Sven Yamaha

Where did the name Sven Yamaha come from?

At the time I was trying to come up with a name, a lot of my favorite artists had this naming style: Kevin Abstract, Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt. So I wanted a name like that. I figured I’d make my first name something even more obviously Swedish, which is where Sven came from. Then I was trying to think of an object for the second part, and I think the first thing I said was Sven Casio. But my friend was playing a Yamaha keyboard at the time and he was like, nah bro, Sven Yamaha. And I was like, wait, yeah, that’s kind of sick.

You’re going on seven years of releasing music. What’s it like going back through the older discography: nostalgia, or do you just see yourself as naive back then?

There’s definitely a lot of nostalgia. The cool thing is that I didn’t grow up playing music or knowing anything about music. When I started wanting to release music I had absolutely no musical background or skills whatsoever, and I just got right to it, my whole career, everything’s always been self-produced, self-recorded. It’s all me. So when you go back through my discography you can really see the whole journey. If you go back to the start, I listen to some of that and I’m like, damn, this is kind of ass. But I pride myself on openness and honesty and vulnerability, so I like that it’s all out in the open. Some people take down older music, or they have a mentality of, I’m not going to start releasing until I’m at a certain level. I’ve always thought about it as: I’m just gonna show everybody everything.

Do you think coming in with no formal background was an advantage?

I do think that was an advantage I had. Because I came into it with such an open mind, and with a kind of childlike curiosity, I could just make whatever came into my head. I wasn’t thinking, oh, it’s supposed to be like this, or it’s supposed to be like that.

What’s the single hardest aspect of being an artist?

Definitely the business side of it. I feel like a lot of people don’t realize how many meetings you have to take, especially as things have started going better for me, A&Rs, managers, publishers, people who want to do videos, trying to book live shows. Especially when you’re on the independent path and you haven’t got the team around you yet. The thing I struggle with most is how much I have to think about this like I’m running a company. The music comes easy for me, that’s what I signed up for, that’s what I want to do, I don’t have to think too hard about making songs, it kind of just happens. It’s all the stuff around it that I find really challenging.

How do you navigate authenticity in that? It’s no secret people get taken advantage of in this industry.

It is hard. I’ve had no shortage of conversations where someone’s telling you one thing and they’re not speaking from their heart, or not telling you the full truth, or they disappoint you in some way. But I think the music industry sometimes gets a bad rap because people are kind of naive. They’re like, we’re musicians, we’re creating from our hearts, this is a pure thing, and that’s all true, but if you want to make a career out of it, it’s also a business. It probably isn’t all that different from if I was trying to start a construction company. I’d be saying, damn, all these people are trying to keep me from getting my permits, all these customers are screwing me over. That’s kind of just how things work. There are shady people in the world. That’s what it is.

You’ve said you’re glad this didn’t happen for you earlier.

I really think it’s a blessing that things didn’t happen really quickly for me, that I didn’t blow up when I was 19 or 20. I’m 26 now. If I’d been a star when I was still a teenager I think I would have fumbled the bag.