Dear Looper,
I give you the first edition of the Loops Podcast, an audio format of this newsletter featuring interviews with artists, mixes and more!
Joining me is dh porter (Daniel Porter), a rapper and producer from St. Paul, Minnesota who dropped an album called old haunts last month. Porter writes verses that are witty on the surface but reveal inner pains underneath. The overall sound is more refined on old haunts, words and instrumentals blending together to create rap music that’s emotional, funny and persevering. (There’s also some truly out-of-left-field references to NBA players.)
Porter was also the first guest for an online radio show I hosted in Minneapolis. He is one of my closest friends and one of my favorite people to talk to about music.
The podcast will only be available to paid subscribers, which I think is a good incentive to upgrade your subscription. There’ll be more interviews on here as the year goes on. Please tell me what you think!
Here’s a little condensed excerpt from our conversation:
me: I think what's cool is that you want to make that your own sound, but then you're also working with collaborators that have sort of helped you kind of shape that together. And people that, you know, I'm imagining are working together with themselves as well now.
dh porter: Yeah, that's definitely cool. It definitely feels gratifying to make those connections happen. And hopefully, right, we wake up one day, and we're like, “Oh, I guess we have a sound, or like a few.” But I wouldn't say that we're trying that hard to push any, like, “We have to do this.” We just kind of like, let it go where it goes.
me: But it sounds like you're making a lot of music to sort of try to figure that out.
dh porter: That's all you can do is just be in there, and create that environment for the miracle to happen. Because music is a miracle every time. So like, create something from scratch out of thin air is beautiful. And it doesn't happen the same way every time. There's going to be times you go in there, and you're like, “It didn't happen today.” But doing it a lot has really paid off. And I feel it has allowed us to push in multiple ways.
You can buy Porter’s album on Bandcamp.
Until next time,
Miguel
Podcast No. 1: dh porter