When I caught up with Wax for a Vibes Drop In Podcast, he wasn’t in a studio or tucked into a tour bus with a mood light and a latte machine. He was surrounded by half-packed merch boxes, figuring out how to ship gear to Canada, then the Midwest, then back again — alone in a room that looked like a cross between a storage unit and a to-do list.

It was beautifully chaotic. Unpolished. Human.
And honestly, exactly how a conversation with Wax should start.

“I have a manager and a tour manager,” he laughed, “but they can’t come to my house and get the stuff out of my garage and send it.”

That’s the Wax rolling into Santa Cruz on November 23rd — the mid-40s version, seven years sober, dad chip unlocked, still handling the parts of the job most artists outsource or pretend don’t exist. And through it all, he’s more grounded, more self-aware, and more transparent than ever.

Somewhere in that conversation, we drifted into Phil Stutz’s idea of the three constants every human carries: constant work, pain, and adversity. Wax didn’t flinch. He didn’t romanticize it. He recognized it immediately — almost like the concept had been hiding in plain sight inside his own life.

“Life being constant work really hits home,” he told me. “With success, it just adds more stuff to your plate… and honestly, when you die, your to-do list should be written on your tombstone.”

That’s Wax distilled down — pragmatic, funny, brutally honest, and deeply aware of the emotional machinery that drives a life.
He doesn’t pretend to transcend the human condition; he writes from inside of it.

Most artists try to outrun the hard truths — drink through it, flex through it, hide behind the performance of success. Wax lived inside that trap for years. It nearly broke him. Now he names it, owns it, laughs at it, writes through it.

And that’s the gravitational pull of Lifetime Achievement Award. A title that hints at trophies, industry nods, big speeches — but what it really captures is something quieter and harder-earned: a man looking back at the wreckage and the beauty, the chapters where he almost lost himself, and the chapters where he slowly rebuilt.

A lifetime not of accolades, but of survival.
Of growth.
Of still showing up.

It’s the sound of someone saying, with zero performance and zero pretense:
I’m still here.
Somehow.
And that’s worth celebrating.

A lot of Lifetime Achievement Award began in a surprisingly ordinary place — a weathered bench on Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach, San Diego. Wax has been going there for nearly two decades, through different chapters, problems and versions of himself. The routine rarely changes. He brings a guitar, a notebook and whatever truth he’s willing to meet that day.

He’ll sit with an idea until something moves. Then he’ll come back. Cross out half of it. Tighten what’s left. Live with a line long enough to see if it holds.

That slow, unpressured rhythm is part of why the new album sounds the way it does: grounded, reflective, and mellow in the way actual lived experience tends to be. It wasn’t made for playlists or the algorithm. It wasn’t built for a quick window of hype. It’s a record shaped by patience in a culture that rarely rewards it.

The Climb Out

Understanding that bench — and why it matters — requires acknowledging what came before it.

Wax drank heavily from a young age. When he signed to Def Jam, that habit became tied to the work. The studio, the meetings, the pressure to deliver a hit — all of it equal parts opportunity and strain. A 12-pack a day wasn’t a party anymore. It was part of the process he believed he needed to create.

At first, the major-label world felt electric. Then the feedback started coming back the same way:

“This isn’t it.”
“Try again.”
“We don’t hear the single.”

When your job is instinct — your sense of what works — and that instinct is challenged repeatedly, it pulls the foundation out from under you. Wax said there were stretches where he spent an entire week in sessions and walked out empty-handed.

“Eventually you get creatively paralyzed,” he said. “I’d do a week of sessions and come out with nothing… calling my brother from hotel rooms, literally crying.”

On paper, the moment should have been his breakthrough. In reality, it was the lowest point of his career.

Then came the twist: the day after Def Jam dropped him, Wax uploaded the “Rosana” video. The track — loose, catchy, and completely different from what the label was chasing — blew up overseas.

Suddenly, he was charting in countries he’d never visited, touring major festivals, staying in penthouse suites. From the outside, it looked like the success story everyone predicts when a label deal ends.

From the inside, it was the same unavoidable human rotation:
work, adversity and pain — just happening in nicer hotel rooms.

And that’s why the bench became important. It was the opposite of all that noise. It was quiet, uncurated and unfiltered. A place where he could write without expectations, judgments or directives. A place to reconnect with the part of himself that existed before the pressure.

That energy runs through Lifetime Achievement Award — not the voice of someone trying to prove anything, but someone finally willing to tell the truth without flinching.

Seven Years Sober, One Daughter, and a Whole New Lens

Seven years ago, Wax stopped drinking. No slow fade-out, no “cutting back.” He quit. And when he talks about it now, there’s no performance in his voice — just clear, unvarnished truth. Sobriety didn’t make life easier right away. If anything, it stripped away the buffer. All the emotions he spent years drowning out came back up, and he had to sort through them without the chemical mute button he’d relied on.

