Profile 013: Matt “Matt FX” Feldman, Independent Content Creator + Music Supervisor
Sometimes the best people working behind the scenes of any business are the ones who see themselves as an artist. For Matt Feldman, publicly known as Matt FX, this understanding has been the basis of his career. From DJing illegal parties in Manhattan’s Lower East Side scene to giving young and new artists their first big break through TV synch placements as a music supervisor for “Broad City”, Matt’s work has always been about building cultural moments of visibility, connectivity, and emotion through the various roles he plays. We chatted with him in our inaugural digital Profile series to learn more about his journey. This is our conversation, transcribed (with small edits for content and clarity).
So can you give me the fullest description of what you do professionally?
Sure! I'm a creative. I worked as a music supervisor, I spent a decade DJing, I produced a handful of artist projects, including a couple of my own. And then I've worked in food as well. I shot and created a 10 episode web series a couple years back that was with the Food Network subsidiary. I think that's it. I've directed some music videos. Basically food, music, and television are my three things.
That’s so interesting. How did you get here? How did you start to think about having those roles and figuring out that this was a lane that you wanted to go into?
I'm a born and raised New Yorker. My dad is a New York Jew from Queens. My mom is Chinese from Beijing China, first-generation on one side. I grew up in Manhattan. I had a very, very rigorous childhood. I did professional soprano, where I used to sing in Church Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, three times on Sundays every week. I did the math: by the time I got to high school, I performed over 1200 services in Church. I went from there to LaGuardia High School, which is a public high school for music and art. That's kind of where I spread my wings and got into pop music, indie rock, and hip-hop really for the first time. My mom says I sang before I spoke and so in that respect, I think I always knew that music was gonna be something. My dad was in the classical music world. And so, without really having that clear of a plan or a path, I knew that what I wanted to do was music. I dropped out of college two weeks after classes started because I realized that at the time that wasn't gonna get me there.
My first sort of professional break was music supervising for Skins, the MTV adaptation of the British show. And that was completely by accident. At the time, I wasn't really thinking I was gonna get a job out of it. I met the creator of the show and was asked to be a part of this focus group, a writers room exercise in which young people read the script draft and kind of get input on what's realistic, what's not. I spoke to Brian Elsley after the first meeting, who created the show and I was like, “Yo, can I meet the music guy? Or can I just send you guys a playlist or can I be his intern, like anything?” And he was like, “Yeah, just send me a playlist.”
The following day I came back and at the end of the group, I was called into his office. He said, “Can you do all the genres?” And I'm thinking to myself like, “Not jazz or country. ‘Can you do all the genres?’ — what does that even mean? So, I’m just going to say yes.” And he said, “Great, I need you to quit your day job.” I was so green. I didn't know what music publishing was. I ordered 500 business cards that said “Music Curator” before someone was like, “You know your title is supervisor, right?” I was kind of thrown into the deep end of it, and ultimately, I am infinitely grateful for that experience.
Skins got cancelled after one season. I figured supervision was a fluke. And that's when I started DJing and throwing parties around the city, kind of getting into that grind. And then a couple of years later, I kind of got to a point where we had been busted by the cops three times in the same month. A friend of mine has spent the weekend in jail for running our door. My crew was out a few grand that we had been investing into these - admittedly - completely illegal parties. And I was just like maybe this isn't the path. But really out of the blue again, the Assistant Editor of Skins called me and was like, “Matt, longtime. Hope you're well. Working on this new show. It goes to air in five weeks and we just fired the music supervisor. Can you please come and play them some music?” And that was Broad City. My life was never the same. Each subsequent season just exponentially increased opportunity, scope, and eyes on me. From there, I've been able to do some hosting on television. I've been able to do my food show, I supervised other shows. And yeah, I guess that's kind of where I'm at now. Sort of trying to figure out what my next steps are.
That’s such an interesting progression. I remember one executive telling me when I first started in the music industry that so many people who are on the business side were artists at one point. For you to do that many shows, and also for the high school known for having so many different people and creatives come through that, that's a huge thing. So you get to this place where you’re pivoting, and all it takes is one opportunity to open the door and just be all that you need.
I'll be honest, though. I definitely would consider myself more of an artist than a businessman. I can do numbers sort of, I can work a budget when it comes to music supervising, but I'm definitely more interested in artistic pursuits. I kind of fell into music supervision by accident and it's something that I felt guilty about at times. I get lots and lots of emails and DMS from people who are like, “I've been dreaming about music supervising for my entire life. I've been dreaming to do that.” And it's like, that wasn't my dream. I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to do it. I think I can do it. But at the end of the day, music supervising is putting one person's music to another person's picture. And my ultimate goal is my music and my picture. I'm not saying I'm gonna be singing at the same time that I’m starring in something, but I'd much rather get closer and closer to creating more.
