You may not realize it, but some of your LinkedIn connections may be amazing musicians in their own right.

For today’s music rec, I want to shout out my internet friend @David Hawkins 🎶

The guy’s an extremely talented songwriter and performer, and I cannot highly enough recommend his latest release, Half Alive. Five songs of quirky, biting, catchy-as-heck indie pop. (And fun fact, I played keys on the 2nd track!)

It will make your weekend, even if it doesn’t help you focus at work 😉

Dave and I talk regularly about the challenges of being an independent musician (and an artist/creator generally) in the age of streaming and algorithmic social media. He’s not only built an audience on his own (tens of thousands of Instagram and TikTok followers!), but is relentlessly tinkering his way toward owning his presence, steering clear of the obvious platforms most folks gravitate to:

• He recently launched his own custom site to promote Half Alive, hosted for free on GitHub Pages, audio and all
• The entire album can be downloaded for free, with methods to (optionally) directly support him instead of defaulting to a streaming service
• He then spun out the idea into a free tool for fellow indie artists to use, called Pressed

I love this for so many reasons, but most importantly: it’s based in principles and passion. It’s not something anyone was explicitly asking for, and it’s not designed to become a huge business, but it’s something independent artists could use.

Do yourself a favor and check out Dave’s EP, and I hope this serves as a li’l inspiration to try building something for no reason other than because it might be helpful to someone 😄 links in the comments!