EBALDC Collaborator by Day;

Music Collaborator by Night!

By day, Katrina Watts-McFarland serves as EBALDC’s Commercial Property Administrator, acting as first point of contact for EBALDC’s commercial tenants. This means she is the initial go-to for commercial tenants who need help with maintenance issues, leasing questions, and other needs. She works with the tenants to collect shared costs and operating expenses needed for continued good operations. During the pandemic, she and the EBALDC Commercial Real Estate team’s work resulted in 95% of EBALDC’s commercial tenants remaining in operation.

By night, though, Katrina is a music producer, songwriter, and poet who goes by the name K.kandu. Connecting these identities is Katrina’s deep care and support for community.

Katrina’s foray into the musical world started with her son, who is a professional musician. Her son started off as a teenager making beats. He was 17 when he began putting hooks into music by Bay Area and Oakland artists. Researching about the music business to supporting her son’s musical career moved Katrina to get deeper into both the business and performing side of music.

On the business side, Katrina says: “That’s when I learned about the business and eventually decided he should create a company; I helped him with that. He released his first album at 25.” She noticed that her son and his friends all wanted to make music, but most did not know much about the business side of things. So, while his friends who worked on the project with them helped out with marketing, Katrina “did all the administrative stuff—registering copyright and setting up an LLC.”

Through Katrina’s research for her son’s business, she learned that with music, the business typically was set up for the writer and producer to collect royalties, but not the musicians—and this is why she developed the music collective, Infinitive Vibes.

“The norm was you paid session musicians based on their hourly price, and they’d have no royalties if a song was successful. The writer and producer would continue to collect royalties forever. [With our music collective,] I feel it’s my responsibility to get musicians setup online to collect royalties.”

Infinitive Vibes aims to create wealth for artists by consistently releasing music of all genres using “the Fixed Shared Equity Royalty Split Model” for each artists’ contribution to each song. “I’m literally giving away my royalties and making sure the producer gives away some of theirs when we work with other musicians to make sure they have equity. This is a really big deal to me,” says Katrina. “I want to support musicians and artists.”

On the creating side, Katrina began collaborating with her son on music a few years ago–setting her poetry and lyrics to her son’s beats tracks. Katrina, who was 57 at the time of her first song release, “One Love”— writes “about my life, my world, and sometimes my imagination – the stories in my head.” She wrote the lyrics and melody to “One Love,” a song released and recorded by her son and collaborator, the artist 1 O.A.K. in 2019.

Katrina notes that she “was always into music, singing in choirs. Edwin Hawkins—the gospel music great who wrote ‘Oh Happy Day’–was in the church my son was born in. And his brother Walter Hawkins was pastor. That’s the church I went to since I was 19, so my son was born into a community full of musicians and music greats.”

She is excited about working on her music and also supporting local artists through Infinitive Vibes. And of course, supporting the success of EBALDC’s commercial tenants.