My interest towards music formed when I was about 6 or 7. I watched Stand By Me, and Buddy Holly's "Everyday" really reached through the screen and sealed the deal with what I wanted to be when I grew up. I became what folks called an "old soul". I was constantly sticking my nose in the past to examine the trends and sounds of the previous century. I became obsessed with bands like Black Sabbath, DEVO, KC & The Sunshine Band, and especially The Beatles. I was always in my elementary school library reading all of these kiddie books about music. There was surprisingly a great collection; books containing the core history of many genres such as funk, metal, rock, and soul. I remember one time I even managed to get my hands on a children's book surrounding the history of strictly Buddy Holly's early life. It felt so great. I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to make music. I didn't care about the money and the women (though I was well aware that it came with the package), I wanted to be in one of those books. I wanted to contribute something to that world and really that world only. Everyone else wanted to be famous YouTubers or social media influencers. I didn't care about any of that. I wanted a guitar. I wanted to be able to just hide away from the world and turn every thought and feeling into a noise. Thanks to my third grade teacher, I was able to do just that (Thank you, Brian Kick). He referred me to some small group of dudes who had formed a little "school" that taught instruments to kids like me. They'd even introduce the students to one another and allow them to form their own little super-bands. After the school was sued for their name (School of Rock), I was on my own with it. I fiddled here and there every now and then, but as a young dude I became stupidly obsessed with improving my popularity. By that time, I was just an emo 8 yr-old who would constantly throw on his big blue headphones and blast Manson or Nirvana just to get through the day. During that time, kids didn't even consider that type of music. I was a weird little outcasted dude. I had a sick sense of humor and honestly those kids thought that one day I was just going to pull a gun out of my little Slipknot lunchbox. I became extremely antisocial. I would just go home everyday from school, blast whatever I wanted to listen to and play Skyrim or Oblivion on my Xbox 360.
That was life until 2017 came around. Mental health issues and divorce began to strike my family like a biker to his alcoholic wife. I went through mental facilities, obtained an emo girlfriend, lost weight, my mother (she's not dead just far away), and became physically attached to my older brother's side. But something happened that year that was as influential as when I watched Stand By Me. A new form of music was joining the airway and everyone around me including my older brother were just leaping into this whole scene. Lil Peep had just freshly died and XXXTENTACION had just shot his way to stardom following the release of 17. Trippie Redd, Lil Uzi Vert, and hell! Even Lil Pump were all making waves (scratch that) TSUNAMIS through the ears of teenagers that had never seen an A+ grade up close. Suddenly, the untouchables were much more. Including myself. I valued that. Those artists were just as hungry if not hungrier than me. They went from nobodies making stuff in their bedroom to somehow having their music blasted through my brother's shitty Crown Victoria subwoofers. It was truly magical to me. These guys had cult followings. I wanted to do that. I hopped on the dead end of the SoundCloud wave about the same time as Kid Buu started. I had a gaming PC my dad had bought me for a birthday and I immediately googled "HOW TO RECORD SOUNDCLOUD RAP". I downloaded Audacity as fast as I could and began to search through YouTube's endless free type beat selection. After watching PeeWee Herman's Christmas Special, I decided to name myself "Cakeman". I started with some emo beat and made my first song, "Everything", a mess of a track about that girl I was dating. I started to put my stupid humor into some of those songs. I shared them with kids from my school and suddenly I was somewhat somebody. Kids would come up to me like music critics and question my process, praise me for doing what I was doing. I felt like Spiderman. I would walk from class to class with kids approaching me as Cakeman and cracking silly jokes regarding some of my lyrics. It felt great. As I grew more comfortable with the Audacity process, I began to create music more toward my comfort zone relating to previous tastes. I had some guitars and an amp, a PC headset with a microphone which I used to record everything else, and that hunger to create. I began scavenging YouTube for random bpm drum tracks and downloaded them onto Audacity and recorded my stuff over them. I recorded my first rock album in 2019 and released it on Soundcloud, which in turn shooed all of my previous silly hip-hop-head listeners away. After that release, I was hardly ever home. I stuck around to a mutual friend of my brother's who was there and witnessed my whole Cakeman thing from the beginning. We began to write more organic and raw songs with his help. We felt like McCartney and Lennon. Kurt and Dave (Who was who is still up for debate). We were just messing around on acoustic guitars and singing our hearts out; writing songs about ex-girlfriends and depression and what not. It was the highlight of my life.
After about a year of drug use, an ego-death, musical experimentation, and "maturity" I was once again nobody. I don't say that because I lost friends, I say that because I wasn't making music I was happy with. Due to LSD psychosis, I couldn't listen to traditional genres of music due to believing that the lyrics were directed towards me and that the artist was poking fun at my terrible and pathetic state. So I spent a good amount of time creating complete noise. I was listening to Hanatarash and Merzbow 24/7. That might've contributed to my psychosis in all honesty. After another year of healing from that, I made amends with my mother. I would go and visit her every now and then and suddenly regained my sanity along with my hunger to create true music. I got a Macbook along with some other recording gadgets for one Christmas and immediately began work. I bought Distrokid, just to make things "official". I wasn't Cakeman anymore, that kid was dead. I was Duke Delorian (I still am), and I was going to make my young self proud. I wasn't that dumb kid making little projects on Audacity. I was a dumber kid who was tinkering with Logic Pro and discovering that those little settings on Audacity (EQ, Compression, Limiters etc.) were actually very important to achieving the sounds that I wanted. I had more instruments by this point. More experience. More studio IQ. I completed Duke's first album, "I Think I'm Aware, an album I solely dedicated to capturing that bedroom indie sound. I ended up getting my first job as a Goodwill cashier and couldn't really find the time to create anything else. But of what I was able to create turned into my second album "Zip Nil Nada", a more expansive array of compositions. In my opinion, it completely topples the previous. After that, I shaved my head and began forming a little castle of empty Miller High Life 40 ounce bottles inside of my closet. I drunkenly recorded my EP "Cheetah", a post-hardcore noise rock project that I put hardly any time in. Let's not forget to mention that Duke Delorian is nowhere near as popular as Cakeman ever was. Even though I'm on all of these platforms, I'm way more secluded and closed-in than ever before. After the recent release of "Electric Soup", I graduated high school and stepped fresh into the adult world I spent so much time poking my lips and lungs into. As of today, I'm unemployed. The last job I had was a gas station graveyard shift of which I had to share with some 30 yr old scrawny piece of shit who would openly brag about beating the shit out of his overweight wife and mother. I am staying at an older friend's house, writing music and actively looking for some job to afford my own place. I'm not sure how the future will pan out. But one thing is for sure: I will always put myself into music. I will always work hard to make me proud of myself.
If the day ever comes when I stop, that'll be the day when I die.
