By Emma Zaremba
Contributing Writer
Spring Weekend is a celebrated event by Bonaventure students. The various festivities and traditional sporting event mark the end of the school year. This year, one student will experience the festivities from a different view.
Josh Popsie, a senior journalism and mass communication major, will perform on stage in front of all his peers this year.
“I think it’s going to be a great weekend, and I’m really excited that the Campus Activities Board (CAB) has given me the opportunity to perform for everybody here,” Popsie said.
Four months ago, Popsie couldn’t fathom the idea that a hobby would be steering his life. He wrote some lyrics in high school, but only shared them with one dear friend.
“She would always read them and tell me I should do more with them, but I never really did,” Popsie said.
The passing of this friend led him to pursue music a bit further. Still, he didn’t imagine that a pastime he enjoyed on occasion would turn into something more.
Years later, Popsie had several lyrics and beats, but he never put the two together. He wrote for the pure joy of it and was content with this relationship, until one day he decided to take a risk.
“One day, my friend was in the studio making a beat, and he asked if I would go in there and do what I do,” Popsie said.
Popsie strolled into the studio and mashed his lyrics with his friend’s music. His friend loved how it turned out.
“That started everything,” Popsie said. “This friend lived up the street and had his own home studio, so it was easy from then on to continue making music together.”
Before long, Popsie decided to collect his songs into a mixtape. He was leaving to study at the University of Oxford in England around the time of its completion, so he chose to make a Facebook event for its release. After joining the Facebook event, people would be able to download his songs for free starting at midnight.
“I posted it as an event maybe a week before the midnight release so that people would join,” Popsie said.
Though he went to sleep that night with low expectations, Popsie said he woke up to a pleasant surprise.
“When I woke up in the morning before leaving for Oxford, it had already had 50 downloads by six in the morning,” he said.
While studying in Oxford, he left his music behind. He hadn’t checked on the status of his mixtape until he returned home later that summer. To his surprise, there were more than 2,500 downloads. This past December, his music hit more than 4,000 downloads.
“It was crazy because I never really expected that to happen. I would have been fine with 100 or 200 downloads by some of my friends,” Popsie said.
Shortly after this personal best, a label named Native Samurai Records, based in Seattle, contacted Popsie. They discovered him from the website he created to promote his music. From the information on the site, they emailed him expressing their interest in his music and their desire to sign a recording contract with him.
“I thought it was a joke at first, like it was one of my friends messing with me, and I emailed them back not knowing what to say,” Popsie said.
He was out of his element. Hurriedly, he contacted a friend in Los Angeles who is familiar with the industry. She told him she recognized the label and certified that they were respectable.
On Jan. 15, the contract went into effect, and Native Samurai began advertising their new client on YouTube. Today, there are 10 of his songs available, with approximately 840,000 views total.
Signing with Native Samurai has also given Popsie the opportunity to work with other artists. Right now, he is working on a remix to one of Natalie Hernandez’s songs. Hernandez was a contestant on season three of “The Voice.” He plans to meet her this summer while recording his first album, which should debut in late August.
Although his music career is taking off, he said he believes that wherever his music takes him, he won’t forget where he came from.
“I keep in contact with people back home more now than I did before,” he said. “It’s the people from back home who were spreading and sharing my music around. They helped make all this happen.”
His gratitude is further expressed by the mood of his music.
“I think the purpose of music is to lift up people who are having bad days. I feel like music is there to connect with those people,” Popsie said.
Tonight at 6 p.m., Popsie said he hopes to engage the Spring Weekend crowd and get them pumped up, even if they don’t know his music. He will perform remixes with choruses people recognize so that it’s easy for them to sing along.
“I’m thankful for everybody here that gives my music time, supports it and shares it,” Popsie said.
