Venesti was only 11 years old when he realized he loved music — after writing love letters to his school crush and discovering Don Omar for the first time.
“I thought to myself, ‘Why not sing about the things I write about?’” he tells Billboard. “I had already become a poet trying to win over this girl. That was when I got the curiosity to turn those poems into melody and want to make songs. That’s how I discovered that this was my passion and that I vibe with music.”
At 14, the artist born Faiber Stiven Caicedo Castro (his artistic name is a play on words of his middle name) made the brave decision to move from his native Guapi, Cauca (located in the Pacific of Colombia) to Cali — a.k.a. the world capital of salsa — to learn music. There, he became the vocalist of a salsa orchestra and even tested the waters as a bachata singer, before finding his own sound in 2018, at the age of 22.
“I began to look not for what people like as such, but for what I like and that can identify me as an artist,” he explains. “I started to explore the music of my roots, African and Pacific, and found a nice middle point that’s a fresh Caribbean sound with Colombian fusions and African flow.”
Venesti recalls working on about 20 songs at home before deciding to knock on doors. Once he felt confident enough in his project — and backed by the support of his mother and older brother — he traveled to Medellīn, where the music industry has a strong presence. Along the way, he came across producers and artists who gave him his first opportunities, but also music executives who turned out to be scammers. He admits that although he invested more than $15,000…
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