instrumental music. I ran into this question more times than I can count, but, "Is it a Christian album?" And the first... For a while I would be like, "Well, it's instrumental music."
Amena Brown:
That makes it neutral, in a sense.
Matthew Owen:
Yeah, because there's no message. If there's no words, was that a Christian kick drum? Was that a...
Amena Brown:
Yikes.
Matthew Owen:
Did you baptize that drum kit?
Amena Brown:
We love a Christian trumpet. We love to see if the trumpet...
Matthew Owen:
Did you get the all on that MPC?
When I would just say, "Yeah," I would see it ease up on their face and they'd be like, "Yeah, I'll take three of them."
Amena Brown:
Yikes.
Matthew Owen:
And so I just learned that for whatever reason, these people just need to know that it was safe for the whole family.
Amena Brown:
Right, okay.
Matthew Owen:
Cause in a lot of these large, especially the big arenas and stuff, there's a lot of youth groups who have shown up in some massive 16 passenger van. And I know this dude is asking me this like, "If I put this in on our ride home because my teenagers just enjoyed what you just did, am I going to hear some things that I'm going to get some calls from some parents because their kids went home and said this thing?" And so that's why I was like, "Oh, you're just asking is it safe for me to play at my youth group, in the van?" So that's where I was like it's that thing of customer service that still very much so exists in whatever line of work you do, I still have it now even though I'm not working in those environments, some of it's the same, oddly.
Amena Brown:
Just the questions are different.
Matthew Owen:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Amena Brown:
And I think it is interesting now to think back on that because we started out doing a lot of youth events because what we were doing sort of fell in the fun category, which is interesting when you're performing in a lot of these, especially more conservative or evangelical Christian environment, if it falls in the category of hip hop or it's fun, it's a good time, they're like, "Oh, that must be for the students. You could come and speak to our youth." At most, they'll be like, "Oh, I bet our college students," and maybe every now and then you'd get a young adult situation.
Matthew Owen:
Like a single situation.
Amena Brown:
Where it'd be somehow people randomly between 18 and 35 that are just aimlessly wandering through their lives can come here. But otherwise, once you got past that sort of thing, then it kind of felt like all the fun got sucked out of it, all the music turned very slow and had to be very...
Matthew Owen:
Acoustic guitar.
Amena Brown:
Yeah, like contemplative and any of that fun stuff was like... I was like, "What are the vibes?" So I think that was probably one of the things that helped me and Matt to know that we need to start phasing out doing youth events, because for me, to the point of what you said, babe, I'm thinking about art and for many Christian folks, there is this idea that if it's not air quotes say for the whole family, then that means there's stuff in it that as Christian people you shouldn't be listening to. But I started to really have a lot of questions about that the more we travel because I was like, well the differentiation you made makes sense, there's certain things that are appropriate for a kid, there's certain things that are appropriate for a teenager. That doesn't mean that love songs are bad. That doesn't necessarily mean that songs about sex are inherently bad. I'm not saying all of them things is good either, but I'm just saying it really narrowed in this way that I didn't like as an artist.
Matthew Owen:
It very much so narrowed the lane of what story you could tell as an artist or what paintbrush you could paint with.
Amena Brown:
Yes.
Matthew Owen:
And I felt like those gaps were already very well filled. That lane is very well filled and continues to be and that's fine. But I want to talk about the things that I see in my every day, I want to talk about my... here's what I see in my life, which I think goes back to the idea of something we've both experienced of, "I don't want you to see me."
Amena Brown:
Right. That's wild.
Matthew Owen:
But yeah, that was always a wild question of, "Is it Christian?" And my brain had to compute through, "What is the question this person's really asking me?"
Amena Brown:
Right, please.
Matthew Owen:
So I'd be like, "Yes it is." And they'd be like...
Amena Brown:
If that's going to help us order room service later, sure.
Matthew Owen:
The level of...