That reckoning overlapped with COVID. Touring stopped. The world stalled. The internal noise got louder. But he stayed sober. And through all of it, he wrote. Not for charts. Not for labels. Not for deadlines. For survival.

Now he’s a father. His daughter is not yet two, but she already changed his circuitry. Most of Lifetime Achievement Award was written before she arrived, but performing those songs now lands differently. Lines he once delivered without blinking now stop him in his tracks. Some feel reckless in hindsight. Some make more sense than they did when he wrote them. Some hit in the gut because he’s no longer the person who wrote them — he’s the person singing them to a room full of people who grew up with him.

“There are people at shows who found me in middle school, or in college,” he says. “When I’m performing those old songs, it’s almost like I step out of my own body and into theirs. It becomes everyone’s nostalgia at once.”

That’s the strange reward of a long career: eventually, the songs stop belonging to you.

Spend more than five minutes talking to Wax and you understand why his catalog hits the way it does. He sits in that rare space where heavy and hilarious overlap. He’ll talk about depression, drinking, panic, paralysis — then flip the same topic into a joke that somehow makes the truth easier to hold.

He doesn’t see humor as a shield. He sees it as a tool.

“Stand-up comedy and a political speech are basically the same thing,” he said. “Just two different ways to get to the same bench.”

That “bench” shows up a lot when he talks — the literal one overlooking Sunset Cliffs, and the metaphorical one he returns to when life squeezes him. It’s why his music swings between technical rap, acoustic storytelling, wine-drunk logic, heartbreak, fatherhood epiphanies, stoner philosophy, and unfiltered honesty. It doesn’t feel scattered. It feels human. Life shifts, and he shifts with it.

---

The Wax Discography Trail

Zoom out on his catalog and you can trace the lived-in arc of an artist who never calcified:

The early releases — Biatch! and Cookin’ Keys with Herbal T — were raw, fearless, mischievous. He wasn’t building a brand; he was expressing himself without hesitation.

Liquid Courage (2008) showed the duality forming. Party songs with a pain subplot. Comedy edged with confession. Confidence masking chaos.

The YouTube era (2009–2011) — “New Crack,” the car freestyles, the camcorder looseness — made him an early internet cult figure. Nothing was polished. Nothing was engineered. That was the hook.

Scrublife (2011) broke open the door. Suddenly he was in the rooms he’d dreamed of — big producers, big studios, big expectations — which eventually pulled him into the Def Jam chapter and everything that came with it.

Continue (2013) landed right after that fallout. The title wasn’t clever branding; it was a mission statement. The album housed “Rosana,” which exploded overseas and turned him into the most unlikely version of a one-hit wonder — charting in countries he’d never been to, headlining festivals he didn’t grow up imagining.

The independent years that followed — Livin’ Foul, Eviction Notice, The Red Album, Push On — are the clearest window into an artist experimenting, adjusting, healing, learning how to make things for himself again.

And then there’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the record that ties the whole crooked line together. Patient. Sober. Self-aware. Written on cliffs. Sharpened over years. Sung from scars instead of wounds. Softer because life softened him. Clearer because he finally stopped trying to impress the wrong people.

It’s not a victory lap.
It’s a document of who he became.

What a Wax Show in the Catalyst Atrium Is Gonna Feel like…..

The Atrium is built for this kind of show — tight, intimate, communal. Wax with DJ Hoppa for the classic two-turntables energy, breaking into guitar-driven moments that feel like cracks in the veneer.

He will do the crowd work. Asks names. Takes requests. Lean into the room. Years of stand-up muscle memory will be on display. Years of living. Years of owning the chaos instead of being owned by it.

He’s not gonna be performing at you. He will be performing with you.

Underneath the humor is something quieter — a guy walking through a room, guided by three constants: work, pain, and adversity. But I guarantee he’s a dude that’s going to be offering the three opposites in that room: joy, rest, comfort.

Even if it’s just for one night.

---

Wax

Sunday, November 23
Doors 7:30 p.m. • Show 8 p.m. • Ages 16+

TICKETS

If you ever screamed “Rosana” at 2 a.m., quietly grew up on the deep cuts, or want to see an artist who survived the climb, the fall, the rebuild, the sobriety, the fatherhood, and still shows up with heart — this is your night.

Wax isn’t riding hype.
He’s riding truth.
And he’s bringing all of it to Santa Cruz.

Vibes Drop In – Interview with Wax (FULL TRANSCRIPT) 

VIBES: Vibes Drop In. Wax, how are you doing, brother?

WAX: I’m doing good, Vibes. How are you?

VIBES: I’m doing good, man. Hey, I was talking to your manager earlier — sounds like you’ve got a little bit of California, Canada, and then ending up in Colorado coming up in your life. Supporting the new album. That came out in May, right?

