Johan Lenox on Creating an Album
Johan Lenox has produced and arranged music for Kanye West, Big Sean, Nas, and dozens of other artists, but didn’t listen to rap or popular music until his twenties. Instead, he was raised on classical music—summer camps in Western Massachusetts’ Tanglewood Conservatory and a Yale undergraduate and graduate degree in music. He’s composed orchestral concerts at Lincoln Center and written full-length musicals.
He’s now on a mission to take these influences—from Mahler to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy—and blend them into a one-of-a-kind solo artistry. He says that his mission is to “make classical popular”. In the process, he’s also made pop classical, from intricate string arrangements to intense dynamics in every song.
Busker was fortunate enough to sit down with Johan a few weeks back to discuss the leg work and creative process that went into writing, recording, and producing his upcoming debut album, “WDYWTBWYGU (What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up)”. Ahead of the album, he’s released videos for “You Up” featuring Ant Clemons and “No One Gets Me” featuring RMR. He describes the videography process as a creative beast of its own, which he touches on in depth below.
When did you know you wanted to release an album?
For a while I was just arbitrarily delaying in a way that some major label type artists do. Maybe trying to get a song to blow up so that the album could be this big debut moment. In my mind an album had always been the goal, and I got distracted doing these EPs and singles ‘cause that’s how everybody does it. There’s value to that too, but at some point I needed to show that I’m growing as an artist.
Can you talk about what it means to have an album deal with a record label? And how you landed on releasing the album now?
Yeah. I mean, that's the way record deals are structured. You can sign for singles and you see a little more of that lately, but it's still a tiny percentage of the deals. Maybe there’s an EP deal here and there, but I think almost all of them are still like an album.
I left Island Records in February and now I'm just putting the album out through this distribution company called ONErpm. Basically the record labels spend a lot of money up front and they want to be able to own more shit. But I left Island before I even put the album out, which is unusual.
The main difference with a distribution company is they don't own any of the music, they just license it. There's a certain term during which they license it and they commission at a much lower level. A major label takes like 80% of the royalties on your songs usually whereas licensing companies can only take 30 or 40 or 50 or something like that. That's the big difference, and you probably get way less money up front and way less of a budget because they're not going to be making as much.
What might be the allure for a “smaller” artist in signing to a bigger label to release their music? What might be a drawback of doing that as well?
The simplest answer is just that they have money and they'll give you a bunch of it to sign, which allows you to not be broke for a while, and they'll also pay for a lot of stuff to market the albums. And then in theory, if they're good at their jobs, the people in the building are bringing in knowledge in terms of marketing, digital strategy, all that type of shit, or maybe using the relationships in the building to get a feature that you want from another artist on a sister label or something like that. All of that would be nice. I didn't find when I was on Island that there was a ton of that happening. It was more just like, here's a bunch of money. We'd just be like, “Can we spend it on this?” And they’d be like, “Sure, can you put on this, whatever, wherever.”
There was some stuff, like they had a person there who knew how to target ads really well and she was really helpful. And then the big thing is that they still basically control radio. If you want to be a superstar, I think radio is big. Even then though, you may as well just do it independently if you can. If you have a song blowing up so big that it should be a massive hit, the deals will absolutely come from everywhere and someone will sign you. You know what I mean? Old Town Road was blowing the fuck up before Lil Nas X signed. And then they signed and within like two weeks it was on the radio.
I just haven't really seen labels be very good at all that marketing shit or whatever, really. I’ve seen labels get in the way and hurt people, but I haven't really seen them actively help except at that last stage where it's just basically inevitable that the artist is going to be successful, you know?
Other people probably have different stories. I mean, I'm definitely more cynical about stuff. But you know, I would definitely sign again. I mean, I'm not like, fuck labels, and own my masters and shit. I do not at all care about that. It also probably helps that I have income as a producer so I don't necessarily need to own a hundred percent of my music. I would happily give away as much percentage that I need in order to make it successful because the real value is your name and having a set platform. So I don't care about that–the ownership or the fact that you're basically being swindled, I don't really care about all that stuff and I'm happy to take all the upfront money to do whatever it takes to get the shit to succeed.