Amena Brown:
The whole album's Christian. The other thing that would be hilarious to us, especially when we would be in these medium to small towns that to them, this Christian tour of however many people coming to blah blah blah city in Kentucky or wherever we were, this was their social interactions for the year. This was a super big deal.
Matthew Owen:
Oh, man. They were going out.
Amena Brown:
And we would go do our thing and the moments of them coming up afterwards, we had this happen several times and people would be like, "You know what? I loved every minute of what y'all did. Y'all are really talented and you know what? I think y'all should take this on the road. Y'all should really take this out there and listen, if y'all ever want to go to Wisconsin, my brother is a pastor up there. I got some connections for you and y'all really need to think about that." And so of course Matt and I are literally standing at the table like, "This is literally the road." Like we are on.
Matthew Owen:
We just left somewhere to come here. We're leaving here to go somewhere else. But you know what? You're onto something, lady. Here's another aspect, I don't know if we've talked about this yet, the volunteer aspect.
Amena Brown:
Oh, yes I forgot about that.
Matthew Owen:
Where you would get to, whether it's a large place, small place, and typically they would say, "Here is the volunteer that we have from this church or this organization who is going to be at your merch table." Because while we're on stage, we can't be there and also we're going to need help, hopefully once the of people go, "Oh my gosh, this, I must have this. Wow." And so...
Amena Brown:
And we weren't making enough money yet where we could afford to travel with that size of team. Some artists, whatever genre, some artists get to where they're making enough money that it's them, it's their DJ or their band, plus they have people traveling with them to do social media, plus they have people traveling with them that are handling merch, inventory, money counting, that they have a person that does that at every event. We were not.
Matthew Owen:
We were all of the above. It was us, our go pros, maybe a little Zoom to catch some audio and a square reader.
Amena Brown:
That's it. So those volunteers were kind of saving grace for us, especially if one of us had a gig and the other one wasn't performing, then the other person might hold down the table, but when we both had to perform, which we did together for many years, who can hold down the table? So now you got random volunteers, you're handing them money like square readers. Oh, man.
Matthew Owen:
I would typically ask, "Have you ever used an iPad before?"
Amena Brown:
Oh, child.
Matthew Owen:
And you would be surprised at how often at that time they'd be like, "No."
Amena Brown:
Say it ain't so y'all. Okay, Matt, I want to talk about the "famous" conversations that we had on the road. Being "Christian famous" or church famous is wild, is false.
Matthew Owen:
Well...
Amena Brown:
It's just because when you're a performer in Christian market, or as some of my friends refer to it as the Christian industrial complex, when you are a performer there, you feel like a big fish, but you are actually in a very small pond. But to that small pond of people, there are some names that really, really matter over there and when you leave that space, you are not that, you might have... We would get booked for an event and for three days we felt a little bit like the Beatles because everywhere, every restaurant we went to around the conference venue, every time we went back and forth to the hotel entering the space, I mean, some of this I know it's got to sound so weird to y'all, that they would have to give hosts to us to walk us in and out of the venue because there would be that many people at the conference or whatever. They would be like, "Oh my gosh, Amena. Oh my gosh, DJ Opdiggy. You have that for like three days straight.
Matthew Owen:
Oh, yeah.
Amena Brown:
Even when you get to the airport in whatever that city is, the people are still like, "I really enjoyed you, take a picture with me."
Matthew Owen:
That is the weirdest thing.
Amena Brown:
You could even land back... For us, we would land back home in Atlanta and there were still people that were just on our flight that live in Atlanta, still asking for our pictures at the baggage claim and then you get in your car, you go to a restaurant, when you leave the airport, you stop by Target and you know what? Nobody's worried about you.
Matthew Owen:
Not at all.
Amena Brown:
So it's weirdly like disorienting because I can see for people who make their career there for years and years that you do feel like a famous person. So we would go to places and people would say, they would ask us, especially students in particular would ask us, "Are you famous?"
