Interview: Hanover, PA Artist/Producer Scanlon Talks About His New Single and EP "Soul Food"
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“My main goal is to just make sure I’m leaving a positive impact on my listeners. I wanna have fun and don’t get me wrong, I got some more fun upbeat projects on the way, but I want my music to mean something.”
As a music creator, what are some of your goals artistically, and what do you want your listeners to take away from your music?
I have a lot of big goals when it comes to my music. I mean I wanna be up there with some of the greats. I think I'm fully capable, I think my writing is there, I just need to stay on the grind and keep a positive attitude.
You know, a couple of months ago I wouldn't have even thought I'd be where I am now. I'm working on trying to start doing some performances, you know I really wanna expand my base. I believe 80% of this is how you market yourself, cause you can have the best sounding music out there, but if you're not tending to the business side of things, you'll never see a return.
My main goal is to just make sure I'm leaving a positive impact on my listeners. I wanna have fun and don't get me wrong, I got some more fun upbeat projects on the way, but I want my music to mean something. It's so easy to forget that having this kind of platform gives you a wider realm of influence and that you have the ability to affect people.
I just want people to be inspired and motivated to chase their goals, especially coming from someone like me, I always lacked that confidence as an independent artist. I didn't believe for a long time that I was worthy of putting my own stuff out there, and no one should ever think like that.
Your music is very diverse, and isn't easy to pigeonhole, which is a good thing. List a few artists who've influenced your work throughout the years.
I have so many artists that influence me. In the Rap scene you got guys like Mac Miller, J Cole, Kendrick, Token, Hopsin, Earthgang, JID, Reason, Eminem and so many others.
I also really look up to some other guys like Anderson Paak, Thundercat, Frank Ocean, Gallant, and Daniel Caesar. I could honestly list so many more, but I'd say these are among my top influences.
Congratulations on the release of your new track "Soul Food", which you wrote during quarantine. Tell us about your creative process for its development.
Thanks first off! The creative process for this song was actually funny because it wasn't originally intended to be a song. I was learning the ins and outs of vocal editing and I just kinda was doing it by ear.
I started with those "na na nas' ' that are in the beginning and after a little bit of editing, I was like "Woah wait, this sounds hot..." and I decided to roll with it and started building the song around it.
It took me a couple of days to get the song where I wanted it. I actually originally wrote the track back in March right after the lockdown started and was kinda keeping it in the bag cause I had already planned the release of my 2nd track "Fade Away".
You created the instrumental using the beat maker program Splice; had you used it before and have you made any beats since on it?
I use Splice a lot, I'm not a super instrumentally talented artist yet. Pretty much everything I've released thus far has been built around Splice samples. I'm slowly trying to separate from that and wanna start transitioning to more independent production, but my goal is to only release things that I really believe sound good, so my main focus is to start small.
I'm getting better with making my own drum tracks and bass lines, buts its been a process for sure. I like to think I've made great strides seeing as I really only started my own productions over this past winter.
Were there other songs created that you decide not to include on the 2-track EP "Soul Food"? If so, why did they not make the final cut?
The EP was actually supposed to be 6-7 songs in the beginning. I had almost finished all of them but in early May, my laptop crashed and I lost almost everything I had done up to that point.
I was able to salvage these two tracks because I had them saved on my phone. That was a really tough moment for me, but I'm super happy with how things have gone since then.
What are some things that inspire your creativity as an artist and producer?
So I grew up in a military family. I've lived in several different states such as California and Virginia and I lived in London for 3 years as well, so I like to think that my experiences have kind of shaped me as an artist.
One of the big things for me has been the local music scene here in PA. Once I started writing my own songs, I started discovering all these other local musicians that really are tearing it up. I honestly listen to more locally produced stuff now than I do mainstream. A buddy of mine, Markel Demetrius, another local producer, helped push me into my own thing and I don't really think I'd be doing this right now if he hadn't been there.