Aaron Frazer Keeps Learning

You know what they say about making plans. Your intentions are often beside the point. 

Aaron Frazer, on tour for his second solo album, Into The Blue, is out with an eight-piece band – horns, backup singer, the works. Wrapping up a leg of the tour in Chicago on the 24th, he’s immediately back in the studio with his other band, Durand Jones and the Indicators, before jetting back home to perform the Hollywood Bowl on the 27th. 

And he didn’t really envision any of this.

For Aaron, if he had any musical ambition, it first came down to wanting to drum along to Nas, Will Smith and LL Cool J records, recreating their already sampled beats. 

“I saw myself as a drummer first.” he tells me. We’re talking before his Studio 1A session.   

“At a certain point I realized that I was interested in hip hop production and I started making beats, hip hop instrumentals, with no one to rap over them, just making them on my family’s computer. Which brought me to going to Goodwill during my lunch breaks in high school, to the dollar [record] bins. That was a big education, just digging, using your eye. You get tons of misses, stuff that looks sick and then it’s terrible, and stuff that looks jank, but it’s awesome. So, that was when the idea of composition started.”

So, without any clear goals, he began digging deeper. Aaron’s father, while not a musician, seemed to understand music on a deeper level than most. 

Aaron explains. “If you don’t have words to express what you are perceiving, whether in food or wine or in music, you can’t perceive the individual components. Having an adult in my life who would talk about things allowed me to hear things on a component level. If the intro riff is being mimicked by the background harmonies later in the song, you’re going to feel it, but you’re not going to know it. Having the language to express that really shaped my ear to apply it to my own writing.”

But who was he writing for? At this point, Aaron wasn’t a bandleader, or even a singer. Before speaking with him, I unearthed an old interview where he confessed he didn’t start to sing until he got his driver’s license. I asked if this was true. 

“Yeah, absolutely!! I didn’t have any alone time growing up. My parents, if the door was shut, it was like, why is the door closed? That kind of vibe. So, yeah, the car is still a sanctuary.”

You can just picture Aaron cruising the freeways, testing the limits of what is now his well-known falsetto croon. Did this lead to his eureka moment, a sudden conviction that he could be a star?

Not really.

“I really did not set out to be a falsetto singer. It just happened. It was fun and I kept doing it., and I’m learning. There are things that I’m like, Okay, that was cool. That wasn’t exactly how I had it in my head. How do I learn from this and apply it to the next one? I hope that translates on this new record. I’m putting all these lessons that I’ve learned in my musical life together on Into the Blue.”

The new album does have that feel. Musically, it’s wide-ranging. Subjectively, it’s a bit narrower.

Blue is a breakup album. Frazer’s split seemed sigficant, prompting his move from Brooklyn to LA. Yet initially, he was determined not to write sad songs. 

“More than anything,” he says, “I wrote the record that I needed at that moment. I put some pressure on myself to avoid what I was feeling. But I was having trouble writing anything at all. There’s a lesson I learned, the creative blockage that can happen if you try to stifle what is authentic to you. As soon as I started writing sad songs, I was also able to acknowledge the stuff that was good, the giddiness of beginning a relationship, and feel the whole spectrum of emotions.”

Tht spectrum translated into broader musical strokes than appear on his solo debut, produced by Easy Eye Sound label owner Dan Auerbach. 

“I think this new record is like an inverse of the first one. The first record has a more hi-fi sound. But the performances, the whole Easy Eye sound philosophy is first take magic, you know, right from the gut. You hear the demo, then you just go play it. On this one the sound is much grittier, but the performances are very dialed. We went through great lengths to make sure that was the case.”

This sculpted, free-flowing R&B takes some effort to reproduce live. While his Studio 1A performance is stripped-down, on stage Aaron is out from behind the drums, singing this new vulnerable material in front of a big band. 

“It’s scary,” he admits, “but it’s fun. I wanted to bring a big band for this album cycle because it’s a big sound. I’ve been able to kind of bring the different musical influences like Ennio Morricone’s  Western soundtracks of the 60s, and David Axelrod as well. All these different elements of soul music, psychedelic rock, orchestration, tons of proto hip hop energy. I wanted to reflect that same sprawling nature with the band.”

Aaron might have stumbled into all of this, but he’s on a serious roll now. 

“It’s like Wile E. Coyote, like running off a cliff. If you don’t look down, you just keep running. I’m just going and going and seeing what happens.”

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Musicians: Aaron Frazer – vocals; Brain Gazo – vocals; Camille Trust – vocals; Derrek Williams – guitar

Credits:

Producer: Deidre Gott; Production Assistant: Confucius Jones; Audio Engineer: Rene Chavez, Jake Perlman; Audio Mix: Jake Perlman; Cameras: Renee Dominguez, Livia Blackburn, Patricia Lim; Edit: Renee Dominguez; Host: Laurie Gallardo