Rising Stars: Meet Trevin Bartee

Today we’d like to introduce you to Trevin Bartee.

Hi Trevin, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Since I was a kid, creating was in my blood. I would always find myself putting a little extra into short stories for class and I loved drawing pictures. But my creative focus really changed in my later high school years, as my angsty teen heart was constantly being fueled by emotional music.

My love for music lead me to teach myself guitar and eventually teach myself how to record my own music. I would write and record my own songs out of my parents’ laundry room and upload them to Myspace to show them off. With a lot of teen emotions going through me, I would be putting out new songs each week. This leads me to move all the way to Phoenix, AZ to attend The Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences.

It wasn’t long into the schooling that I questioned whether that career path was for me. I wasn’t necessarily nerding out on the specifics of recording, as everyone else was, and I just wasn’t connecting with how competitive the field was. I just didn’t have the drive to want to step on others to get somewhere.

Feeling disenchanted with what I thought was the thing for me, lead me to return to Kansas City after graduating. I had a new set of skills but still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Music had become an expensive hobby that I felt passionate about but didn’t see a future with.

I joined the workforce and made music on the side. I still enjoyed expressing myself, and music was the only way I knew how to do that. In 2016, I released a solo album called ‘Baby Girl’ under my solo artist name Fiesta Maiden. But soon after, I hit a major writer’s block. It was during this time that I had started working at a warehouse with my co-host Amanda. I would bounce song ideas off of her, and she was even the photographer who worked on the album art for my album.

This was the only time we really collaborated. She was a photographer/visual artist who would have fun writing original murder mystery parties and I was a musician. I didn’t see a lot of chances for us to cross paths creatively, as we were in different fields.

But it wasn’t until a few years later that she and a friend of ours talked about starting their own podcast. I think for them, it was a bit of a passing thought or a fun idea that they weren’t sure how to get off the ground. The second I heard them, I wanted to support them. I had all of the gear, and I wanted to see my friends succeed. I wrote their theme song and I edited/mixed all of their episodes. But as I was the guy behind the scenes, I started to crave having more creative direction.

A year into the show, they had decided to disband, and it felt like my chance to step up and be more involved. We had an opportunity to create a new show, and we both hit the ground running. As a new show, we brought all of our experience with us and were able to grow it so much more quickly than a first-time podcaster.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Oh, it’s never a smooth road. I’ve been in and out of different passion projects since I have been a creative person. Between writer’s blocks and issues finding bands when I was younger, I was constantly having some kind of crisis on where my place was in the creative world.

There were a lot of mental struggles. Dealing with depression at a young age and feeling inadequate with my creative ventures, it was a major challenge. I knew deep down that I had the ability to create things, but I had a hard time seeing things to completion. And even if I did finish them, I wasn’t always happy with the finished product.

It really does feel like this is what I’ve been preparing myself for. Every challenge and step along the way has made me more equipped to do the things that I am doing now. There isn’t a day that goes by with this show, where I can’t mentally reference a mistake in the past that helped me know how to better handle a new challenge.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am the co-host of Seriously Sinister: A True Petty Crime Podcast. Along with my partner Amanda, we are out to parody and change what a true-crime podcast can be.

When it comes to true crime podcasts, you’ve got the serious shows that narrate a terrible crime in the past and you’ve got the true-crime comedy podcasts that will still talk about serious murder subjects, but crack their own jokes around the subject. I think both of those types of shows have their place, but I don’t think I am the person to tackle a story like that.

When Amanda and I were first kicking around the idea of true crime, it wasn’t long into brainstorming that I knew I wanted to do something completely different. It was important to Amanda and me that we do something that lets our personalities shine through, without doing the same kind of format as everyone else.

I landed on petty crimes, but I wanted to push the concept further. I wanted to use my audio skills to push the listening experience to be a little higher on the production side of things. So we decided to do a parody podcast. Instead of a true-crime comedy podcast covering murders and cracking jokes around the serious subject matter, our goal is to tell stories of small funny crimes, but try to tell their stories with a very serious and dramatic tone.

It was perfect for me. As a podcast listener, I am big on improvised comedy podcasts, like Comedy Bang Bang. Amanda is a heavy listener of serious true crime shows, and we both were big fans of the creepy storytelling podcasts. So now we challenge ourselves each week to write a highly dramatic story based on a funny crime headline from the news.

We’ve done stories about a serial American Flag thief in a small town, a young boy who taught himself how to drive from a Youtube video only to drive himself to get McDonald’s and I even did a spoof of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart but made it all about opening someone else’s mail. They are all true stories, so not only is this a comedy podcast, but we can easily fit in with any true-crime podcast because the stories are all true.

Aside from our original idea on the stories, I also put a ton of work into our story segments. When we record our episodes, Amanda and I will tell the stories to each other, and then I take the recordings back to my studio. There, I will write and record my own original background music and come up with cheesy reenactment sound effects for the stories. When listening to creepy storytelling podcasts, I always feel like they are missing a level of immersion. Like when you are watching a documentary, and there are all of these reenactment sounds and images to bring you closer to the story. I wanted that, but with comedy.

On our first episode, I did a story about a man that the local papers had dubbed ‘The Night Puncher.’ This guy would go door-to-door, knock, and if someone would open the door to answer, he would punch them in the face and run! When I was first putting the episode together, I lined up a cheesy punch sound effect along with a stock sound of a man screaming. The second I pressed play to hear my monologue with an echoey scream from a man, I lost it. That’s when I realized that I was not only doing this for an audience, but I was entertaining myself.

Every week is a new chance for me to make myself laugh and also keep Amanda on her toes. She never knows what I’m going to do with her stories after she tells them. Seeing her reaction to each episode is rewarding enough for me.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk-taking?
I think the whole idea is a bit of a risk, for us. Let’s face it, our idea is extremely silly. Every episode, I will add a sound effect to something and I will have to confidently present this, not knowing if the joke is going to land or not.

In one of Amanda’s earlier stories, she told a story about her husband breaking into her own house to sneak up and scare her. She talked about how her whole body went limp and she fell to the floor crying until she heard a familiar laugh. I had surrounded this whole situation with pretty dramatic sound effects.

There was the sound of a scream and a body hitting the ground, but I felt like the whole thing was coming off as a bit too serious and high stress. So when Amanda said in her story that she heard a familiar laugh, I chose to use a laugh similar to Goofy from Disney. To hear that laugh in the middle of such a creepy-sounding story really jolts the listener.

Every week, I am playing with those expectations. Whether it be a story that I build up just to give the listener a silly anti-climactic ending or a goofy sound effect, there’s a lot of comedic risks that I take. Sometimes you just have to make yourself laugh, and hope that your listener is in on the joke too.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seriouslysinisterpodcast/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SeriouslySinisterPodcast/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/seriouslysinpod
• Other: https://linktr.ee/Seriously.Sinister.Podcast

Image Credits
Amanda Rose