Deaton Chris Anthony

I would sit with my mum when I was three years old, and she could read music and play complete pieces. I remember asking her, ‘How’d you learn how to play the piano?’ And she said, ‘I taught myself’. I’ve been completely obsessed with that my entire life.

I grew up in Kansas in a small town. There’s the dentist’s office, there’s a park, and it’s like, John Doe’s teacher down at the school. I pull up to the grocery store—it’s the same cashier that’s always been there, and I get some Lunchables or whatever the hell. The thing is, man, I’m chasing the creativity that I had when I lived in my parents’ basement in this cul-de-sac. Nothing’s going on, so my mind went everywhere. There was nothing to get in the way of just letting my imagination unfold. I still wish that I was in that mindset because it felt like the whole world was open for me.

I think it was that era. This is 2013, 2014, and Tumblr was alive and well. I would only listen to my parents’ music up until high school, when finally I was like, wait, I should find music I actually like. That’s when I crossed paths with Vaporwave. I would listen to music and then scroll through Tumblr and merge the mood of the music to what I was seeing. Tumblr in its prime was very informative.

My dad’s a big computer guy, so we had all the first game consoles. We had a lot of the early computers. He’s an engineer, and I remember growing up, he had three desks and he always had a project. Now he has ten 3D printers, and he’s always building things. I totally got my dad’s engineering brain, and then my mum’s the musician and the creative in the traditional sense. I kind of got the perfect merge of worlds.

I started making music in 2013, and Vaporwave was definitely in its prime at that time—very much an internet aesthetic and a genre of music that was mainly on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. I was obsessed with that music, and it felt like a great entry point for me because it’s all sample-based. It’s literally just taking old R&B tracks and slowing them down and adding reverb to them.

I stumbled upon 18 Carat Affair then. He was in a lot of these Bronze56K skate videos, and his music’s just the sickest. I looked on his SoundCloud, and it said he was from Kansas. Turns out, he literally lived 10 minutes from my house. I hit him up and was like, ‘Dude, you’re an actual legend’. I met up with him, and that was my very first session. We went into a little shed/studio in his backyard. I’d never worked with anyone musically. I pulled up with all my samples, and he had a tape machine and a couple samplers, and we just really got along. My first album had him featuring on it, which was a huge, super sick start to my musical career. I moved to LA, and that launched me out here to some relevance.

Honestly, I think rhythm for me came from skate videos. I didn’t understand editing when I was a kid, so I’d think, dude, they found the perfect song for the video because they land right on the beat every time. I was so amazed by that. When I started to edit my own skate films—it’s very percussive, popping a trick, getting into the grind and landing. It is the same as a drum fill or a hi-hat. That was when I really started to understand rhythm in a track.

I feel like it was Shorty’s Guilty.

I feel like my first real passion was skateboarding, but then the music in my films made me realise I actually want to make music. Making music is what I love.

The ‘80s sound the way the ‘80s do because of the DX7. You can make it sound like a saxophone or a voice or drums, but it doesn’t sound like a real saxophone. You get that cheesy ‘80s sound, and that was really exciting to me.

I remember when I first started making music, I didn’t know how you even got sound into a computer. Is it a cable that goes…? I didn’t understand anything about it, so I actually learnt how to sample. I was like, I can just take something that already exists and pitch it or reverse it. And I realised too, all my favourite music was sample-based, so that was kind of my thing. I moved to LA, and a lot of people would be like, ‘How’d you get that sound on that one track? That snare?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a sample’. ‘What sample is it? Like a drum machine?’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no. The whole thing is a sample’. I remember people being kind of bummed, and I was like, oh, I’m not respected as a musician. But it sounds good! It’s a good song.

All my favourite things that I sampled were made with equipment, so first, I needed to learn what equipment it was. It was like, that actual sound is patch 37 on the D-50. I can remake that exact thing. That was my intro. I would find old R&B tracks and decipher the sounds, or I would look on forums. What is this harmonica patch? And then I’d get the DX7, find that patch, and start to remake the samples. Eventually it was more interesting to try and find my own sounds.

It was probably, like, ‘86 to ‘89. That was the OG, where I started. Everything was icy as hell—ear-piercing, icy sounds, all warmth gone. Just digital, icy shit.

I found this blog called The Isle of Deserted Popstars, and it was literally that—some homie who was obsessed with one-hit wonders from the ‘80s. All of the samples I was fucking with from that era were from these weird, unknown R&B musicians. They’re pretty obscure. There’s one artist I want to reference that I think has been, besides Mariah Carey, the real North Star. Her name is Millie Scott. Pretty low-key. She’s got this record called Love Me Right, and it’s just the most insane production, as ‘80s as you can get. I’ve been chasing that sound for years, trying to track down the exact drum machines they used, even going on Discogs and finding the engineers of the project, trying to find them on Facebook, trying to DM them. I’m like, ‘What drum machine did you use on Love Me Right?’

I think it all started with ‘Wi-Fi Or Wifey’. That was the beginning of, OK, I figured out my little thing.

I tell stories through sounds. My favourite thing is to have an album be a plot. Films have slow moments, and they have adventurous moments; there’s conflict. To me, that is a record: to go from the prettiest, happiest thing and contrast that with something truly dark. You can’t make something sound sweet unless it’s in the context of something dark. On all my records, I love to make colourful, fun music, but I have even more fun making just the scariest music.

