The nonprofit offers eight-week workshops on everything from lyric composition and song structure to storyboarding a music video and editing it on a computer.Ĭisneros-Marinaro was one of the first students to join the off-campus program last year. It’s that kind of passion and excitement that the nonprofit leaders and educators hope to foster through the program. … Each time it comes out as my best product.”

But once I’m in the booth, I get to voice my emotions. “Writing the lyrics is cool, because that’s my therapy right there. “Hearing the recording for the first time, it’s great,” said Cisneros-Marinaro, a senior who is one of 14 students enrolled in STOP’s Marin Oaks on-campus program. It was the first session at the new $10,000 music recording studio at Marin Oaks High School, a continuation school in Novato, that was built thanks to a partnership with the Surviving the Odds Project, or STOP, a Marin nonprofit that aims to empower at-risk youths through musical expression. With emotion, Cisneros-Marinaro,18, performed his rap song in-progress titled “The Struggle,” which is about dealing with the death of his uncle who was killed by a drunk driver.

“I’m feeling it, we’ve got to do this right now,” he said, as he smiled, put on headphones and stepped up to the mic to lay down a 16-bar verse. On a recent afternoon, Alonzo Cisneros-Marinaro bobbed his head to a beat playing over studio speakers while reading out loud lyrics he wrote on a piece of paper.

Oaks by Quentin Wallace