EDITOR’S NOTE:
Call & Response pairs two Curious Goldfish conversations, recorded months or years apart, with artists who may or may not know one another. Different paths with the same question running underneath. “Call and Response” is one of the oldest structures in music: Carried from West Africa into American spirituals, gospel, blues, and jazz, where a leader sings a phrase and the community answers. The form survived because music has always been a way for people to talk to each other across distance and time. It's a reminder that music connects people who don't know they're already in a conversation.
I talked with both of them in Nashville, about a year apart. I met Stella Prince face-to-face, and Matthias Lamparter virtually as he dialed into the conversation from Nashville. Both built their careers with their own two hands. One still does it that way. The other just figured out she can't anymore.
Matthias and I spoke in mid-May 2026, a few weeks before his debut, 15 Seconds of Fame, came out on June 10th. He paid for the whole record himself, no investors and no crowdfunding, by working as an electrician, playing four-hour cover sets, and fixing up broken guitars to flip for cash. I recently published a report based on survey of music fans, industry professionals and independent musicians. One finding stuck with me: the fans who spend the most money on music find their artists at concerts, not on social media. Matthias bet his whole career on that long before anyone showed him the data.
Stella and I talked at AmericanaFest 2025, right after her first official showcase at Ansy Blue, Nashville's only female-owned venue. She's from Woodstock, New York, now splitting her time with Los Angeles, and she's been called the “Face of Gen Z Folk.” She started booking her own shows at fourteen and has put together more than a thousand of them since. Despite three decades of age difference, we connected. I told her my favorite Taylor Swift records are folklore and evermore. Stella said “same here.”
Matthias has never believed in waiting to be discovered. He builds the audience in front of him, one room at a time, and pays for the music with the work. State fairs, private events, covers that turn into originals once the room is dancing. He'd buy a guitar with broken tuners for $35, fix it, and sell it for $85, five times a week, to keep recording. The internet was never part of the plan.
How do you just sit and wait for the internet to decide you're famous?
Stella ran the same playbook for years, and she ran it hard. Her own booking, her own tours, her own marketing and merch, starting at fourteen. A thousand shows in, something shifted. She told me she'd spent years quietly wondering how much longer she had to do all of it alone.
I think really in the past couple of months…There's only so much more I can do myself, and I've kind of reached the end of that chapter.
That's where the two of them split. Matthias treats self-reliance as the whole point. He'd rather repair instruments and book his own state fairs than owe his career to an algorithm or a manager he can't afford. Stella spent the last eight months building a team, manager, publicist, branding, all women, and she talks about it like relief instead of surrender. She reads every musician memoir she can find, and she noticed the women she admired toured alone, surrounded by men they paid. She didn't want that. The grind got her to the table and now she's deciding what to hand across it.
Self-reliance built both of these careers. For Matthias it's the destination. For Stella it turned out to be the on-ramp.
Two artists who built it from nothing, at two different points on the same road. Here they are:
The 2026 State of Music in the Age of AI & Streaming Report is out. Get your free summary here.