I produced a couple tracks for Charli XCX for that album Crash. That felt special to work on.

She hit me up and was like, ‘I want to make a Janet Jackson record’. At the time, I had just released a record that was kind of reminiscent of that sound. She came over to my house, we did a session, and then she invited me over to this crazy house up in the hills and we worked for three or four days. Then everything got locked down during Covid, and I was like, man, I guess that one’s not going to come out. Then I got a random text a year and a half later, and it was like, ‘Hey, song’s done, Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens hopped on it’. I was in pure shock. That was my very first written and produced track. That’s a special milestone for me.

Just before Windows and Mac took over the world, Amiga was the shit. It was the computer that people used to invent a whole type of music—drum and bass, jungle, and a lot of dance music. I am such a fan of that type of dance music, and I really wanted an authentic way to make early rave jungle stuff.

I got my Amiga because there’s actually an old photo of my dad, and he’s wearing a leather jacket and speeder shades. It’s a ‘90s pic of him. He would tell me how he used to club back in Sweden, where he is from. It’s inside me, that dance music, because my dad did it. But I lived in Kansas; there was nowhere to go and listen to that type of music in my world, so I could only dream of what that was like.

This sound is so ‘80s. It’s the first Mario. If you imagine the sounds he makes as he jumps, like a bleep—the Amiga makes those sounds. These cartridges came out, which you plug in the back, and all of a sudden you can sample in audio. It runs through all of the Amiga’s chips and components, which makes it sound so bad, but really good at the same time. Now everyone’s trying to chase a little bit of that noise or that crunch, so having the real thing is really special. But the process of making a song—it’s so limited that I feel like I make very easy-to-understand music. I don’t have the option to complicate things. Pretty much every song I start is on the Amiga.

It’s not the easy route. But instead of sitting in front of the piano and learning my scales, I’m learning how to enter commands on the Amiga. I pull up to my sessions now with my Amiga. People come with a guitar, I come with this, and it’s the same thing. At the end of the day, we’re making music. But that’s probably been the biggest challenge of being a musician—knowing that I’m standing out, that I have something to say and something to contribute to the work, but that I’m not doing it in the traditional sense.

It’s an insane story. My dad wanted to be an exchange student. He grew up on a farm in Sweden—a small town, crazy small town. They were like, ‘Where do you want to go?’ He said, ‘Send me somewhere with snow because I like to ski’. So they sent him to Utah, and that’s where my mum mainly grew up. They met in high school in Utah, and then my mum and my dad fell in love and were high school sweethearts.

My dad had given my mum his ring before he had to go back to Sweden because his student visa was about to expire. After he left, there was an argument between my mum and her mum. Basically, she ended up forcing my mum to give back his ring and write a letter saying, ‘I never want to speak to you again. And, by the way, I’m pregnant with your child’.

Reluctantly, heartbroken—just to get her mum off her back. So then my mum had my brother her senior year of high school.

Yeah, eight years older than me. For five years, my dad was back in Sweden. That’s when he would go clubbing. He was in his early 20s. I don’t know super specifics, but I know it was pretty on-the-nose house music. It wasn’t jungle or anything like that. It was still late ‘80s clubbing, so it was the beginning of house. Anyways, years go by. My mum sent a letter to my dad being like, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘You said not to talk to you’. And she’s like, ‘Well, I want to see you’. He’s like, ‘That’s great timing because I’m going to see my uncle in the States soon, so I’ll come see you and our son’. Then my dad got in this crazy car wreck and escaped death—he rolled his car three times. He took that as a sign: I just need to go and be with my family. So he flew straight to where my mum was, and he met my brother for the first time.

They got married three months later, and they’ve been married ever since. A few years later, they had me.

I know, that story is nuts. That’s why I started Deaton Chris Anthony in 2015. The idea was that I spend 10 years building this world and then shed light on the process. This is the first time I’ve ever shared this. Literally, us talking right now is me for the first time pulling the curtain back and revealing the intention behind all the work.

Just Deaton Chris Anthony. Coming to LA, giving myself a new name, a new identity. Outputting as this character, making music. Most people think my name is Deaton, that I’m just that guy, but the Deaton world consists of every member of my family. There’s four characters: There’s Deaton, then there’s Angela, Korbin, and Bobby. Deaton represents my mum, the aspiring R&B musician. My first album, BB, was dedicated to her. My initials are ANGL, so Angela is my character, represented by my BO Y album. Korbin is the older brother; he’s really into emo. SID THE KID was my ode to him. And Bobby is my dad, an alien who crash lands in Deaton’s room and starts a rave. That’s my new album coming out. So yeah, this entire time, I’ve basically been developing all those characters based on my family. A coming-of-age story.

It’s me. It is me. My name is Andrew, but I am also Deaton Chris Anthony. I just think it’s time to sort of let people in on where it all came from, because it’s not random. There’s a lot of lore. I’ve dedicated my whole life to telling this abstract story about my family because my family’s story is so special to me.

This still comes down to the story of Deaton and everything that he embodies. Like I said, the album I’m making right now is my Bobby ode, the rave music that I’m into. That’s my dad; that’s his aesthetic. It’s just completing the whole saga of my family. It’s nuts. I created a language to make sense of things that don’t make sense. I had to become Deaton Chris Anthony to discover who Andrew Nicholas Georg Lovgren is.