Hey —
Donald Glaude has been chasing records since he was six, spending allowance and lunch money on Beatles and Prince LPs. So near the end of our conversation I ran a little segment I call Crate Digging: I read him five of his own titles, one at a time, and asked what came back.
What came back was wonderful. "Soul Cha Cha," built on a Bohannon sample, is one of his favorites, and he's redoing it. "To the Soul" got a "Damn, that's an old one"; it's the track that led him to Soul Cha Cha. "Get Up" was cut at Moonshine Studios in a day or two. Then came "Mad Disco," and a legend caught flat: "I can see it, but I don't remember what it sounds like. Great song. It probably wasn't." And "Stick," which they "did over the phone," turned out to be one of his only Beatport #1s.
Under the laughs, though, there's a real thread. Glaude taught himself to produce. No mentor, just "my own weird shortcuts, pretty ghetto, but it works." For years an agent's voice sat on his shoulder: write a hit, write a hit. He couldn't. It wasn't until COVID that he let it go, deciding to "just make the music that came out of me," perfect or not. The loudest showman in the game, quietly making peace with his own catalogue.
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Coming next: Marques Wyatt, LA's deep-house institution, and the dancefloor as sacred space.
Keep digging,
Deckard
The oral history of dance music, told by those who created it.