WAX: Yeah, the album came out May 30th — Lifetime Achievement Award. It’s been out a while now. I’ve toured Canada, the Midwest. We already did the East Coast and Southern California. Now we’re doing Northern California, Seattle, Portland… all kinds of different places.

VIBES: Sick. Let’s start there. I’m going to rewind — reverse engineer this whole conversation and get back to the dude you were before you got onto the scene.

For me, Lifetime Achievement clearly has some meaning baked into that title, but I want the human side of it. After all these years, all this change — the world, your life, your career — what was the process for this record? What headspace were you in?

WAX: The process on this album was—

(to someone off-camera) Hey, I’m doing this interview right now… could you—

No, it’s okay. It’s okay.

VIBES: That’s some real shit right there.

WAX: Yeah. Speaking of real life — I’m in the process of packing up stuff to go to Canada, figuring out what I need. I have to ship stuff to every city I’m going to because of all the flights, then ship stuff to the Midwest for the Midwest tour.

A lot of that stuff I have to handle myself. I have a manager and tour manager, but they can’t come to my house and get stuff out of my garage and send it.

VIBES: They can’t do that.

Is that your art behind you? What’s that?

WAX: That’s me. A depiction of me and my friend who passed — EOM. He produced a lot of music with me. I didn’t make it, though.

VIBES: It’s a great backdrop.

And you’re right — eventually it all comes back to you. There’s this therapist, Stutz — Jonah Hill did a doc on him during COVID — who says people will never escape these three things: constant work, pain, adversity. Not in a negative way, but as daily realities we need a playbook for.

What’s in that room right now — tour prep — eventually it all flows back to you.

WAX: Constant work, pain, and adversity?

VIBES: Yeah.

WAX: Dude, I’ve got to watch that.

VIBES: You should. They recorded their sessions through COVID. Stutz realized he’d been reactive instead of proactive. He started coaching people on how to build a playbook for constant work — saying it’s built into the human condition.

Same with adversity — personal, business, relationships, every small thing.

Same with pain — physical, emotional, political, all of it.

If you can handle those three things every day, he says it unlocks everything.

WAX: Life being constant work really hits home for me. With success, you just get more stuff added to your plate.

Me and my brother joke that when you die, they should write your unfinished to-do list on your tombstone.

All those things — pain, adversity, constant work — you need that most of the time because the opposite of those things — joy, relaxation, comfort — you only get in small amounts. Even an hour of those a day makes the rest worth it.

VIBES: Exactly.

I’m a lingering fan — like most people, I found you in the mid-2000s on YouTube. As I went back through your catalog prepping for this, I realized I knew a lot more songs than I thought.

But what sticks out is how you move between deep introspective stuff and total stream-of-consciousness, “we’re fucking around with a camera” energy. There’s a playfulness to it, but you’re not afraid to get serious.

WAX: Yeah. If you write from a place of truth, you’re going to cover all the bases of life — pain, joy, the ability to laugh at it all.

A silly song about being an alcoholic and a serious one can come from the same place. That’s been my experience.

Stand-up comedy and a political speech are the same thing — two ways of approaching the same reality.

VIBES: Equal standing. Humor is sometimes the shortcut — the toll pass through pain.

I’ve used humor in the worst moments for friends, and it was exactly what was needed.

So your process: are you writing in the mood you’re in? Or more like a script?

WAX: It depends on the song.

Take a rap song with a chorus — that hook probably came to me walking down the street. It’s almost like God or the universe hands it to you.

Then the verses take work — if it’s a story song, it can feel like a college paper.

Every song is different.

For this new album, a lot came from me sitting on the same bench in Sunset Cliffs in San Diego. I’ve had that spot for 20 years. I bring the guitar, write whatever comes, then refine it each time I go back.

That’s why it’s a mellow album.

VIBES: I saw you there on camera earlier.

As a father, I think of life in chapters. And when you have kids, everything changes — how you see the world, how you hear songs, how you take in movies.

Did fatherhood make its way into this record?

WAX: Somewhat — but most of the album was written before my kid was born. She’s not even two yet.

But performing the songs now — totally different. Some old lines sound irresponsible. Some hit harder.

Once you have that fatherhood chip in your Trivial Pursuit circle, you’re a different human.

VIBES: Funny — that’s the second time Trivial Pursuit came up today. I used it with a bar owner in her twenties and she had no idea what I was talking about.

Anyway — I think I was listening for fatherhood in those lyrics just because I knew your life had changed.

John Ondrasik from Five for Fighting said something similar — he sings “100 Years” totally differently at 60 than he did at 23.

Do you feel that?

WAX: Yeah. I’ve been doing this 30 years — 20 professionally. No “real job” for 16 years.

The words hit different now. In my twenties I wrote songs like “Out of My Mind,” about wanting to get fucked up instead of dealing with pain.

