Artist Profile: wishlane

wishlane, an up-and-coming pop artist currently based near Atlanta, Georgia, has spent years intertwining the sounds that shaped his childhood, from the southern rock ballads of his father’s band to the electronic music that permeated his adolescence, and the result is a unique combination of experimental production wrapped within a singer-songwriter ethos: a blend that, in many ways, defies description.

wishlane’s exposure to music creation began very early on in his life, as he sat and watched his father’s band, a classic rock outfit influenced by groups like Kings of Leon and The Weeks, practice and perform locally.

However, by the time he had the desire to make his own music, a separate influence had taken hold: the Internet-driven electronic and dubstep scene of the 2010s. At only eight years old, wishlane first received an FL Studio license as a gift, and he spent months combing through the demo tracks provided by the software’s manufacturer, seeking to understand how and why each component of each track was arranged and produced.

Although he did not yet have the skills or confidence to begin making his own songs at this point, he credits this learning period as having a major influence on his current production capabilities.

“It impacted my ability to be a musician [because of] the fact that I started at such a young age. Most things are easier to learn when you're younger; it's like learning a second language… And I do view music as its own language, because you are saying things, whether there's lyrics in them or not. So I think it really did help a lot in terms of me getting to where I am currently in music that I started when I did. Because had I started later, I wouldn't have picked it up as quickly.”

After making various EDM tracks through middle school and high school, however, wishlane’s life underwent a drastic shift when he moved from New York to Tennessee, and being back home, closer to his family, compelled him to yet again re-visit his songwriting roots.

He continued learning guitar and simultaneously, through friends, became exposed to the burgeoning hyper-pop scene of the time: including artists like Jane Remover and Cybertrash.

As he gained more confidence in his songwriting abilities, his production abilities grew as well, and his first two EPs, “Slow down,” and “Dunderhead”, represented displays of the artist nestling into the niche they had created for themselves.

His first full-length project, Catch22, captured another major change in his life, as he moved back to the town in which he had gone to high school, attempting to reckon with the simultaneous dread and familiarity of such a relocation.

“I'd been chipping away at the idea that eventually turned into Catch22 for like three years by this point, but moving out of New York and then being back at home with my mom was sort of the impetus for what [the project] eventually became… That album was sort of born out of that reclusiveness.”

As wishlane worked through the memories and emotions that brought him into Catch22 as a project, he also had a yearning to separate himself from the habits and sounds that had defined his production up to that point. His next project, Nobody’s listening!, thus represented a departure from the years he had spent building up his capabilities of arrangement and sound design, instead opting for a creative “clean slate”.

“Nobody's listening! was, production wise, just a mishmash of everything that I had ever learned, and I think part of that was out of the desire to have a completely clean slate. I was just sort of throwing everything that I knew how to do at a wall and seeing what stuck. And, lyrically and story wise, Nobody's listening! is definitely the most fleshed out story that I've had an album tell. I mean, all of my projects have had an overarching story, but Nobody's listening! was the first time that I would really consider myself good at telling one.”

Now, having fulfilled his desire to operate wholly independently of his musical habits, and having been satisfied with the outcome, wishlane now looks towards his next ventures: a tentative, but certainly unique, path he will continue to carve through his musical niche.