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Alvester Martin’s Triumph: From Being Homeless to Releasing his First Album “Love Me or
The road to success is never easy and we recently learned that dancer and singer, Alvester Martin, traveled that road. Check out our interview with Mr. Martin as he discusses putting everything into his craft, what was the inspiration behind Love me or Leave me and what we can expect from the future.
How did you begin your career in the entertainment industry?
I actually started out as a professional ballet dancer. I always wanted to sing and be a musician. For me, dancing was just something that I liked because I saw Michael Jackson and Usher do it. So my grandparents put me in tap dancing because they weren’t really big on their son being in ballet. However, I had a teacher when I went to an art school, I had a black male teacher tell me that I would never be a ballet dancer because I didn’t have the physique and I didn’t have a body type or the know-how.
I became a ballet dancer professionally around the age of 16 and I trained at SAB in New York at the Lincoln Center. I moved to LA to pursue music and I kind of fell into music.
You were homeless. How were you able to turn that around and stay motivated?
The only thing I can honestly say is God. It’s really a one day at a time. Now, I’m no veteran to homelessness as far as I have been homeless three times. I put all my money and everything back into my art because I believed in it so much and I believed that God has given me this gift and if there is anything that you want, there has to be a sacrifice. I’ve asked God many times am I supposed to be doing this because it hasn’t been the easiest of roads. I was on a major network television show and the star of it, which is Black Magic, and I was homeless at the time.
Literally, every dime I got, I was putting back into my music and recording an album. It’s definitely one of those things where you got to stay prayed up. It definitely pulls you closer to God because you really don’t know. You’re taking this gamble and you’re just hoping and praying that it works out.
You’ve worked with so many talented artists from Beyoncé, Rihanna, Tamar Braxton, Mariah Carey. What is one thing you’ve learned from being around these creatives?
I’ve learned to lose my heart and keep my spirit. I’m overly compassionate and I’m overly passionate. I used to get really affected by small things; things as far as I would let my emotion dictate my mood and my feeling and how I would maneuver. I saw this quote from Warren Buffett that said, “If you can’t control your emotions, you can’t control your money”. I can’t really have too much of a heart because people play on that. When people know they have your heart and they know they have your emotions, you can be manipulated.
Now you have an album. How did you get to this point?
The album chronicles the last four to five years of my life and I’ll say now I have the courage enough to call it an album. Before I would be honest and say mixtape because I was afraid of failure. I thought, at least if it comes out and it doesn’t do well I can say it was a mixtape. But I realized that if it sells one or a million its still an album and it is what it is. I had to really think, either you’re going to continue to take dance jobs, and you’re going to continue to stifle yourself or are you really going to step out on faith. That was one of the hardest things I did because I really made a conscious decision to say no I’m not going to take any more dance jobs and focus on my music. The album was recorded in 2016 in November. I recorded the album in two weeks.
The album is called Love Me or Leave Me. What do you want people to get from the album?
It’s really me calling myself out. I had to get over a lot of things like coming from the background to the forefront. Most of those are internal and most of those are insecurities and also letting what people say get into your mental psyche and we don’t even realize how much we do allow what people say to get into our mental psyche. So I had to get to a point where it’s like okay these are your f***** up qualities, these are the things you cool about, these are the things that you are going to change, these are things that you don’t matches and these are the things that you’re going to that you accept about yourself. The end result will be either you’re going to learn to love or leave yourself.
So it’s really more been talking to myself. Either you’re going to accept you for who you are and get better and better yourself in the areas that you want to better yourself or you’re going to try to always put on this front face and try to be this inauthentic individual just for the exceptions of others. TD Jakes said, “what you think about me is none of my business”.
What is a Quintessential Gentleman?
A quintessential gentleman thinks it is what it is. You are accepted for you. You are comfortable in your skin but also in what you actually like because there’s a lot of s*** we do that we don’t even like. A quintessential gentleman is able to decipher. He will not fool yourself into something that’s completely not him.
What can we look forward to from Alvester Martin?
I’m ready to go on tour. I’m ready to share the music life with the fans. I feel very at home on the stage. I actually get a social anxiety in big crowds, so I feel more at home on stage than I do on the road. I’m in the process already of album number 2 but I want to get out there on this album and tour.
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