Aaron Bruno, AWOLNATION Founder and Lead Singer

Aaron Bruno (0:00)

I'd rather fail trying something new and innovative and forward thinking musically than copy someone else just to have a hit song.

Michael Gervais (0:12)

Alright, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade in training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist.

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Subscription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. All right, this week's conversation is with Aaron Bruno, best known as the founder and lead singer of Awolnation. They formed in 2010 and they crafted one of the most influential songs in years with the chart-topping record-breaking track Sale. And the song just exploded. And see if you can recognize just the few bars here.

It's so good, it's so good. And that song, Sail, went six times platinum in the US and holds the record for the most weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart by an independent artist and the second longest for any artist. But that's not the only reason I asked Aaron to be on the Finding Mastery podcast.

Sail, that song had a profound impact on me. And we talk about that in the podcast and how his music helped me to get in the right vibe for a mindset training project that I was working on. And it's just amazing how music can do that. The same song can mean so many different things to so many different people, different emotions and feelings and memories. And that's something that we discuss in this conversation. Why music means so much to Aaron, to me, to all of us, and why he is so passionate about it coming from an authentic place. And as you might imagine, Aaron didn't just wake up masterful. We dive into the struggles, the fork in the road for him and how he navigated that as well as when others were encouraging him to hang up his music career and how he moved through that process, which is certainly tricky when people that you care and love say, hey, maybe this isn't the right path for you.