Duckwrth 'SuperGood' + Interview
☆ By Shonali Bose ☆
A SELF PROCLAIMED “SEGUE” OF GENRES - no one can quite blend soulful seventies beats with hard rap verses like Duckwrth, and his newest album SuperGood is no exception. Since his first project, Nowhere in 2015, Duckwrth has catapulted into the rap scene as a true creator with an impeccable ability to draw from different eras, feels and genres to create his tracks. Fusing a multitude of genres namely soul, funk, rap, and jazz, SuperGood captivates the listener throughout its entirety and exhibits Duckwrth’s capabilities as an artist and a creator.
The album follows a story of two characters venturing on their first date, from the anxieties leading up to it to finally arriving at the function. With features like Julia Romana, Kyle Dion, and EARTHGANG, the album exudes a spirit of collaboration and celebration. SuperGood’s intention and execution is clear: the listener comes out feeling ‘super good’, bopping and grooving along the entire time.
1824 of Universal Music Group kindly included The Luna Collective in an online press conference to discuss and celebrate SuperGood. In this discussion, we learned more about Duckwrth’s creative process, opinions on 2020, and got a deeper insight into his most recent album. Read further to learn more.
1824: Duckwrth, we’re celebrating you and your success with Supergood, How are you feeling first and foremost?
Duckwrth: I feel surprisingly relieved. I know dropping a project in COVID can be a bit crazy. But I feel good, I feel more relieved that it’s out. And for an album called SuperGood it’s already it’s own affirmation. Like when you press play it’s supposed to make you feel super good and I feel like it came out right on time, like people need to feel their best in this moment, so I feel relieved.
1824: Has 2020 influenced the way you wrote the album or how you think the album would be perceived by fans?
Duckwrth: Ironically, I wrote the album in January. So COVID was just popping up and no one was taking it as serious. So when I was writing it I was like oh 2020 is a new decade it’s my year, be boutta go stupid. My thoughts and ideas were just so much different from the 2020 that we know now. The album is more like a story, like you’re watching Netfix. It’s a story to take you out of your current situation. Further than that, it’s [about] the tone and the message of making you feel good.
1824: What would you like people to take away when they consume SuperGood?
Duckwrth: It’s an album where you can bop, you can groove, you can move, it’s definitely something you could listen to in the car. Or an album that you play when you’re taking a shower or making love. I very much want it to be a lifestyle project. But really there’s only so much an artist can do, it’s up to the listener how they interpret it, or where they take it. All I can do is just create it.
1824: What was it like growing up in LA?
Duckwrth: In the 90s and 2000s, it was beautiful. It was kinda like its own utopia, but it also comes with its own trauma. There was a lot of gang activity in the 90s and the youth was learning how to survive. But I will say that roses grow from concrete, and Los Angeles gave me a backbone. Now I can deal with corporate America because I learned how to survive ducking bullets and shit, so I stand with a straight spinal cord. And it taught me all the things I need to ‘get’- as an artist, as a man, as a businessman.
1824: How did you decide on the album art?
Duckwrth: I feel like my covers have always had a little bit of fantasy, from XTRA UUGLY Mixtape to THE FALLING MAN where I was like playing the character of this King who falls into his demise because he can’t find love, so it’s a little darker. For this one it’s manly about love, it’s like the Yin and Yang to THE FALLING MAN. It’s all reflecting each other and showing growth as an artist. I feel like the 70s, especially for Black People, was a time of celebration. We just came out of Civil Rights and Black People started gaining different freedoms. Within that, when Black people start going into themselves and their original essence, a bit of magic happens. So I think that’s why you see such eclectic style and colorful music in the 70s. The Album covers were so beautiful, so I kinda wanted to tap into that because we’re coming into that same energy in the 2010s and 2020. So I really wanted to tap into that magic.
1824: Is there a particular song that was a little more difficult to write and how did you find the inspiration to do it?
Duckwrth: New Love Song. I had the idea to do it before the album, and in the Sample of the song it’s the Clark sisters Jesus’s Love Song. I remember I was on IG Live freestyling with the song in the background. I wanted to give a nod to gospel because that was some of the earlier music I remember from my childhood. I recorded the rap part of it and then we did the bridge and I sat on it for three weeks because I wanted to do Jesus’s love song but I didn’t want to be particular to religion. So, I wanted to find a group of girls that could pay respect to the Clark sisters but use different phrasing. I wanted New Love Song to be the foreshadow of ‘these characters are going to fall in love by the end of the album’. I didn’t figure that out until the 4th week of January.
1824: How are you maintaining your authenticity in both your music and your appearance?
Duckwrth: It’s more-so a personal thing, but for me I'm a creator overall so anything I touch creatively I feel like is my DNA. If I’m going to be doing music, I want to show a healthy artist. You see the most genius artists kinda saying they’re egotistical, or their drug abusers, or they’re saying they’re physically abusive to their spouse. It’s the Rockstar lifestyle and it ends up eventually leading to their demise. And I don’t really fuck with that image and I feel like there’s a healthy way to portray an artist, and that’s by being true to yourself . And I think that’s how you make the best music, and how you make music that lasts, that’s the music that becomes people's favorite albums. And a lot of music today is kind of like fast food, it’s fast and shit, and it doesn’t last too long. But if the artists are true to themselves that’s true conviction, and those are really the ones that last. So if I’m going to be an artist and a rapper, I want to be as authentic as I possibly can. I do know there’s something else I’m doing with my life, and that’s helping people. I think it’d help people, it’d help culture, and it’d help people, just to see an authentic character.
