By Don Ward
“Because the best things take time to cook.”
That was LeTrainiump’s response when I asked him how the different ingredients of his life, from his Louisiana roots and Christian upbringing to family, personal loss, and music, came together to create the artist he is today.
Being from Louisiana, he understood exactly where I was going with the gumbo analogy. And after spending time with him during Weekend 2 of the Austin City Limits Music Festival, there was a lot more to the story behind his performance. For LeTrainiump, getting to ACL wasn’t an overnight success. His journey started in Mamou, Louisiana, took him to Romania, brought him back to New Orleans, and eventually led him to Austin. Along the way, he discovered that pursuing music required more than talent. It required learning how to run a business, building relationships, and surrounding himself with people who believed in his vision.
I first met LeTrainiump a couple of years ago at Soho House in Austin. It was good to reconnect with him, this time alongside Buddy Magazine publisher Rob Garner, during one of the biggest weekends of his career. Joining our conversation was his wife of 10 years, Dominique Richard, who also serves as his manager and creative director. What I found particularly interesting was how closely their journey resembled my own experiences as an entrepreneur.
People see the performances, the crowds, and the recognition. What they don’t always see are the financial pressures, sacrifices, difficult decisions, and years of work that go into building something sustainable. We talked about his upbringing, the experiences that shaped him, his mother’s passing, and why he believes genuine relationships are essential to building a successful career. But we started with something that independent artists know all too well.
Just because you’ve played ACL doesn’t mean you’ve made it financially.
Buddy Magazine (Don Ward): One of the things I always try to explore with artists is the business behind the music. People see you performing at ACL, but they don’t necessarily understand everything that goes into getting here. How do you look at that side of your career?
LeTrainiump: I think a lot of people don’t understand that this is a business. Everybody has this mindset where they think, “Oh, you played ACL. You made it. You’re a billionaire now.” No, bro. I still got rent to pay. I still got employees to pay. I have to cover their gas. Their kids are here, so I have to make sure all of our kids are good.
People don’t understand that this is a business, just like any other business. It’s just that I get to enjoy it, too.
Buddy Magazine: Your musical journey goes back to when you were 14 years old. You started in the church, spent several years in Romania, and eventually pursued a different direction with your music. Walk us through that experience and how it shaped you.
LeTrainiump: At 14, I was heavily rooted in the church. At that time, I decided I didn’t want to be an artist. I wanted to be a minister, specifically a worship pastor. I wanted to learn how to run a church. So from 14 to about 23, I did just that. I worked at different megachurches and learned how to build relationships with people. Because people don’t understand, church sometimes can be a business, too.
From there, that led me to Romania. I was there for about five years, off and on. I remember getting ready to buy my plane ticket back to America and thinking, “What am I going to do when I get back?” All my friends were working offshore, working in tech, or had gone to college and graduated. And here I was traveling the world. I remember thinking, if you can figure out how to get from Mamou, Louisiana, to Romania, two completely different places, surely you can figure out how to chase your dreams.
And that brought up the question: What is my dream? I’ve always envisioned myself writing music for people beyond church, beyond a spiritual connection. I’ve always wanted to write music that everyday people could connect to. It could be fun, hype music, but I wanted to write lyrics that somebody going through something I’m going through could turn on and relate to. When I moved back, I started doing woodworking. I wasn’t pursuing music at all.
Then one day, I was about 26 or 27, getting married, and realized I had all this talent and ability, but I was still working at this small shop. One day, I just went for it. I married my wife, and we moved to New Orleans.
Buddy Magazine: At what point did you realize that pursuing music had to become more than a passion? When did you start treating it like a business?
LeTrainiump: When we moved to New Orleans, we were going to figure it out. I got a job for a while, but eventually I lost that job. I’ll never forget, before she became my manager, my wife came to me with a list of all my stats because I had been putting music out. She looked at everything and said, “No, you’re doing something.” Eventually, she decided to manage me, and we decided we were going to do this as a family.
