RAC - Grammy award winning artist talks Boyhood and creative passions over third album release
Indie, pop, rock, electronica; name any genre across the musical spectrum, and you can guarantee RAC has had his hands on it at some point. With a sound that transcends compartmentalization and a track record over two-hundred remixes high, it’s no surprise that fans have been waiting with bated breath for the release of the Grammy-award winning artist’s third album titled BOY. RAC hit the music scene like a thief in the night back in 2014 with his release of ‘strangers’, the electric sunshine melodies brought listeners into a world of the artists creation and left an imprint in their minds with catchy lyricism. In present time, BOY, is here to do much of the same with cooler toned synths reminiscent of an afternoon’s daydream as a child.
RAC is no stranger to the unique, an observation which is evident in this new release. New collaborations, new sounds and new outlooks collide, yet somehow still bring about a gentle wisp of nostalgia. Fans and new listeners alike can expect to fall heart first into this audible time capsule. Turncoat got ahold of the Portuguese-American Portland-based artist himself to hear a bit more about the album as well as the mind behind it.
What can listeners expect from BOY that differs from previous releases?
I think as it should be it’s a natural progression. It’s weird to talk about because i’m in the midst of it, a lot of this will become more clear after it’s been out for a year or two but at least I can speak to where i’m at right now. To me, it feels like a natural progression. I think if people listen to it without any other knowledge of what I do or anything like that it might sound a bit different, maybe a little more mellow than some of my other work. For the most part, I think it falls in line. I see it as sort of a logical progression to where i’ve always been headed. I don’t know if every artist feels this way but so far I feel like this is my best work so i’m really excited about it but that’s the kind of thing you really only know with time. It takes many years to really understand it and see it. As far as what people can expect, I always just sort of chase my own path and that’s what this album is about.
How has your creative process shifted over the years?
I try to do as many things as possible. I’m always trying to change things up so that I don’t get bored because I get bored very easily. If you want to be a professional musician you have to constantly change up what you’re doing otherwise, well, burnout is real. So, I constantly change my methods and my creative process over the years to mitigate that. It sort of has this side effect of continuously challenging myself to do something new and different and you learn something new along the way. There’s a lot of upsides to it. As far as how it’s actually changed on the first album I very much sat down on my own and wrote maybe fifty to sixty demo’s and then sent them off to vocalists. On the second album, I did a lot more in-person writing, I was in the studio with somebody and we’d write from scratch. That was kind of a big departure. It was a great experience doing that but I kind of missed that solitary period of just coming up with something on my own without any outside input and I really wanted to go back to that. So in a way this third album is a return to what I did on the first album but with a lot more experience with many, many years in between. That’s kind of the main difference. Obviously, creatively there’s a lot of different things going on but that’s one of the more obvious changes.
In terms of remixes, what is the process you go through in deciding whether or not to take on a particular song?
These days i’m not doing as much, I spent well over thirteen years doing remixes. I’ve done like every style and every genre so at this point in my career it really has to be something completely different and interesting. For example, recently I did a Neko Case remix, which I love Neko Case I think she’s amazing. It was such a pleasure to work on her music but it was recorded mostly acoustically without a click track. It was loose and live as it should be, but that makes remixing very difficult. In a weird way that was kind of a plus, it was an interesting challenge musically. A lot of it is just fielding requests, seeing what comes through and then making a decision. I know intuitively pretty quickly if it’s going to work or not. That’s usually the process, a request comes in and i’ll make sure everything is above board and see if the song works creatively. But, i’m being a lot pickier these days.
What do you hope listeners take away from BOY?
This album is essentially about my childhood, that was the main inspiration behind it. During that writing period that I was referring to earlier, I was constantly going back to that place. I grew up in Portugal, it was taking me back to this period in my life where I was somewhat secluded. I didn’t really have access to the internet, well the internet wasn’t really a thing. There weren’t really many music stores, you’d scavage to find music from friends and other places. It was a really nice time because there wasn’t anybody telling me what was cool, what was good and what was bad. I was just really diving in and making decisions for myself intuitively as a young person at a very formative period. A lot of that stuff was really important, really impactful in my life. So this album is me channeling a lot of that through a modern lens, if you will. My hope is that some people can relate to that and feel the same way. That was sort of the barometer for this, how does this particular structure make me feel? Does it remind me of that period? Does this melody take me back to this place? I think there’s a certain universality to that, I guess we will see but that was the intent. I hope that people can relate to it and if not, it’s still a pocket of time in my life so I hope people enjoy it just for that.
BOY is currently available on all major streaming platforms.
by Lukas Skye
