MOSES LAKE — Justin Lesser has had at least one foot in the music world since his teenage years, whether writing his own songs or DJing — though most of his friends and fans know him as Cheto, until recently the longtime house DJ of Broadway Bar and Grill.

He recorded his first song when he was just 17, but mostly spun records of other people’s music until, at 19, someone told him to jump into a freestyling circle and improvise a few verses.

It clicked. That same year he recorded his first album out of the home of Mark Crawford, who would eventually open Mystical Flight Studios in 1998. For the next decade, Cheto self-recorded and mostly self-produced his own music, building up a repertoire that can still be found online.

Things got derailed a bit in 2011, after a two-and-a-half-month six-state tour, starting in Montana, winding down through Nevada and California, and finally ending up in New Mexico.

“At that point, from credit cards and borrowing money, and some shows got canceled — and when we weren’t selling merch we weren’t making any money — by the end I was a little in debt,” Cheto said. “And for lack of a better word I was kind of burnt out by my own music.”

Towards the end of the tour, Cheto was wrapping up talks with Broadway Bar and Grill to become their house DJ, a steady job working in the field he loved. Though he has his career as a musician on hiatus, he enjoyed the work he did behind the turntables and found he had gotten better at it due to his experience on the stage.

“I enjoy kind of piloting the party, you know,” Cheto said. “In school, elementary school and stuff, I was one of those kids that was not the first to get up in front of the class. Learning to perform helped a lot with being a DJ; it helps for when you have to make announcements and talk to the crowd.”

In the interim, he stopped making his own music, instead spending the next eight years spinning another artist’s records and occasionally obliging a request from a fan.

“So many people know that I do my own music, so sometimes people will request one of my songs,” Cheto said with a chuckle.

But while he had become content with the direction his life had taken, the hunger to perform and write music was still there. Then, in the spring of 2019, a friend mentioned that a Spokane venue was looking for an act to open for renowned rap artist Afroman.

Cheto submitted some of his old work and was one of a half-dozen acts to get booked. He later found out that there had been over a hundred submissions.

That first performance in years was exhilarating, he said. He had decided to try something new, working with bassist Larry Smith and guitarist Scotty Bouck to lay some music over his tracks while he rapped and interacted with the audience.

“It felt great, man, I can’t even describe the feeling with words,” he said. “Definitely thought to myself, not just why did I stop, but why was I away for so long.”

That was just the start — over the next ten months, Cheto opened for other big names in the rap world, like Bubba Sparxxx and Demun Jones, playing set after set until February. By October, he had quit his job at Broadway Bar and Grill to refocus his energy on making his own music, and in November he organized a benefit concert to support suicide awareness in Moses Lake, which he hopes to make an annual event.

And then the first few cases of the novel coronavirus started being reported. It wasn’t long before states began closing music venues and gigs began drying up.

Cheto had to find a way to use the extra time he had on his hands. He had already been in the process of building out his home studio, and getting all of the pieces for that project became a little difficult as things began to shut down.

But he managed to make use of the extended time at home, writing new songs for the first time in almost a decade. There are two in particular that he’s excited about, which he says seem appropriate for the times, both given the impact of the virus and also in light of recent protests against police violence.

He’s also been working with Crawford to remaster some of his old music, and will be re-releasing “Long N Lonely Road,” originally written in 2011, with added layers from Bouck and Smith.

With lockdown orders slowly getting lifted, he hopes to be able to get back into the studio with his bandmates in the coming weeks. While it’s too soon to say when his next show will be, he said he’d love to organize a big show on Halloween, a few days after his birthday.

And, of course, if he can, the second annual suicide awareness benefit concert in November.

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.