I found out about Adelitas Way through WWE who used their song “Invincible” as the theme song for one of their weekly television shows. They were just starting out with their first studio LP and I related to that concept of starting fresh and being excited to discover. I began listening to Adelitas Way as soon as their first album came out. There’s a lot of stuff from back then that I would never listen to today, but through it all, one band has remained comfortably entrenched in my musical diet: Adelitas Way. I was young and hungry to learn everything I could about music, and so I listened to anything I could get my ears on from Aerosmith to Beyonce to Skillet to Michael Jackson.
That was when I got my first iPod and it’s when I discovered Rolling Stone magazine, which was a big influencer for me as I became an avid music listener. Contact him at and follow on Twitter.If you’ve been around this site enough, you know that I didn’t really get into music until 2009, when I was about fifteen years old. It’s time to renegotiate everything in this business.” “There should be a lot more ownership in this game right now than there is. “Artists, we shoot ourselves in the foot a lot,” DeJesus says. DeJesus owns the masters to everything he releases nowadays, a much more lucrative - and empowering - endeavor than getting 20 percent of any profits on a major label.Īnd so while the costs are high doing things this way, so are the rewards. The band scored a top 10 hit on rock radio with the “Getaway” single “Bad Reputation,” an almost-unheard-of feat for a band in Adelitas Way’s position. That’s the risk.”Īnd yet, the risk is paying off. You scrape by to pay your mortgage, but you’re paying 18 grand in radio bills. “You’re talking 30, 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars. “Every dollar that comes in from every record we sell I’m taking away from family and I’m investing it into what I know is the future,” he says. DeJesus has wrangled with this firsthand. The capital required to keep a band like this going is substantial and has, in the past, demanded major label backing or something close to it. It’s a radio-friendly band that works with expensive, big-name producers and strives for hits, with the costs of taking songs to the airwaves being enormous. Now, plenty of DIY acts pay for and release their own albums, but Adelitas Way is operating on an entirely different scale with entirely different goals. Adelitas Way successfully crowdfunded its last album, 2015’s “Getaway,” and has self-financed its new record, “Notorious,” due out later this year. His plan: not to sign with another label, but keep everything in-house. “I was like, ‘I’m going to go for something crazy right now.’ ” “They were considering picking up the fourth record on us I just didn’t want them to,” says DeJesus, an intensely high-energy presence with the athletic build of the major league baseball prospect he once was. 1 hits on active rock radio.īut when it came time for Virgin to pick up the option or pass on the band’s next record, DeJesus urged the label to do the latter. Adelitas Way had a solid three-album run with Virgin, with the group’s most successful album, 2011’s “Home School Valedictorian,” selling close to 150,000 copies and spawning a pair of No. If DeJesus needs to be in fighting shape these days, it’s not just to steel himself from the rigors of the road, his band’s latest trek beginning Thursday at Brooklyn Bowl.Īfter Adelitas Way split from Virgin Records in 2015, DeJesus has become bandleader, manager, label head and more. “I’m on a diet, dude,” the 33-year-old says. The Adelitas Way frontman is taking in the weather in front of a south-side eatery on a Tuesday afternoon, though he’s skipping lunch. Maybe the only thing harder than landing said deal is prospering on your own after it ends. Ninety-five percent of the acts that sign to a major fail to recoup costs and eventually get dropped. Scoring a major label record contract is a bite of the golden apple that often results in little more than a mouthful of worm chunks. It’s time to renegotiate everything in this business,” says Adelitas Way frontman Rick DeJesus, whose band self-financed their upcoming new record after splitting from Virgin Records.