“I’m such a music tech person,” pop producer Shawn Wasabi tells American Songwriter in the week leading up to his long-awaited debut release Mangotale. The LA-based musician first gained notoriety in 2015 with “Marble Soda,“ an original song with 32 million YouTube views, which featured Wasabi creating music and melodies on a custom instrument controller at lightning speed.
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Mangotale is a colorful musical explosion of fun, created almost entirely on his laptop at home, featuring all-female vocal guest spots from Chevy, kennedi, raychel jay, Satica, Spacegirl Gemmy and Tia Scola. Wasabi approaches music from a different angle, creating unusual sounds from unusual places and turning them into pop joy, each one filled with upbeat, quirky beats and catchy melodies that are positive and energetic. But don’t write him off as someone who just pushes a button on a laptop and calls it music. Wasabi can shred on his instrument of choice, be it keyboards, guitar, bass or his MidiFighter 64 controller, a unique instrument he designed with manufacturer DJ Tech Tools.
Having a conversation with Wasabi is a fun ride as well, punctuated by youthful ‘oh yeah’s,’ ‘wow!’ and ‘check this out’ comments. It’s like witnessing a running conversation inside his brain as he stumbles upon realizations about himself and his music. “I try to get ideas down in the first few hours or I lose the plot,” he says. “Better get it down before the ADHD kicks in!”
We caught up with him to discuss music, video games, and the vision he had for creating the Mangotale world.
Do you have a first recollection of music and what drew you to it?
When I was four years old, I had a small Casio keyboard and I would learn music by listening to my mom’s CD collection. She had a big collection of everything, from Beethoven and Mozart to the Beatles and Jackson Five. I would listen and learn all the melodies by ear. That started my fascination with music. I’ve been playing music for most of my life, mostly piano. I’m super curious and love experimenting. I try to use the studio itself as an instrument and bring new recording styles and sounds into the process.
I can tell by watching your videos. Piano is your main instrument but you’re playing guitar and bass very well.
Thank you so much. I don’t post many videos of me playing an instrument. I spent so much of the last few years focused on midi controllers. But I have friends who have loaned me stuff and now I have a Fender P bass and a Gibson Les Paul sitting in my living room. I’m rediscovering my passion for playing instruments. It’s fun to zen out and play an instrument. It’s very therapeutic.
Did you have any formal music training?
I had some classical piano training when I was young. It started there. I got good at playing certain things. In the past two years I’ve been trying to learn jazz and making friends with musicians who have a good sense of and playing in jazz jam sessions. I’m trying to become more fluent in learning cool chord progressions that will make your head turn.
How would you describe your music?
That’s a great question! I just put out my new album Mangotale. I’ve been super enamored of the whole process. I try to be very sound design-y and very sentimental and personal in how I produced the music for this album.
A lot of my music is hyper melodic and colorful. A lot of the songs I’ve done I’ve been trying to write lyrics that are a lot more visceral and sensory. I love personal lyrics that are conversational and have a lot of storytelling. I want everything to sound like a hook. I want every line to be polarizing and very sensory, like you can see and taste the lyric. That’s how I approach songwriting.
For production I’ve been doing the same thing in that I want the timbre and melodies and chord progression to be very storytelling and catchy and colorful too. I have this song “Lemons” that uses a Nintendo Labo, which has a switch and you can build this cardboard piano. There’s a video game section where you can load in synthesizer sounds and samples. You play it on the cardboard piano. I sampled a bunch of sound fonts from old video games I dug up on the internet that are in .wav form. I would extrapolate those sounds and work around them.
Do you have lyric co-writers on any of the songs on Mangotale?
It depends on the song. I co-write for the most part. On Mangotale I start off with a concept and write notes on my phone. I try to visualize and write around that with more descriptive words. Let’s say something like ‘the hat is yellow and round.’ How can I make that more interesting? I’ll take those words and try to make them visual, vibrant and descriptive. There are so many different ways to approach it.
