Golden, and why I make music
After graduating college (and with it, Penn Masala) I needed some time to figure out how music and the creative arts would continue to fit into my life.
On my 24th birthday, I received two gifts that would help me answer that question.
It was the release day of Daniel Caesar's debut studio album Freudian, which was so damn good that it shocked me out of a musical malaise and gave me a desire to create albums of my own. The album remains one of my favorites, and an inspiration to this day.
And a songwriting book gifted by one of my best friends gave me the tools to start putting this new desire into action. Written by John Mayer's former teacher at Berklee, the book gave me a structure to start finding my own voice as a writer.
I spent the next year writing dozens of songs, all various shades of terrible. It all felt so forced, until I finally I wrote a song called Same. I knew something was different because the song seemed to just flow out of me and felt deeply personal. I started to play Same at open mics around New York and in my excitement, I told a few friends (and romantic interests) at the start of 2019 that I planned to release a full EP by the end of the summer.
With the clock ticking, I spent most weeknights pacing around East Village, muttering into my phone. My best ideas came to me while walking, so I would recording voice memos of melody and lyric ideas (often also picking up unwanted musical accompaniment from noisy bars and snippets of strangers' conversations). And on hot summer weekends, I'd workshop the best ideas into songs in my makeshift bedroom studio — where I kept my noisy A/C turned off to record vocals until I could no longer bear the heat, at which point I'd switch to other production tasks for as long as it took for the room to cool down. Rinse and repeat.
In early October (yes I missed the end-of-summer deadline, but better late than never) I finally released golden, my debut EP. And I celebrated with a lovely release party in the Lower East Side with all of my friends. Later, we shot a music video on my friend’s rooftop and debuted the video on a billboard in East Village in early 2020. That video debut party was the last time I saw many of my friends before the pandemic began.
The name "golden", among many things, was a subtle nod to Golden Child Recordings — the record label Daniel Caesar cofounded before he was signed by Republic.
I make music not out of a desire for money or fame; but because some day I want to make someone else feel the same awe, wonder, and inspiration I felt on my 24th birthday while listening to Freudian for the first time.