For those who have not heard the “Underneath The Sky” mixtape series or the latest live EP “Get to Know Me Live! at Swing House” from this new MySpace recording artist, he is quite the phenomenon taking the digital music scene by storm. Mateo, a Morehouse College alumni, who began his career as a consultant, but ditched the lofty lifestyle to follow his dreams in music, sat down with Singersroom and shared his vision and goals about this music game and the general direction of R&B music today. With him ushering in a new genre he calls “Urban Mod,” he offers everyone the opportunity to get to know him.

Singersroom: How did you break into the music game?

Mateo: Music has always been around. Music has always been in the family. When I was growing up, my mom put me in piano lessons at age five; playing classical piano. My grandfather was a really big blues guitarist, back in the day. He played at King’s Records where James Brown would come through. So, yeah it’s always been around.

My grandmother is actually a singer and she toured Canada and the Northeast in her day. So, I grew up doing that, and then I ended up going to school. I had not really planned on doing music, like as a profession. I was going to do it on the side because I didn’t think it was something you could really make money off of. I was kind of like everybody else. You know, you go to college; then you think about getting that good job; get that paycheck every 2 weeks; and so you just push a lot of things to the side. So went to Morehouse, was a Business and Music major and I ended up actually just pursuing business.

Funny story… I was interviewing for a consulting gig, I was trying to get this internship at Boston Consulting Group, and one of the first people to interview me was John Legend, which at that time he was John Stevens. I had read his bio card and I was like ‘Oh, he played with Lauryn Hill, like man I’m going to get this job, it’s going to be crazy, I’m into music [and] he’s into music’. It was a good interview; unfortunately I did not get the job…But he was really cool. I graduated from Morehouse went up to New York to work as a consultant, hated every minute of it, and was like “I’m going to do music.” I quit everything and everything just started flowing for me. I met some people that did music for the “EVE” show out in LA, so I moved out to LA. Started doing some live shows and working on the television show then I ended up meeting Quddus Philippe. He used to be a VJ on TRL. He was working at Myspace Records. He brought me over to Myspace records and the rest is history. That’s how it all kind of went down.