Matthew Owen:
Yes. I got that pretty often at the merch table, "Hey, are you famous?" I remember when Instagram first started popping up to become a thing and the idea of... once upon a time, everybody was in a brand. We weren't that aware of ourselves.
Amena Brown:
Yikes.
Matthew Owen:
I remember once it started becoming socially a thing of how many likes you were getting on whatever the social media... And that's when Instagram was first kind of popping up. That's when people were posting pictures on Instagram. I don't even think video was an option yet. And I can remember I would be rapping at my turntables, whatever, some line of 13 year olds would be standing in front of me wanting to take a picture, somebody being like, "Are you famous?"
Amena Brown:
Yikes.
Matthew Owen:
And my answer's always been, "Well, if I was, would you have to ask?"
Amena Brown:
That part, and my answer was always, "I go in Target, nobody's worried about me." I feel like that's a famous person. You're in Target, you going through the mall and the people are like... I've been, we both have been in a place where Usher was, who is a person who just to be clear is actually famous, for real famous. The whole mall is a buzz like, "Oh my God, that was Usher. Oh my God, oh my God." And I would tell the kids, "I go to Target all the time," and you know what? Nobody's there like, "Oh, it's Amena."
Matthew Owen:
Nobody. Even in the scenario you pointed out earlier about being at the airport and people being like, "Oh," and they want to take these pictures and stuff, the people who were not at the event, sometimes they'd be sitting next to us on the plane and be like, "So who are y'all?" And we'd be like...
Amena Brown:
Okay.
Matthew Owen:
That's also a weird conversation to have to explain, "Well, we live in Atlanta. She's a poet, I'm a DJ. We just... we're at this event and they had this experience," and you're trying to... And it's really not.
Amena Brown:
It's not actually as big of a deal as it might seem for 10 minutes. I also want to speak to the things you were asked to sign. Now I will tell y'all, there are some heartwarming moments that happen at the merch table where your work actually means a lot to people, you have people come up that are actually supporters of what you do. I will tell you that doesn't feel like most of the time when we were in Christian market, that was our experience. But there were some times that was wonderful. Other times get a little weird, like people asking you at the merch table to sign their Bibles. That was always a weird one.
Matthew Owen:
That was a weird one, yeah.
Amena Brown:
I'm not a co-author there, so I don't know what I'm doing. That was always a weird one. People asking you to sign other people's merch, which I realize now was a budget situation. This is people being like, "I can only afford to buy one of y'all's CDs out here." So they were like, "I'm going to buy so and so's CD over there, but I'm going to walk around to everybody else's merch table and be like, 'Sign this'."
Matthew Owen:
Yeah. There's a small period of time where there was a certain Christian rapper that was at a lot of the events we were at where I think that record label has an engineer who also traveled as a DJ with them and he happened to be a white dude, I happen to be a white dude, from far enough away, maybe. I don't think we look alike, but whatever. So I would get asked to sign a lot. And again, it's back to that thing where people walk up to you and they already have in their mind, there's no telling them, "I'm not that or well, it's an instrumental album."
It's just, this person, there's something this person wants. They want it in a timely manner. So just go on ahead and give it to them. That's just how I roll. So I was like... they walked up to me with this certain artist CD and for a while I'd be like, "I have nothing to do with... this isn't me." And after a while I'd be like, "Yeah, cool." And I would always sign it DJ Opdiggy and my O always has a little... cause I've had this goatee since I was 16, so it has that O and it has a smiley face on it, and I saw the dude and told him about it, we had a good laugh about it, but...
Amena Brown:
I mean, there's probably... I can't even count to y'all the amount of CDs that people have at home that have our signatures on it and we had nothing to do with those records.
Matthew Owen:
Man, people asking me to sign their shoes, like brand new shoes, like you're talking about summertime... Listen, I know those your back to school shoes and you wore them to this concert and your mama going to be upset, but here let me sign them.
Amena Brown:
You asked, I'm giving it to you.
Matthew Owen:
I had people asking me to sign their pizza.
Amena Brown:
Yikes.