Now I still perform it, but when I’m doing old songs and long-time fans are there, it’s for them. I tap into their nostalgia. I disconnect from the literal meaning and connect to the emotion.

People 15 years younger say they liked my songs in middle school but now they understand them because they’re the age I was when I wrote them.

Recorded art sticks around.

VIBES: Let’s talk “New Crack.” From the outside, it looks like a huge moment — band to solo, early YouTube virality.

Was it as big for you as it looked?

WAX: Yeah, definitely.

YouTube was new then. There weren’t many people doing it. That video introduced me to a lot of people and also showed me that you could use the internet to circulate yourself.

Before that, I was in a band doing it the old way — touring, one fan at a time, selling CDs, mailing list postcards to people’s homes.

VIBES: I watched it again preparing for this. You made the kind of content people now aspire to make — raw, organic, handheld, flow-heavy.

That’s the vibe that works again.

And the way you rap — it feels like a natural conversation. You never sound like you’re trying too hard, even when the lyrics are rebellious. Easy on the ears.

WAX: Thanks, man. I take that as a real compliment.

VIBES: Then you blow up a bit. Def Jam enters the picture. You “make it,” in the traditional sense. What was that window like?

WAX: Interesting.

I got the thing everyone talks about — the record deal. And I got good money. But really, when you get signed, the work is only beginning.

For every artist you’ve heard of who got signed, there are a hundred who also got signed that you’ve never heard of.

It’s like sports — a handful of NBA players become stars. But there are way more pros in Europe you never hear about.

I had two managers then who hated each other. I fired one — illegally — and it turned into a mess of people fighting over money that didn’t exist yet.

I spent most of my money on lawyers. And I never got the “big song” they wanted from me.

The crazy part is: the day after they dropped me, I released a video that went viral. Then I had a hit in Europe.

VIBES: “Rosana.”

WAX: Yep. That’s the one.

It became the #1 song in a couple European countries. High-level touring — penthouse suites, festivals.

But after all that, I settled into being a low-key working artist. Not a huge audience, but enough.

VIBES: And again — constant work. No matter the level, the cup fills.

At the height of the pressure, did you ever feel like, “This is the new normal, this will never go away”?

WAX: Honestly, yeah.

All of this happened under the cloud of alcoholism. I drank a 12-pack a day during the Def Jam era.

We’d go to the liquor store in the morning. I thought it was part of the process.

They wanted a hit. I’d go into sessions with big-time producers. At first it was fun. Then the rejections came — “this isn’t it.”

As an artist, your whole job is your taste. If your taste is questioned over and over, you freeze. You get paralyzed.

I’d do a week of sessions and come out with nothing. Sitting in hotel rooms crying on the phone to my brother. Depressed as hell.

That’s why it didn’t work out.

VIBES: But clearly, something shifted.

Are you straight and sober now?

WAX: Yeah. Seven years. Haven’t drank in seven years.

The emotions come back in that first couple years. For me it overlapped with COVID, so it was rough. But I never went back to drinking.

Now I couldn’t imagine trying to do all this while drinking.

VIBES: And you get tethers — kids, family.

Did you get good songs out of that pain in the long run?

WAX: Yeah. A lot of Lifetime Achievement Award is about that — especially “Shit I Used to Do.”

VIBES: And that bench — that’s therapy, right?

WAX: Totally.

A lot of musicians need the stage. I don’t. I love performing, but the reason I do this is that moment on the bench.

That’s the joy. Just me, the guitar, the writing.

Being alone with the craft. That’s meditative. That’s therapeutic.

I think that’s why people relate — I’m just saying what I’m going through, and we all go through variations of the same shit.

VIBES: And once you understand that the bench, the Catalyst stage, a Saturday morning with your kid — all have equal standing — that’s when life changes.

WAX: One hundred percent.

VIBES: Alright — for our readers: what can they expect from a Wax show at the Catalyst?

WAX: I love performing. And I make the show about the people who are there.

I involve the crowd, I ask names, I do some stand-up-style crowd work.

DJ Hoppa will be there — he’s world-class. We do classic hip-hop, two turntables and a mic. Then I bring out the guitar for a more intimate part of the set.

I mix the energy. I play the old classics. I take requests. It’s loose, on-the-fly, fun.

VIBES: Have you played the Catalyst before?

WAX: Yeah. Both the big room and the small. This time it’s the small room — the Atrium.

VIBES: Born and raised here — the Atrium is my favorite room. Intimate, rad, feels alive.

WAX: Same.

VIBES: Alright, man. We’ll throw your handles in, run this on our TV network, blast it out. This was amazing. I blew through my next interview.

WAX: This was great. Come through the show, say what’s up. And tell your friends, family — even your enemies. Let’s get some people in there.

VIBES: Thanks, brother.

WAX: Thanks so much. That was awesome.