WinstonHits

Sunday, I was talking to the Callie Dee, local hip-hop promoter and soccer mom (no, really), and she was telling me about a show she put together for Lola’s Saloon.

The tour she was overseeing recently had fallen apart due to a run of bad luck involving a series of equipment failures in Austin. Fort Worth was to be the last date. One of the artists performing was Winston Hits, a hip-hop act out of Dallas that I’d been wanting to hear. So, I headed to Lola’s, parked behind The Trailer Park and headed inside.

I found Winston and Callie hanging out on the back patio. None of the other artists showed up, so Winston was the only act for the night.

Inside there were maybe a dozen people milling about and there were Joe Easton, running sound, and DJ Snoopi, on the ones and twos. Winston took the stage and despite the sparse crowd, he played to the room like it was a stadium.

“I’ve performed sold out at Trees,” Winston told me out on the patio. “I’ve performed places smaller than here with less people. Really, I just learned to connect with the people who are there, at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter if it’s one or 100,000. You gotta treat it the same.

“At the end of the day, I need to give a good performance. Period.”

Although the set was short, the audience was digging it. People were responding, and Easton got to play with the reverb on the board. Most of the lyrics can’t be printed here, but the mix was dialed in so you could make out every word — somewhat a rarity in a hip-hop show.

Winston draws inspiration for his songs from daily life. Like My Pain was inspired by the death of his grandfather.

“I was in a really dark place,” Winston said. “My wife tried to help me out but I just completely shut down and I just wrote this song just to get everything off my chest.

“I rapped it to my wife, and she said, ‘You’ve got to record that.’ I didn’t think anybody would like that. It wasn’t pretty. I don’t know why it hit me so hard, but it did.”

But people did respond to it. The lyrics struck a chord with a lot of people

“When I would do this song, people would come up to me and be like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been feeling that way all the time,’ ” he said.

“It felt good to know that other people felt the same way. That was kind of the turning point that set me off into it. I saw then that I could do what I needed to do and put my spin on my music exactly how I wanted and tell my story for real, and people would pay attention to it.”

When it comes to motivation, Winston has a secret weapon.

Three years ago, his wife gave birth to twins. While initially he thought this meant an end to his musical dreams, the twins have become an inspiration — a drive to succeed, and to show his kids you don’t have to hate what you do to make a living.

“When you hear you're going to have twins, you’re thinking, ‘Man, I gotta work three jobs. I’m never going to sleep; my wife’s going to always hate me because I’m going to be cranky.’ That’s what I assumed,” he said.

“When I held my kids — call it cliche — but it was really eye-opening when they just stared at me. This is what drives me. I know everybody has their motivation, but I kinda got an edge.

“Everybody got kids, but I got two college tuitions to pay at the same time.”

“I want to be able to instill that into my kids — not about music, just anything in general — if you do what you love and you work hard enough at it, it will pay off eventually. You just have to really put the time and effort into it.” - Steve Watkins