Matthew Owen:
I'm like, "Are you going to eat that?"
Amena Brown:
Man, I don't know what we're doing it. It got really weird, really fast.
Matthew Owen:
Sign my forehead, that one felt cultish. I'm like...
Amena Brown:
I'm like, "What are y'all doing guys." This is yikes. And then once-
Matthew Owen:
I mean, I did it, but...
Amena Brown:
Right. I mean, even with the Bibles, that was a weird one, but I would kind of put my... at that time, I would put my favorite Bible verse and just sign it because I was like, "Maybe just to encourage you while you reading this." I don't know, this is weird. Also, once people found out we lived in Atlanta, they were like, "Oh, you live in Atlanta, you know Lecrae?"
Matthew Owen:
Yeah.
Amena Brown:
I can't tell y'all how many elevators, how many merch tables, how many situations we were in this where people... it was sort of like next to the like, "Okay, you're here, you're performing, you must be famous in some way," to them in this medium to small town in the Midwest somewhere and they would be like, "Oh, where are y'all from?" And then we would say, "Oh, we're from Atlanta." "Oh, y'all know Lecrae?" And shout to Lecrae. That will always make us laugh because we would be like, "Man, we've been in... both of us have been in Atlanta over 20 years." We've been here a long time. And Atlanta...
Matthew Owen:
I've been here long enough to where I've been to Freaknik.
Amena Brown:
Right. Right. And I was here like two, probably two years post the last real, real Freaknik. It was just dissipating when I moved here. So we've been in Atlanta a long time so that always makes us laugh.
Matthew Owen:
I was here when there was a new group called Outkast coming out.
Amena Brown:
Okay. Okay. All right.
Matthew Owen:
And we're like, "Whoa, they sound like us."
Amena Brown:
Okay, that's the people... No. And it would just make us laugh also because when we are home in Atlanta, our artist community here is very different from the people that even that might have been our friends that we would see on the road or whatever. So we had a lot of artists community here, but most of the artists that we know that we kicked it with, that we went to shows with, they weren't traveling to these events. They were looking at the pictures we posted like-
Matthew Owen:
What are you doing?
Amena Brown:
... "Wait, what is this?"
Matthew Owen:
Other DJs would be like, "Wait, what is this thing you're doing?"
Amena Brown:
So that was always funny to us.
Matthew Owen:
The, "Do you know Lecrae?" question to me typically came after, "Are you famous?"
Amena Brown:
And, "Do you know Lecrae?"
Matthew Owen:
"Do you know Lecrae"? And sometimes, "Do you know David Crowder?" That one also-
Amena Brown:
Oh, that's true. That's true. Cause some people knew he was here. Yeah.
Matthew Owen:
And I think that that question kind of came with the, "Are you famous?" Which also, back to my earlier thing about people wanting to make sure they're getting the most likes for their post of this random... I think what they're asking is, "Are you worth me taking this picture with? Because I don't know you, but is it going to get me these likes?"
Amena Brown:
"Because if I don't know you, can I prove you're important enough for me to post?" If you tell me, "Oh yeah, I know Lecrae, or I know David Crowder, I had dinner with them" or something, at that point, then it'd be like, "Oh, well if I post it and people are like, 'We don't know them.' We'd be like, 'Yeah, but they said that they eat sushi with David Crowder sometimes'," or something. I don't... That was always weird. Got a little muddy. Yikes.
Matthew Owen:
Just like the merch table.
Amena Brown:
Okay, the merch table is a very muddy place. So we wanted to give y'all a little window into what used to be our life and that's just a little bit of what the merch table is. We're looking forward to coming back and sharing more of our road stories with y'all because there's so much to tell you. So thanks again for joining me, babe.
Matthew Owen:
Imagine the stories we didn't tell.
Amena Brown:
Okay. We'll have to do like a after dark version for y'all for real.
Matthew Owen:
If you see us in person, we might.
Amena Brown:
See y'all next time.
Matthew Owen:
Peace.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.