Don Yaddle – A Song For Carlton
I’m a 21 year old half Japanese, half white, philosophy major (recently a history minor) at UC Berkeley and if music doesn’t work out possibly a future law school student. I grew up playingdrums and listening to Blink, Green Day, Weezer, and the Strokes in San Diego and decided I wanted to write music a little over a year ago when I was at an Oberhofer show and I told Brad Oberhofer I wanted to make music but only knew how to play drums. He said that it didn’t matter as long as I wanted to make music, so that week I downloaded garageband and started learning how to write songs and play guitar. Flash forward a year and I finished my album first album. Since I’ve left home I really feel like I’ve grown up a lot both from experiences and from getting the way I think about meaning and ethics and everything altered through everything I have to read in philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and Kant haha) and, as such, I tried to write an album about what ‘home’ is. I know VICE wrote an article saying that no one makes concept albums anymore (besides Kendrick and Tyler) but I feel like anyone who writes songs about themselves and changes as a person over a period of time can’t help but tell a story, so my album is somewhat of a loose concept album about someone leaving home and trying to find out what it feels like to find your own home. I feel like a lot of guitar/indie music these days isn’t really emotional or super intense, or at least not the music I listen to, so I don’t know what kind of modern genre I’d put it as, and the sound changes a lot throughout the album, but I definitely have been influenced by all the punk and alternative rock my dad listened to, plus the 80s and 90s Smiths/Cure/Belle and Sebastian my mom listened to, plus the psychedelic and surf rock that reminds me of San Diego, which will always be home to me. I like the big guys too like Mac Demarco and Kevin Parker, and really appreciate what modern rappers like Kendrick and Tyler (Flower Boy is next level) do with the production in their music, and always see rap as having a lot other genres could learn from. I recorded the whole thing in my room on garageband, so its not studio quality, but I think it turned out pretty good for my first project and I hope someday I can go on to inspire other young Asian American kids who just look out at the rock scene and see only white dudes (though they make good music haha), as besides awesome and inspirational artists like Mitski and Jay Som, you barely see any Asian Americans in indie music.