Could you talk a bit about how you select the collaborators that you work with, both from an instrumentation and production standpoint and for the artists you feature on the project?
I think most people don't get in the studio and make an album in one period of time. You sometimes hear about stuff like that or something that lasts like a year, but you rarely hear about an artist that's going into a studio with a certain team of people making an album in two months. I mean, I would like to do that and I'm going to try to do it a little closer to that for this next album, which I'm going to start working on soon. But I think the reality is most people, myself included, are making this stuff more in groups of a hundred songs, two hundred songs. They keep a playlist. They just get up every day and work with people or alone.
In these sessions, you just go in with a producer, go in with a writer, and if it goes well, maybe you do it again. Some people find that they have one producer they really love working with and they just send them the whole project, which is a nice feeling. I have one guy who I have finishing my stuff with me and mixing it and just helping get all the vocals uniform and all that type of shit.
Because I produce too, I see these [artist] collaborations less as the person that I'm going to do the whole project with and more just I'm going to just borrow some ideas from different people and cut them in on the song when I use their stuff. You know, like writing a good chorus is a great example. You bring somebody in to help write a song and they nail the chorus, and then maybe you reproduce or rewrite lyrics or re-record the vocal or change the tempo, you know, and as it becomes this body of work it’s all about finishing these details.
Would you say that is similar for features that you have on the album? How does that happen?
I mean, there's basically like two ways that'll happen. One is that you have a finished song basically and just be like, it'd be cool to get this person on it. You know? It’s funny, because I feel like there's this notion of, “Well, does it improve the song?” Obviously I'm not going to put it on there if it doesn't improve the song, but to suggest that that's the main reason some of these features are on there is wrong. I mean, the reality is, of course you're putting a feature on there at least in part to try to reach a new audience.
I don’t know, some people are weird about that, you know? I've seen the Twitter people just be like, “it almost just feels like he just put these on there for marketing.” Obviously that's why. But I try to do it in a way that I think is interesting and cool and different. And I try to think about artists whose music I like and I think would share a fan base with me.
In doing this I'm taking songs that I already know are really strong, especially if I'm going to ask somebody who's got more going on than I do. The artists I’ve worked with, they're happy to do this, but I'm going to make sure that when I ask it's for something that's really fucking good. And the way to make sure it's really fucking good in my opinion is to have already written like 200 songs and like pick a good one. So that's how I do it.
I think if you have more leverage though, people really just want to be on your album, and you can just fucking get them in the studio as many times as you want and just start ideas from scratch and see what happens. I think that, maybe, is a more creatively fulfilling thing. I just think with some of the artists I've been trying to get on here, I probably don't have the luxury to write five songs with them from scratch and hope they're fucking amazing. I'd rather just come to them with something that I know is amazing and get them to do their best work.
I think also one thing that makes it easier for me to do that well is that I am producing these songs. So once I get something back from this artist, or even in the room with them, I can then take a step back from the song and reproduce this section so that it's really special and really makes them an integral part of the song. I think that is what separates it from a song that a rapper has done 16 bars or 8 bars or whatever and has nothing to do with the feel. I really tried to not have that be the case. And I think the fact that I'm able to produce means that I'm able to retroactively make it feel like it was always the necessary part of the song.
What were some of your biggest challenges from beginning to end of the album process?
Logistically the biggest thing for me was making the visuals. You know, like if you mess up and don't get the shot and you've spent all this money to get all this equipment around and people on set and all this shit, it's just terrifying. It's all really stressful and extremely expensive.
In terms of the music, for me personally the vocals have always been the hardest thing. I sang acapella in college, but I didn't solo in those groups. I mean, like maybe like once in a while I do like some fuckin bass solo or something like that, but pretty much I just did the baseline. I wasn't like out front singing my ass off on some Adam Levine shit or whatever as most people were. And I never really had the lead roles in the musicals.