How would you say that your work has forced you to evolve as a soul? And in thinking about that, I do think that there is this line between for those of us who choose to follow our dreams and chase them; the journey to chase our dreams does shift us, our possibilities, our confidence. As you are going on this journey workwise, how has that shifted your own personal evolution?
When I dropped out of college, I was like, I'm gonna be the frontman of a band and I'm gonna become a superstar and like, it's all me, me, me. I think when I was younger, I was so self-obsessed in the context of how I was going to progress my career. And then as I started music supervising, I think the biggest difference between working on Skins and working on Broad City was when I was 18 working on Skins, I was just plugging bands that I was finding on music blogs. I was just looking up artists I loved online.
So, three and a half years later, I've now spent hours and hours DJing around the city and grinding and meeting other artists and producers and DJs. And I just had this realization very early on like, alright, the budgets are tight. This Viacom, Comedy Central budget is infamously tiny. And there are so many artists out there in Brooklyn and beyond and the rest of the world who could use this platform in a way that artists on labels and publishing companies already take for granted almost. And I think realizing that even as the show got bigger, even as more and more major labels were approaching me and big-shot managers being like, “Oh, put my artists in your show.” I was like, “No, no, no, no.” Now we have an obligation to use the show as a platform. We got to put on side artists even more so. I remember going to this Spotify luncheon for music supervisors, and I got to meet Kier [Lehman] who does music for Insecure. And I was telling him like, “Yo, people are always like, ‘Why don't you put SZA in your show?” And I'm like, “You're literally the reason why I would never do that because you're on an HBO show. A SZA song isn't going to be a drop in the bucket for your budget. But one SZA license would change my entire season.” For that same price, I could license 30 or 40 tracks from unsigned artists who could use the rent money. And even though it doesn't come for eight or nine months, they could use that thousand bucks or 800 bucks or whatever it is and that plug. I definitely think that that journey as a supervisor made me realize how much it isn't about me at all, and how much it's about trying to lift up artists who otherwise wouldn't have these opportunities.
I think that that is so important because I do think that in some ways, too, that's what helps when you can come into it and you see yourself as an artist and you see yourself as a creative because it's not about the look; it becomes about how do you empower an entire community in the ways that you too would want to be empowered. As a creative, that's what we think about. How are we gonna pay our bills? And how are we going to make our rent? And so, you see the power of those opportunities. Kudos to you for allowing that to change.
I mean, so much of the music industry, so many of these systems are so wildly rigged from the start, top-down vertical monopoly, just fucked up. Having an opportunity to create a platform that isn't that and that really can be more of a conduit, more of a rope ladder than anything else, it's definitely something that I hope to continue doing. I haven't had a chance to music supervise anything since Broad City ended at the top of last year, but I definitely wouldn't want to take a project where it was all about using period music or something like that. I definitely want to keep being known as someone who's putting on the next artists, the artists who could really use that spotlight.
I think that that's critical. Even working on the label side, licensing was so huge for us to break new artists. Also, I was on this call recently and they were talking about how that's not a thing in the UK. UK artists don't really get the opportunity to be licensed because it's all about the big spots.
Well, yeah, and then also in the UK, it costs the same amount of money to license a small artist as it does a big artist; it’s regulated in a very different way. So, it's £1000, regardless of whether you're doing your sister's band or Michael Jackson on Skins allegedly, Brian told me. That's why they were able to have these insane songs in the British Skins. And so, we had to kind of cross that hurdle together working on that show. I remember I was one of the first people to ever license Phantogram, and I did it for 400 bucks a song, 800 all in. And it's funny ‘cuz you look back now and it's like, Gillette commercial, Super Bowl commercial.
The way I did it was, I remember hitting up Blood Orange’s label which was Domino at the time. Blood Orange hadn't officially even been signed yet. He was still lightspeed champion and the tracks were still demos. And I remember being like, “Look, I know you're not going to take an $800 license. But what if I did three songs for $2400? Would you consider that?” And they're like, “Uhhhhh...fine.” I don't know. It's always like, how can we figure this out? How can we work together on this?
I mean if there’s a way to get through loopholes...