Kennedi, who sings on “Lemons” pretty much wrote that whole lyric by going on the mic and saying a bunch of things. I have a few writers I like working with because we have a great dynamic. My friend Hollis, who wrote a few songs on Macklemore’s record is a descriptive writer like me and can take objects and write about them in tangible, palpable ways. Like the Macklemore song where he talks about his car and describes it so many different ways. What song is it? Oh yeah, he’s talking about his off-white Cadillac! (“White Walls”) So I took that technique and found ways to incorporate it in my writing. I’m not much of a free stylist but I love taking concepts and fooling around with them. Just sitting down with someone and having a conversation. There could be cool things the other person says but don’t realize it might sound good in a song.
Let’s deconstruct “Medicine.” It has a great beat to it. Is that where the song started?
Oh, thank you! That was one of the smoothest songs I’ve ever made. It’s recent too, since the lyrics are about quarantine. When I’m at home I listen to a lot of bossa nova when I’m cleaning around the house. I wanted that same feel for the song “Medicine” where you can vacuum the living room to the song or lay in bed for eight hours. The bossa nova rhythm makes me feel a sense of calm where I can chill and vibe out for a second. I’ve never made a song like this. It works really well.
Oh yeah! There’s this short polyrhythm fill in between sections. It’s a triplet going across the 4/4 meter. I love that part so much. It’s so simple but effective! It doesn’t feel out of place and catches your ear like ‘woah that’s cool!’
“Snack” has a definite Jackson 5 vibe. Was that an inspiration? Is there anything sampled?
Nothing is sampled. It’s all instruments I played, keyboard and some midi parts. There’s a bass guitar line that moves under the piano. That was definitely Jackson Five-inspired. I went through a phase where I listened to a lot of Motown and disco. It’s very rare that I sit down and say I want to make a Motown record today. On the beat to “Snack” I was sitting on the couch at my friend’s house working on Ableton. I picked out a simple major progression. The moving bass line gives it that flavor that it needed. I’m super glad because “Snack” is one of my favorite songs on the record. I was finally able to put those Motown influences into a full production. I love how it reminds me of my childhood and that same feeling I had when I first heard them at that age.
A lot of people say that electronic music is devoid of emotion. But you’ve managed to dispel that notion. How would you answer that?
I understand where they’re coming from and I’ve never been asked that. I do feel that sense reading YouTube comments when I posted midi controller videos and people would write ‘I don’t understand this. Why doesn’t he just play instruments?’ A lot of people get the idea that there’s no sense of musicianship.
Well, there are pioneers who need to lead the way.
Well, thank you. I’m glad you appreciate that.
Tell us about the Midi Fighter 64.
I was 19 and had graduated high school the year before. I met up with the company DJ Tech Tools in 2013 or 2014. Michael Mitchell was one of the guys there. He got a 3D printer and at that time 3D printing was blowing up with the whole tech industry. So we were of the same mindset. I told him we should make a midi controller with a 3D printer and we did. We put it together over the course of a few months.
Where did you come up with the album cover artwork concept?
I visited the Cartoon Network and met with two of the animators, Christina and Lilit, who work on We Bare Bears and they’re super talented. They draw so fast and can storyboard ideas in few seconds, almost before I’m finished with my sentence! I invited them to my house and we sat around all day. I was spilling out ideas, asking them if they could draw a bunch of islands with trees and a big root, with a volcano in the background. Stuff like that. Over the course of a day we wrote down the storyboard and how I wanted the story behind how I wanted the visual island of Mangotale to feel. We did that in 2017. Fast forward to now and I found another artist on Twitter. I reached out and told her I loved her artwork and was working on an album. I sent her the storyboards and drawings and color palettes. She sent me back this sketch the same day and it’s pretty much what wound up as the cover for the album. was blown away at how it was everything I wanted in cover album artwork. I was so impressed that she understood it instantly and sent it back the same day!
