‘I Do Belong in This Room’: How a Young Performer Turned Anxiety Into Art

(LOS ANGELES) — At 20 years old, Jonathon Martinez stepped off stage from his first sold-out headlining concert at the famed Peppermint Club in Hollywood . The lights were dimmed. The crowd cheered, clapped, and whistled. His stage name — Presence — glowed on the marquee out front. On the surface, everything had gone perfectly.

But backstage, his body began to shake.

“I wasn’t allowed to be stressed,” the YouTube sensation-turned-breakout-recording-artist revealed. “We had interviews, rehearsals, people hyping me up … but then after the show finished, I just started feeling everything I didn’t let myself feel beforehand, it just started pouring out of me like crazy.”

Now at 23, Martinez has built a career around emotional transparency. As Presence, he has earned 9.6M likes on TikTok, belted out his top hits at SXSW, and released his debut album Tears in the Moshpit!

But behind the screaming fans lies something quieter and much harder to measure — the courage it takes to share one’s most vulnerable self with the world.

“I still feel [anxious],” he says. “Whether it’s before a show or after. I’m working through it.”

The tension, between performance and private pain, threads through everything the “Just Hold On” singer creates. He’s not afraid to admit that the same sensitivity fueling his music can also overwhelm him. In his dozens of singles, he blends singing and rapping with his battle against grief, anxiety, and depression.

Martinez’s voice is smooth and emotive, with a natural rasp that adds depth to his undeniably raw delivery — intimate and unfiltered like a confession.

He began singing covers ON YouTube at age 14 alone in his bedroom in Camarillo, Calif. With a mic and a laptop, he composed his first songs from online beats and vocal layers

“It was this super-isolated process,” Martinez recalled.  “I used to do everything by myself.”

Unlike other artists, stardom wasn’t his plan.

“It wasn’t something I saw myself doing as a kid,” he shared. “Things started rolling on YouTube. I was posting videos, and once they started going viral, I could tell I had potential.”

That changed in the summer of 2023 when a former manager at Nettwerk Music Group, Tom Gates, encouraged him to collaborate more intentionally. Gates believed the singer had something to say, and that he could reach his potential by saying it with others in the room. Martinez began working with producers Sweater Beats and Gianni Taylor.

It was a risk worth taking for the young performer in the world of music.

“We hadn’t even really gone deep yet, but there was just this unspoken thing like … ‘You get me, I get you,’” Martinez said of one of their first sessions.

Those early collaborations produced some of his most popular tracks Scared of the Fall and Running Back to You. And their connection felt “electric.” The singer said, “That was when I realized these are my people.”

One day, the trio played back a particularly emotional track and found themselves dancing in the studio.

The tune rang: “So if you leave, I’ll be right here / Waiting for the pain to disappear / My mama always told me to face my fears / But there’s too many cracks inside that mirror.”

Someone blurted out the phrase that eventually inspired his debut album title: “Whole lotta tears in the moshpit.” According to Martinez, it was a joke at first, but it landed. “I wrote it down right away,” he said. ”That was it.”

The phrase captured the contradictions he was learning to live with. How deep emotion like sadness could move people, or heartbreak that could be shared communally.

Tears in the Moshpit! became the centerpiece of his emotional poeticism, boasting over 100M streams. The 12-track record encapsulated everything he was working on as an artist and feeling as a human. Depression that didn’t stay still. Pain that urged you to move with it — not move away from it.

Not long ago, Presence would not have been able to compose such an expressive alt-pop record. “I told [the producers] in one of our sessions, I have this dreaded fear of doing anything good because the world is gonna balance it out with something terrible,” Martinez said. “Instead of shutting down, Gianni was like ‘Wait, I’ve got a lyric for that.’ And it became: ‘Am I afraid of getting higher or just scared of the fall?’”

That line, now the title of one of his debut album’s most streamed tracks, reflects the reality behind the curtain. Martinez’s emotional openness isn’t performative, it’s self-preservation.

Each studio session starts with the same question: What do you want to write about today?

That freedom gave the singer the space to stop writing for an audience and start writing for himself. The singer added, “Just because I write sad songs doesn’t mean I have to be sad all the time.”

In fact, he’s had to learn not to.

“I think because the music is so heavy, I can find myself in a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at times,” Martinez explained. “These songs are about some of the hardest points in my life, and performing them constantly can feel like I’m stuck in these moments. I have songs about friends and family passing away — and I’m grateful I wrote them… but reliving that grief tricks me into feeling it all over again.”

Shaan Chaadva, Presence’s longtime friend and now his Artist and Repertoire representative, watched the star’s struggles weigh on him.

“His music is so deeply vulnerable and special,” Chaadva said. “He talks about things other people are too afraid to talk about, and that’s what makes it hit different. People cry at his shows, and they wait for hours to hear him. It’s not just music. It’s connection.”

The two met as teens via Instagram. “We weren’t even working together professionally at first,” Chaadva said. “We just liked each other’s music.” When he became an A&R years later, Martinez was one of the first artists he reached out to. “We’ve always had that bond; he’s not just a client. It’s family,” he added.

Music journalist Angelina Singer of Tongue Tied Magazine echoed that connection in her review of Presence’s Tears in the Moshpit!. “This album is chock-full of deep ideas folded into catchy melodies and emotional poeticism. It’s also got lots of fun electronic effects … it’s an album that will meet you where you’re at, but then help you fearlessly level up into happiness that you never thought possible,” the writer noted.

While critics have praised his ability to channel grief into catharsis, Martinez says his approach to songwriting has changed. These days, it’s not about chasing impact — it’s about staying grounded in truth.

“I used to think I had to make people feel something,” he expressed. “Now, I just try to be honest.”

Martinez isn’t singing about characters; he’s pouring himself onto the music sheet. Even his stage name, Presence, grew out of something personal. He says it’s a word he started writing in a journal when he was 11.

“I didn’t even see a music career back then,” he says. “But I remember saying, ‘If I ever become a musician, I’m gonna call myself Presence.’”

Over time, the word picked up meaning: stage presence, emotional presence, and spiritual presence.

He traces that shift back to a moment when he was 15, sitting in a studio for a now-defunct [project. Sound engineer Timbaland, who once rubbed elbows with Tupac and Justin Timberlake, was in the next recording booth.

“I was there with my parents, just a kid,” Martinez recalled. “And I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’ But by the end of that session, I knew — I do belong in this room.”

These days, Martinez is still learning how to stay in that room on his own terms.

“I’m not trying to recreate a feeling,” he said. “I’m trying to make a new one, for me and whoever needs it.”

To Martinez, that’s what it means to be Presence: not to perform healing, but to make space for it— to show up even when your hands are shaking.