Yeah, I've got some schemes that made it work. I remember there have been times when I've worked on shows where they were like, “We have to own the theme song. This is a network policy; we have to own our theme songs.” And this is after I'd already played them something that they were like, “Oh my god, this is perfect. I love this. Can we make it our theme?” And I'm like, “Well, this came out last year, and it's on the artists EP, so you can’t own that.” And to get around it, I was like, “Yo, just take the part they like, change two or three things, make a new intro and outro, make it a minute-long song, and sell that. Keep what you got.” Just little schemes like that to make sure we can slip it through.
And that's where you get really good at your job. That's also where people pay you. Not only for your expertise, but for your ability to create a problem-solve. Like, “Okay, this is a problem. Come hell or high water, we're going to figure it out.”
So thinking about these things, are these the moments where you feel the most authentic and expansive in your role, when you are putting these artists on? Or, also thinking about you as a producer and as a DJ, when do you feel the most authentic in your professional process?
That's a good question. I would consider myself someone who has a lot of integrity with my creative work. I believe in compromise, but I don't believe in giving up a vision or sort of completely acquiescing. And in that regard, I'd like to think that I am authentic in all of my creative pursuits. There's definitely been times when I've had the opportunity to work on a show that I believed in maybe a little less than Broad City. I believed in a little less on a creative level and with those opportunities, it's like, alright, I'll just give you what you want because clearly if you're not interested in my vision to help this, then the easiest way to do this is to just let you have what you're looking for.
But when it comes to a collaboration, like working with Abbi [Jacobson] and Ilana [Glazer, both of Broad City] or even on a DJ side, something that I used to struggle with when I was younger was like, oh, I'm not gonna play pop music. I'm not gonna play popular rap. I’m only gonna play house music. I’m only gonna play techno and underground music. And the older I got and the farther I got as a DJ, I started realizing a DJ is in many ways a service industry profession. You have to keep people happy, right? Why try to force something down someone's throat if they're not interested? I'm tired of playing house music to people who don't want to hear house music. And beyond that, there are ways to create artistic value out of DJing pop music. I do truly believe that.
A couple years ago, I had the opportunity to play a few parties at the Met. These were private, black-tie, 800 person events. The first one I played was their Young Members Party. It was in the Egyptian temple. Wild, right? Top ten moments for someone growing up in New York. Growing up in New York, you don’t think, “I'm gonna DJ in the Met.” That’s just not something that I could have ever dreamed of.
And I remember that week, “This Is America” had just come out. I was prepping my set that day, and came up with this transition that at the time I was like, yo, this is hilarious. I remember taking out my headphone and passing it to my roommate and being like, “Yo, you gotta hear this. I'm gonna do this tonight. It's gonna be so funny.” I understood the sort of levels of it immediately, but I was also like this is gonna be me trolling a little bit. And what I did was I played “This Is America” straight into Shania Twain’s “That Don't Impress Me Much.” And the way I thought of it was like alright, so all the girls in this room love Donald Glover. I'm sure they're obsessed with him, obsessed with Childish. But this is an Upper East Side crowd. This is some old money. And I'm sure half of these boyfriends are right-wing conservative, not interested in the message. And Shania had gone on record recently saying that if she was an American citizen, she would have voted for Trump. So it's like, alright, one for y'all, one for y'all. Donald Glover don't impress you much? Cool, here's some Shania.
And I remember three or four days later, I woke up to 30 text messages of people just being like, “Yo, you're in the New York Times. You’re in the New York Times.” In the Still Processing podcast, Jenna Wortham was like, “Yo, I was at the party. I was kinda uncomfortable. I saw how many White people in the room. I saw the DJ was also a person of color. He was dropping all this rap music and everyone was getting down and I was just wondering about that. And then he played Childish Gambino and Shania Twain and I realized all the levels of political subtext.” Honestly, I derive so much artistic joy from that. Talk about authentic self. Like if I’m gonna play pop music, I’m gonna put some messages in that.
I love that. Obviously, you’re making a conscious decision, but it's not to alienate anyone in this room as much as to talk about what the discrepancy in this room is. And I think if a DJ does offer those moments, they allow for that creative juxtaposition to happen where you really can engage with two really different topics and say, “Alright, I'm gonna force you guys to think about this.” But to your point before, it's like you have to sometimes read the room.
Don’t get me wrong, they loved the Shania. The room went wild and that transition has become one of my back pocket secret weapons ever since. That'll stay with me for years and years to come for sure. As long as there's political injustice in the world and White people who just want to dance to hip-hop, I will force Shania on them at some point in the night. Like here's a taste of your own medicine.