That was eight years ago. In those eight years, we learned that it’s not just a passion project. You have to file your taxes a certain way. You have to talk to people a certain way. You have to carry yourself a certain way. Our kids are involved in everything we do. Basically, this is a family business. And in order for it to be a family business, we first had to learn business.
How do we do this? How do we make this work? How do we become full-time artists but have our kids along with us? I can’t say we have it 100% figured out. But we left New Orleans and moved to Austin on a whim. When we first got here, we didn’t really understand the business side of Austin’s music industry. We just knew it was a music city.
The first year, we hated it. The second year, we started meeting the right business people who had the right acumen for what we wanted to do. And before you know it, we’re playing ACL. It went from a dream I had at 14 to something that literally dictates the life of my family every day. Where are we going to be next week? Where are we going to be next month? My daughter has school. How do we work around school so she can be at a show?
Because we want to show our kids that you can dream and make it happen.
Buddy Magazine: As an entrepreneur, I can relate to the sacrifices involved in building something. I’ve had to raise money, build teams, and learn how to navigate challenges along the way. You guys have an interesting dynamic because you’re married, raising children, and running the business together. How do you stay grounded while trying to take everything to the next level?
LeTrainiump: It’s a strange dynamic.
Dominique Richard: It’s rooted in purpose. And because it’s rooted in purpose, it doesn’t matter what the small things are. It’s a matter of asking, what are we here for, and why are we here? I had a near-death experience in 2018 that really rocked both of our worlds. We started looking at our lives and asking, “What are we doing? We haven’t accomplished everything that we want to do.”
We had been procrastinating on things we wanted to do. Three weeks later, we signed a lease in New Orleans and said, “We’re going. You’re pursuing your music career.” At the time, I was working in the fashion industry as a talent manager. So we started pursuing things from there. For us, it’s always been about purpose. We want people to feel seen and understand that whatever they feel called to do, that’s their thing to do.
For him, that calling is music. He’s called to encourage people to be their most authentic selves, to be healthy, and to be kind.
Buddy Magazine: One of the things I always want people to understand is the person behind the artist. You’ve lived in Romania, moved between cities, built a business, and experienced some significant personal challenges. When you look back over the last 10 years, what has been the biggest struggle that shaped your resilience?
LeTrainiump: My mom died in 2021, and I haven’t been the same since. I think when you get to a point where you feel like you’ve lost the worst thing, it’s already happened. I’ve lost the one person that could help me in life. When that happened, I felt powerless. I felt like I had no control over anything. But from that moment, it was like, “Nah, I gotta live on purpose now. I gotta make this count. I gotta make every second count.”
And I think that has been the saving grace through everything I go through. If it doesn’t count for the world, or if nobody was even at my stage listening to me, it wouldn’t matter. I did it. I made it count. I made the moment matter. I stopped and took in the moment. I’m here. And I do that minute by minute. I ran five miles last week. I ran three and a half miles yesterday pushing my son.
That was a moment where I stopped and thought, “Wow, I’m proud of that. I did that.” I think it’s understanding what you actually have in front of you and giving gratitude to it. Not everything is always going to be perfect, but it could be way worse.
Buddy Magazine: You’ve got your Christian roots, pop and R&B influences, your family, the loss of your mother, and everything you’ve experienced along the way. Being from Louisiana, you’ve got a lot of ingredients that can make a good gumbo. What brings all those ingredients together, and why do people keep coming back?
LeTrainiump: Because the best things take time to cook. Everything takes time, man. You gotta let it simmer. I think, if we’re speaking on business terms, a lot of people want fast success. I’ve been doing this for 10 years. It took me 10 years to play ACL. With the band, I have seven years, but 10 years for me personally of actually doing this.
