Before winning a Grammy, releasing his first album or founding Remix Artist Collective, André Anjos was a bilingual college student in Greenville, Illinois.
Born and raised in Porto, Portugal, Anjos moved to the United States for college and found himself torn between the two cultures and began searching for a sense of belonging. He found that in music.
“[It was] some sort of universal language and once I figured that out, it just felt somewhat special to me, even early on,” he said in a phone call with The Daily Free Press. “For whatever reason, I was able to connect to people more openly through music as opposed to spoken language.”
Through this connection, Anjos said he started remixing songs, trying to “showcase it and do it in an interesting way so maybe that’s changing a cord or tweaking the vocals or something like that, which changes the meaning, or changes the emphasis of a certain word.”
He soon moved into songwriting and released his first full-length album, “Strangers,” in 2014. Following the success of “Strangers,” Anjos continued to write and eventually finished his most recent full-length album, “Ego.”
While making “Ego,” Anjos found himself reflecting upon his success. After “Strangers,” he became busy with touring and found himself getting recognized on the street.
“Just a lot of things have changed. Not all of it good,” he said. “So I was talking about channeling it into music and that’s basically what I did, kinda processed that through me, through the only way I knew how.”
This channeling of his thoughts and feelings are exemplified in both his remixing and original work. There are a few key differences, though.
“With remixing, it’s usually a portion of the original song … It feels like there’s a little less pressure too,” he said.
“It’s inevitably gonna be compared to the original and that’s fine, but it’s not a replacement, so nobody can really get too mad about it.”
With such short time before a song has been “overplayed,” Anjos revels in having time to write and produce a full-length album of his own original work.
“With original work, it’s a lot more labor intensive,” he said. “For this latest album, I spent about two years working on it [and with remixes] I don’t normally have that luxury.”
He described his writing process for “Ego” as being the opposite of the process behind “Strangers.”
“I spent most of the time just working in the same room as people, talking about life, talking about music, talking about all kinds of stuff, with hopes of making a more personal connection and having that seep into the music in some way,” he said.
Anjos holds his background close to his heart and in turn, it finds its way into his music. When asked about his influences, he said that he draws “inspiration from everything” he listens to.
“Musicians influence every other musician, so I feel like everything that we’re hearing now, culturally, is kind of just a mix of everything else,” he said.
Lizzy Plapinger, who performs under the name, LPX, is opening for RAC on multiple dates of his tour. She attested to this while comparing her own music to that of Anjos.
“We both make different shades of pop music but ultimately I think we live in different spaces, which I think is rad,” she said.
She continued, furthering the idea that their differences “help highlight what makes each set unique.”
Anjos said he knows that he is one of the lucky few to break through and succeed in the music industry, and he had advice for young artists wanting to make their mark.
“Do your own thing. Write the music that you care about, forget about trends,” he said. “Do it slowly, build a foundation and that’s what I did.”
With “Ego,” he became the first artist to release a full length album on Ethereum, a distributed public blockchain network similar to Bitcoin. He noted that the network “creates probably one of the most fair systems that operates today.”
Though it’s mainly based on furthering an idea, RAC is doing something that hasn’t been seen before in the music industry. He said that releasing the album on Ethereum allowed him to exhibit a larger “concept.”
He said, “This can be done. It’s possible.”