Absolutely. When in your industry, or in the things that you've done, have you actually felt seen?
I think more than anything, it was probably that moment. I also just think that as a music supervisor, I didn't really set out to do anything other than pick the best music that I thought could go there. The agenda, the obligation kind of almost came after the fact once I realized the kind of power I had, the weight I was saving. And so even that initial response of like, “Oh, this music is different” was definitely a moment. I was like, wait a minute, I am being recognized for being an alternative here to the norm. I don't know. I am still kind of waiting for that moment in food I think to be truly seen. I had overall a negative experience working with the network I worked with to create my first series. I'm unbelievably proud of what I did and what we made, but that was that was in spite of the partnership.
Were the problems around them understanding the concept? Was it them understanding you? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure. I definitely think that from the very beginning when we presented them the idea for the show, there was a push-pull conceptually. I think they wanted to go more for trendy things and sort of gimmicky things, and we were more interested in covering more legitimate topics and conversations in food. Fighting with them to do an episode that involved Nigerian food and Trini food when they wanted me to do activated charcoal or something like that. And not that those are all Black things, that wasn't the reference there. Unfortunately, just fad stuff.
What’s trendy versus what has some depth to it.
Exactly. We had an experience where one of the episodes, I spent basically the entire time drinking with this girl out in LA who makes these incredible ice cubes called disco cubes where she's able to suspend objects in the middle of hard ice cubes and really cool stuff. She's also a crazy mixologist and super aesthetic. So we were at a restaurant she works with, we were at her own house; she's showing me all these contraptions. We wind up kind of doing a party at the Airbnb that I stayed at at the end of the episode. It’s a great time.
Following episode we planned was going to be a hangover episode, and I was going to do that 100% method. I was gonna go real with that. We had these concepts approved from the network weeks and weeks before we went out to shoot them. We shot these out in LA. And then once we got to post, one of the first notes we got on that episode was “Hi, we need you guys to remove every instance of the word “hungover” from this episode.” And it was like, are you kidding? We wouldn't have shot this if that was gonna be one of the requirements from the beginning. And I think ultimately just like working with a network that didn't really see streaming for what it was. I don't know. It was a lot. By the time we finished the show, Discovery acquired Food Network, which was our parent company. And so I wound up being shelved for five months, and they fired everyone at the subsidiary that I'd been working with. And then when they did finally put out the show, they told us the night before, “Hey, we're putting out your show tomorrow.” I remember my manager at the time was like, “Is there a PR plan? What are we doing with screeners?” Just trying to figure out what we can do to promote it. And verbatim someone on the other end whom we've never spoken to in the two years of developing this said, “The plan is there is no plan. We're just going to run these on the same days as the final 10 episodes of Broad City because there are 10 episodes, and that'll be our cross-promotion.” And I was like, “You've just guaranteed that Abbi and Ilana will never post about this show. And furthermore, you're making me publicly question my loyalty to something that I've just spent the last seven years working on. Something I'm more grateful for than anything.” Having to split my attention...it's just a nightmare.
Wow, that's awful.
That being said, the show was the show I wanted to make. The people who worked on it, I got to get my friend hired as the director and he bought his entire team in. Post, I was there for the entire four or five month period, four days a week. I essentially had a taste of showrunning for the first time. And the product itself I'm extremely proud of. It's just the worst rollout ever, kind of at the rim of a corporate merger.
We don't consider that so much of the vitality and success of creations from people of color depends on your partners and their ability to not only see and support what you're doing, but to get out of your way as you do it. To allow you to speak to the communities that you want to speak to, to tell the story that you want to tell, and to really highlight things that you're not gonna see on these networks anyway because they're not going to know how to do it. They don't know how to capture these different conversations.
So thinking about that,when was the first time that you saw yourself? Or got a glimpse of, this is the power of who I am. When did you have that insight? Or have you not had it yet?
I think there's been kind of multiple realizations, both positive and negative. I remember being 18 living in my parents’ place, which is a rent-controlled apartment in downtown Manhattan. Growing up in New York, I didn't consider myself upper-class by any way. I knew private school kids. I knew rich kids at my own school. I considered my experience a very middle-class life. My mother was in the Cultural Revolution in China; she lived in a cave for seven years. And yet, meeting kids who are moving here from bumblefuck Ohio to living in a shoebox in Bushwick and accruing six digits of student debt at going to New School, working at Urban Outfitters. I'm like, “Wait a minute, I am so wildly privileged. I grew up in the West Village in a rent-controlled apartment that my parents are not charging me anything to live in right now. Yeah, I'm a college dropout, but I'm not on the street by any measure.” And having these realizations of my privilege, I think were extremely important in realizing who I could be, what I was to become.