I was more of a really musically strong person. I think I got interested in trying to be a recording artist and I could sing in tune and shit, but developing like a signature vocal performance style is different. A lot of people just kind of arrive at that at such an early age because all they ever did was sing or they have such an idiosyncratic voice that it just kind of happened on its own or they're a rapper and using auto-tune in an interesting way and the result of the effects gives as really unique sound.
But I think if you're just trying to start from scratch you want to fit the feel of the production and sort of connect to what the lyrics mean. If you'd go back through my old shit, I am singing very differently across different songs. I'm changing multiple times and not overnight. It’s a gradual shift. I had this much poppier Mike Posner inflection going on for like a year or two. And then I sort of realized that it was not feeling right with the way the music is dark and weird and moody.
Then I realized most of the artists that I listen to don't just kind of sing with that clean tone, like Post Malone. He sings very through his throat almost and does that fucking goat vibrato. The Weeknd has a super nasal, kind of intense thing going on. And there’s this Khalid style too. I ended up sort of in this world - I think it sounds similar to SAINt JHN’s vocals. They’re not just singing the way they talk or just singing on pitch like on generic pop radio.
I think that people don't like to talk about that sometimes. It’s supposed to be like, we just do what comes naturally. But the reality is, I came at this as an outsider who has mainly been doing classical music and all that type of shit. Anyways, the short version of that is that I re-cut the vocals on this album at least three times, some songs like seven, eight, nine times. I just went back in a couple months later and totally redid them. I ended up getting a vocal coach a year ago at this point. I basically just went through every single song and redid it ‘till I was happy.
You touched on it a bit with the vocals, but in what other ways is this album an evolution from your earlier work?
I think the writing is better. Like the melodies and stuff hit harder. I mean, I've taken these voice memos that were spread out through these EPs and expanded that into a whole story being told through voice memos on the album. Definitely lyrically the biggest theme is similar to what it was on the last few things I put out, like suburban malaise and directionlessness. That's still the story that I find most interesting to tell. But there are definitely other elements that have come into this now. And one is just the feeling of growing up and just being like, “What does adulthood look like? Why am I still living like a fucking college student?” Or “What did I think I was going to be doing at this age when I was a kid? What were my parents doing?”
And just this sort of looking forward and backward in time with what life looks like, and I think that kind of relates to this malaise and feeling of “what am I doing with my life?” And then there's also this even bigger picture element of it, which is just the American Dream. I feel like a lot of people feel the way I feel right now, where it's just a sense of stagnation and that we're not making progress towards what we thought was supposed to be the end goal. And people are fucking 35 and playing Halo and shit.
And that is sort of the theme of the album, which is an acronym for What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up (WDYWTBWYGU). The cover for it depicts this child sitting on a front lawn playing with toys. And there's a suburban house and the sky is just on fire behind the house. And all of the videos have elements to this. Like the “You Up” video has flashes of climate change – fucking fiery cloud systems popping on and off in the sky throughout.
I don’t know, I'm not like a hundred percent like apocalyptic doom yet, but I definitely think there's a lot of uncertainty in the world. And I feel like the central question of the album is: “If I feel uncertainty and instability in my own life, is that because I'm just a fucking jerk-off who hasn't figured shit out yet? Or is it because the fucking system is against me and all Americans?”
Of course I can’t get healthcare. It's like, of course I'm like a mess. Their apartment is covered in fucking shit ‘cause you know, they're driving a dog to doggy daycare and then going to their Uber job to doing some other thing. It's just like nobody has any time to really get any stability.
Are there any previews of the album you can leave us with?
I can say some of the features, they’re of course not all 100%. The latest single features this dude RMR—he has this big viral song where he’s wearing a ski mask and waving a gun around. He’s amazing. And then I’ve got Mr. Hudson who was on a bunch of classic Kanye records, I’ve got 070 Shake on the intro track hopefully. I’ve been working on her album too, so hopefully that will be a go.