It took me 10 years to play the opening stage of a major music festival. If I want that headlining stage, it’s going to take time, man. People don’t give themselves enough time to figure things out. They give up. They say, “It’s taking too long.” It’s hard/But why is it hard? It just requires much of you. To whom much is given, much is required.
It’s going to take a lot out of you. It’s going to take everything. If you want it that bad, it’s going to take everything.
Buddy Magazine: You mentioned how badly someone has to want success. You’ve been doing this for 10 years. What does that level of commitment really look like?
LeTrainiump: There’s a story I used to tell people when I was preaching in Romania. At the time, I related it to salvation. But after I left ministry, the story meant even more to me in a real-world sense. It’s about two businessmen. One has been in business for years, and the other is just getting started. The new guy asks the experienced businessman to mentor him.
He says, “Teach me how to do business the way you’ve been doing business. I want to be like you.” The experienced guy tells him to meet him at the beach at five in the morning, wearing a suit. So he shows up in his suit, and the other guy is wearing swim trunks. The experienced businessman starts swimming out into the water and tells him to follow.
The new guy says, “Man, I’m going to mess up my suit.” But he keeps going. The experienced guy keeps telling him to come farther out. Eventually, the guy in the suit is struggling to keep his head above water. The experienced businessman pulls him back to shore and tells him, “You gotta want it like you wanted that next breath of air.” That’s how bad you have to want it.
You have to want it like that every day. You have to be willing to get that fresh breath of air every day.
Buddy Magazine: Dominique, you’re supporting that commitment every day. You’re his wife, manager, and creative director. What makes that partnership work?
Dominique Richard: I feel it, too. I wouldn’t rather do it with anybody else. I love what I do, and what I do complements what he does. I manage him, but I’m also his creative director, and that’s how it all started. I worked in the talent industry as a model manager, and I kept getting angry watching him be put into the wrong genre and not taken seriously.
Finally, I was like, “There’s nobody in this world that can represent you better than the person that knows you the most.” I wanted to be in this. It’s fun. There are going to be times when it’s hard, but there’s hard everywhere. You choose your hard. I’d rather choose it with my best friend. We’re married, but we were best friends before we were anything else.
I was his creative director before anything else. So the rest of it is just a little extra.
Buddy Magazine: Let’s talk about what happens next. In my world, running a tech startup, we’re constantly thinking about our go-to-market strategy. How do we grow? How do we build partnerships? How do we scale? You’ve spent 10 years getting to ACL. How do you take this opportunity and turn it into something sustainable?
LeTrainiump: Follow-up. Follow-up is everything. There are different levels of follow-up. With a festival like this, the people who run it or booked us are in the email thread. A simple thank-you will go far. It’s always follow-up. With a fan, the follow-up is acknowledging the performance after the performance. “Hey, I had a great time with y’all. Let’s do this again.” Or you find a moment you had with somebody. You single that person out. You make people feel like rock stars.
Before you know it, they start feeling like it’s their show, not my show. And then they’re telling their friends. Their friends are telling their friends. Everybody wants a piece of it. I think that’s one of the most important things you can do in anything. Let people know, “I was there, and I’m grateful for that moment with you.”
Buddy Magazine: And that extends to social media and the relationships you build outside the performances?
Dominique Richard: Everywhere. Honestly, it’s just personal connection. It’s not about being a certain way because we want something. It’s about finding gratitude in every moment because we have gratitude in every moment.
LeTrainiump: It’s genuine.
Dominique Richard: I cried the whole ride home last week. And that was real. Because I was thinking, wow, I’m so proud of you. To be able to see that, to watch that hard work come to fruition, and say, “This is why you worked all those years. This is why you worked that hard.” I’m so glad that I get to help and be part of that mission.
That’s how I feel about all the relationships we have. I think even this festival falling into our lap is a product of that. It’s genuine gratitude.
LeTrainiump: I’ll tell you this. We had a friend who told us, when we played ACL, we were saying how the opportunity just fell into our lap. And he said, “If you stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready.”