And then artistically, I'm still trying to figure it out in some respects. I've definitely spent the last couple years working on a project that I had to kind of shelve as soon as quarantine began. Aspects of the project grapple in some ways with my identity as an Asian-American, and I think that conversation has shifted quite a bit since the pandemic began. There's this model minority thing that I 100% subscribe to and believe in and think it's an issue with people from Asian culture. But also I've gone my entire life being like, at one point in my life, “There will be massive racism towards Asian people.” I just knew it somewhere deep down. I just knew that that was gonna happen sometime and to finally see that beginning now, it's a lot to sort of try to grapple with and think about.
It is hard, I think, to be any level of minority in a country that doesn't understand that the majority here is not actually the global majority. And these deeply-rooted, racist tropes that end up impacting all of us and all of our communities. It's an exhausting thing to navigate through. You mentioned that your mom left China to escape just the Communist regime there in the middle of that chaos. And I apologize for my ignorance, I don't remember the exact term for it...the Cultural Revolution, right?
Yeah, the Cultural Revolution. And to be fair, she did live a decade-and-a-half in China after that sort of period of prison/cave living ‘cuz she had a sentence she basically had to carry out as a city kid. Mao Zedong took all the city kids and all the farm kids and he switched them, essentially. And so, she was doing essentially slave labor for years. But sorry, I totally interrupted your question.
Did you feel that impact or weight in your house to be a model citizen, or did you feel like you were able to kind of subvert that in ways?
I definitely think that I was ultimately granted a lot of leniency compared to other people. I know growing up Asian-American, I think, in many ways I can owe that to my father being a successful musician, having a career that worked out. I think my mom was extremely disappointed and somewhat beside herself when I dropped out of college. There have been many disappointments throughout my upbringing because I wasn't gonna subscribe to that kind stereotype of the Asian-American path in America. But ultimately, I think once she realized that there wasn't any use of trying to get me to, she just kind of let me do what I was going to do. And I am ultimately very, very, very grateful for my parents being patient with me and letting me sort of figure everything out for myself.
Yeah, that's a huge blessing. Looking back over your life, were there key critical moments that even shaped you into the person that you are, personally and professionally?
Sure, there's a joke one I can tell you which is that my mother allegedly never fed me baby food once. She saw the Gerber product and she just didn't believe in it as an immigrant. And so from day one, I was just eating whatever they were eating, but blended up in a blender. And I think in many ways that's why I have the palate, or the interest in food that I do, the obsession with it. It was so scarce in her life growing up, and I think she wanted to spoil me; I'm her only kid. And so, growing up this pudgy kid, that has now translated into a passion and a love of food that no one can take away and that will always be a part of what I do with my life.
Then on the flip side, that boarding school was definitely one of the most hellish experiences, ironically enough as a Christian institution, that I've ever been through. It was definitely a place where we were ruled in fear. It was a place where we were overworked and didn't really have any free time for the most part. I can recall experiences. I remember I had this one piano lesson. So at the time, I had already gotten pretty good at piano, but I’d gotten good at piano through my dad, who wasn't a piano player. He was a conductor. He taught me how to play piano as a sight reader. You could put something in front of me and I could hobble through it, but wasn't that great, technically. At the boarding school, I had a piano teacher who was very traditional and just hated my technique and couldn't really acknowledge the fact that my musicality was on a more advanced level than my technique and just thought that a correction was due. I remember one time, he asked my headmaster whether he could keep me away. And this was on a Friday, which was the one night of the week where we could watch a movie and chill out and eat some pizza and didn't have something important to do the following morning at 8 AM. I got held for four and a half hours because my teacher wanted to instill in me that when you're playing a Bach fugue, there are four different voices. There's soprano, alto, tenor, bass. For that reason, both of your hands need to be able to have the ability to play two separate melodies at the same time. And each melody is at a different point so the emphasis needs to be different. In those four and a half hours, we spent on one measure. It was one measure of a Bach fugue that and through it just sobbing.