Photo by Brian Ziff
1824: What’s something you learned about yourself as an artist and as a person through the process of making this album?
Duckwrth: I learned I’m only as strong as the people around me, this album was very much a collective creation. So a lot of times, I won’t be able to arrange a certain phrasing, but I’ll have my homegirl Julia Romana come up with a better arrangement and she’ll give that to me and I’ll put some spice on it. Even with production, I’m not that musically skilled but my producers can understand my ideas. My manager, my writers, my producers, even my engineer would tell me when something sucks. And engineers don’t usually do that. So it was really a collective creation.
1824: Can you speak on your music making process and how you’re able to so cohesively blend those different forms of musical expression together? Are there different genres or aspects of genres you keep in mind when you’re writing?
Duckwrth: The biggest thing is, I see myself more as a creator than an artist. And I listen to so much music. So I feel like I’m more so like a segue of these genres. I’m like a smoothie of sorts- you put in different ingredients and it creates the actual juice. If I had a superpower, it would be to take in what’s happening in the outside world and be able to regurgitate it. The music that inspires me most in the studio is soul, jazz, gospel. Certain chord progressions really resonate in my soul and you can find them in those genres. And then the genre that inspires me when I perform is strictly punk, thrasher, parkour, that’s my shit. They just perform with such conviction and it riles people up and gets that fire started. One of my favorite bands is Bad Brains, and the lead singer is HR. He’s a beast- when he performs he channels straight fire and savagery. And I want to channel that when I perform.
1824: What do you think of racism and politics in 2020?
Duckwrth: I feel that with 2020 and Donald Trump, everything happens for a reason, and if you zoom out of life and you just look at Earth’s history, I just feel like a lot of racism was swept under the rug and was very passive. And it takes a lot of energy, light or dark, to dig up this shit and be able to show face value what America really is. I fuck with politics, but I also don’t because it’s corrupt. I like more local politics and local legislation. I feel like you can always start in your community, I’m hoping things will get better, but I know it will have to get bloody because that’s what America understands. It understands war and it understands capitalism. So when you fuck with people’s pockets or fuck with their lives, that’s when people pay attention. Every storm is temporary and I’m glad all the disgusting stuff that was swept under the rug is now in our face.
Photo by Simone Niamani
1824: Who are some of your biggest influences and what would your dream collaboration be?
Duckwrth: Biggest influence musically would be OutKast just because, as a young person in South Central, they showed me that there’s a ‘different [way]’ of being a Black creator. And it made me feel more comfortable in my skin because I’m different, and growing up there wasn’t a space held for different Black kids. So they’ve inspired me not just musically, but as a person who’s different. So I want to do that for this generation as much as I possibly can. Dream collaboration would be like The Neptunes or Rosalia or Stevie Wonder. The Neptunes just because their the GOATs. The inner Duckwrth in me would be so stoked.
1824: How has the creative and songwriting process changed for you during the Pandemic, how have you been finding inspiration and what’s your biggest challenge?
Duckwrth: So I wrote the album in January. Since then I think there’s been so much that’s happened. I have crazy writers block right now. I’ve been able to produce with others and I know what I want going into the next album, but out of the many songs I’ve made this year, there’s maybe two of them that are worth putting out. Mainly because it’s been a crazy year, I don’t think my artistry needed as much love as my human did. It became a year of survival, so what’s lacking in my human has been placed in my face. 2020 is definitely a mirror year, it’s been a year of reflection.
1824: How would you say your sound has changed between 2015 and now?
Duckwrth: The earlier albums were me experimenting with different sounds, different vocal ranges, and then figuring out what people respond to the most. I think it’s just more so natural growth. For Nowhere I moved from Cali to New York and I was working with one producer, I just joined with my management, so it was just a launching pad. But I love that album. There are definitely songs I cringe at as an artist... like uhh why did I do that. But I know I wouldn’t get to where I am as an artist without Nowhere.
Photo by Simone Niamani
1824: If you could sample any artist from the seventies, who would it be?
Duckwrth: It’s a Minnie Rippelton song, it’s at the end of the movie ‘Us’: Come to my garden. I could sample the fuck out of the whole album. The whole album sounds like a movie.
1824: What was the idea behind releasing the visuals in the format you did for the album?
Duckwrth: Well the whole album is about this interaction between me and this girl that I was supposed to go on a date with. The first half of it is just the fantasies that I have with her and just my own insecurities, but then me also trying to flex. Then I finally pick her up and she had a long day. And she just wants to smoke and roll up before we get to the function, then we eventually end up at Ward on Wheels. I kinda kept it in the album format, and my manager just turned into the visualizer, and wrote the story. But it worked out, people love that visualizer so much. It’s just giving more snacks for people to snack on. [As people wait for music videos to come back] People are taking it in as the actual visual and it’s crazy. It’s pretty interesting.
1824: On singles Coming Closer and CRUSH, those are very intricate visuals. Do you typically have a visual in mind during the music process?
Duckwrth: Yay and nay. I have an idea and a feeling, and it’s not too hard to translate a feeling into a visual. But every once in a while, I see a music video, but that’s like 1/5 times. I tell my feelings to directors and we work together.
1824: What’s Next?
Duckwrth: Expanding SuperGood. The intention of the album is the positive affirmation of feeling super good. So it’s like: how do you take that outside of an album? How do you make that tangible in a physical world? How do I make people feel super good in the real world. So we’re looking to expand that through community efforts, more visuals, more music videos, garments. But I’m most excited with the community efforts, starting with South Central. If they can feel ‘SuperGood’, we can expand across America and potentially through the world.
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