But looking back on it, those types of experiences in some ways screwed up my work ethic for life. I can be so slovenly and lazy in some things in some aspects, having been so overworked as a kid. But when it's something that I care about artistically, when something that I'm actually passionate about, I can dial in and just completely lose track of time in the best way. Experiences like DJing at the Met, I probably prepped nine hours the day before. And that's not counting all the days. Just to know that I'm about to DJ four hours straight for 800 people in black ties at one of the highest-budget events of my life, I'm going to come correct. So I definitely think that these really early experiences led me to have the ethics that I do, for better or for worse. I've always said that when I have a son, if I have a son, if the headmaster at that school is even half as evil as the one that I had, there's no doubt I would send my kid there. No doubt about it.
I have two final questions. So the first is: how do you see the industries that we're in, whether it's music, food, or television for you, how do you see that evolving for people of color and especially for Asian-Americans? Or is it not?
I'm very conflicted. I think the Asian-American identity is one that is not monolithic. And I think the conversation is in a pretty terrible place. I go on Twitter and I see people like Eddie Huang and David Chang getting cancelled by other Asian people, and it's just like if they don't have a shot, then do any of us? It kind of pains me to see sort of some of the “infighting.”
In the past couple years, a lot more Asian-American and Asian artists around the world have seen a platform in 88rising, which is a new label that has really created quite almost a stranglehold on that as if they're the only brand that can put out Asian music. As much as I'm really happy for a lot of those artists, I also question that anyone can come along and be like, “We are the best Asian music label.” That’s bullshit, come on. That’s garbage. Let alone the fact that I hear terrible things from some people about the structure of it and how it's run. But I'm not going to get totally into that on an Instagram Live.
Then on the flip side with food, I think we're in a better place than we ever have been. I think for years, there were White people making a pho recipe that's a total bullshit thing. And you see all of these food websites posting these really watered-down basic versions of traditional cuisines. But I think that's really starting to go away and in its place, you see places like Bon Appetit and Test Kitchen have legitimate voices, people who really know what they're talking about. You see Chinese restaurants popping up around New York City. First, there was this big Sichuan wave a couple years ago. But there are so many different provinces in China with their own cuisine. And don't get me wrong, I love Cheryl's House. I love Americanized Chinese food; that's its own thing. But to see the opportunity for all of those places to now make business I think is really cool. It’s awesome.
It's tough. It's a tough question. In many ways, I've become very disillusioned with how the music industry has evolved in the past couple years. I think Spotify has done way more harm than good in a lot of ways. The project I touched on before that I shelved was a music project. One of our main goals at the top of this year was live rehearsing once a week. We were going to hit New York so hard this summer, and we were going to try to build kind of a classic live following first. And obviously, now that being out on the table, it's like, “Whoa, shit, how are we gonna do this? How are we gonna launch this?” And I don't know. I have no idea. I got some plans cooking. But at the moment, I'm still trying to figure out a signal, figure out a sign.
What is the legacy you want to build with the work that you're doing?
I have a very cheeky answer that I've been giving for five, six years now to that question, which I still believe in every way. But I'd like to be the first person ever JBEGOT which is an EGOT with a James Beard Award [for Culinary Arts]. I'm a long way away. I got time. This could take 30 or 40 years for all I care. I'm not in any rush. But ultimately, I want to tell stories. I want to tell real stories, good stories. I want to create art. I want to create platforms more than just supervising for Broad City to uplift other artists and other voices. I want to do cool shit.
What inspires you? And how do you stay inspired?
That's a great question that I don't even know if I have an answer to.
Really?
Yeah. I'll come across something and I'll just be like, this is amazing. And it'll totally sort of reshape all my notions of something. The first time I dove into James Blake's music early on, and when I say early, I even mean before he started singing. He was producing instrumental electronic music. I became depressed because I was like, shit, I could just throw in the towel now. I'm never going to sound like that. I'm never going to get there. This guy is so next level. I think it's those humbling moments that inspire me more than anything. After that initial depression, the five stages, I come to, like, Alright, I'm gonna have to build something out of this.” Authentic crossroads in culture inspire me.
And then on an artistic level, when it comes to songwriting or something, I am as cliche as the rest of them. You have a bad day, a fight with a girlfriend, something. You sit down at the piano and it's like, oh, now the lyrics are pouring out. I'm definitely someone who writes about their surroundings in that respect. And to be honest, I definitely need to pick up an instrument soon because there's just so much to write about right now. So much bubbling.
Any final words? Any final thoughts?
If I can leave everyone with anything, it is to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. Whatever you got, just throw some money in. 50 bucks was the first thing I did this morning after going to the bathroom. And stay safe.