Dryden Brown was always destined for creative pursuits. His dad, a musician, always seemed to have him plucking and poking on the guitar or piano—depending on the day. Ultimately, Brown gravitated towards the piano, where he would sit and pore over music for hours on end. Back then, it was a way to pass the time when he was bored. But it soon became a full-on obsession.

In 2017, Brown officially kicked off his professional career as an artist with his trap and bass project Lemay. His second-ever release, “Stunt” with sumthin sumthin, would go on to accumulate millions of streams. In 2018 he released “Mumble” and “Digital Disaster,” both songs that would go on to become festival mainstays after being played out by the likes of Tiësto, ILLENIUM, and Ekali to name a few. And he was featured on RL Grime‘s Sable Valley Summer Vol. 1 compilation in August of 2020 with his single “Organized Confusion.” What Brown was able to accomplish with his Lemay alias is no small feat. But in January, he called the project quits.

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“Two years before I decided to end the Lemay project I started to feel not very happy with where I was at with it” explains Brown. He says he had backed himself into a corner musically and was now making music in the interest of appeasing others rather than for the unbridled love of it. “A lot of those songs that I wrote for Lemay came from a very dark place. Whenever I would get booked to go play shows, I would have to re-listen to all these songs and make these sets… I was kind of putting myself through like mental hell just to push the project forward,” he says.

Despite some serious highs, Brown felt he was at an impasse both in music and in his life. Something had to change. He says he remembers thinking to himself, “There’s really no bigger way to create a buzz than to start something new. So I was like, fuck it.”

Energized by his decision, Brown began the process of deciding what was next. “When thinking about the direction I wanted to take with my new project, I started asking myself ‘What would [I] listen to?'” It only made sense to name his project just that: DRYDEN.

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In September he formally uncovered DRYDEN to the world. A week after that he released “SAY IT RIGHT,” a bootleg of Nelly Furtado’s song of the same name on SoundCloud, as the first taste of what to expect from his new alias. Brown went on the release three more bootlegs in the weeks that followed with “D.A.N.C.E.,” “HIDEAWAY,” and “GOT YOUR MONEY,” joining “SAY IT RIGHT” to make up his MINUTES PAST VOL. 1 bootleg pack.

MINUTES PAST VOL. 1 is refreshing. Each track features a groove galore. The sound is eons from the trap anthems harkening back to his Lemay alias; and that’s the point. The bass line in each of the bootlegs is remarkably nuanced. And he actually stumbled upon that sound unintentionally, dubbing it a “complete accident.”

“I was making a future bass song and I wanted to make a bass layer underneath, and I accidentally threw the bass layer onto like this guitar contact preset… And then ever since then, I’ve just been kind of tinkering with it to try to get it to a spot where I really liked it and still sounded like gritty enough… but also have that swing and that vibe that I was going for to get people to move and actually dance.”
-DRYDEN

While he may have stumbled upon his new sound by happy accident, DRYDEN was very purposeful about where he sourced inspiration for his new sound. “I came back to a lot of the stuff I grew up on. A lot of older ’80s stuff like Michael Jackson and Earth, Wind, and Fire. I started to fall in love with music again,” he says. In particular, Brown attributes the instrumentals and the infamous bass lines in Michael Jackson songs as massive influences on him. “They make you feel like you’re walking down a dark New York alley at night time with the fog coming up or something. They make you feel like a badass,” he says.

The music of the ’80s isn’t his only source of inspiration, though. He takes a lot of inspiration in his sound design from modern electronic titans Justice, as well as producer Ian Kirkpatrick who’s worked alongside a bevy of music royalty like Dua Lipa, The Chainsmokers, Selena Gomez, and more.

Friends are something that Brown referenced as an essential part to what made DRYDEN possible. “I want this to be music that people can just like listen to walking down the road or driving down PCH or taking a long vacation trip with your friends across the country,” he says. Over his years in music, he’s met a ton of people that have helped his new creative direction, among them are members of the San Diego Waterboys. “All of them have definitely helped me a ton. Frost [Dancing Astronaut Artist to Watch in 2022 FrostTop] has been like my right hand man,” he says. And it’s not just the creative side that he leans on his friends for help with. He points to Flosstradamus and RL Grime specifically as friends that have helped him navigate the murky waters of the music industry when he’s needed guidance. “To be able to have them a phone call away, getting their insights and hearing their story, helps a ton,” he admits.

As for what’s next, DRYDEN plans on letting this bootleg pack sit for a little so fans can digest it. But there’s plenty more music in the pipeline. As the “Vol. 1” indicates, there’s a second bootleg pack on the way. He says that’s coming potentially a few months down the road, and that he’s targeting spring or summer for the first original releases. “I wanna be very selective and picky with the music that I put out and I really want it to mean something and be very true to me,” he says.

Similar to his approach with his release schedule, he’s also taking his time before playing out his music in a live setting. “My goal is to not play any shows until I get to a point where I can headline a smaller tour similar to what Julian [ISOxo] just did,” Brown says. The difference in his approach with DRYDEN is more than just in the music; it’s in the mindset as well.

Part of that change in mindset revolves around branding, which he recognizes as a weakness in the past. “I think the biggest thing I learned from Lemay was that I didn’t really care about having a brand or making any sort of visual assets for anything,” he recalls. Now, instead of just using assets labels provide him and posting them to his socials, he’s now going out of his way to blaze that creative trail for himself.

Brown says he recognizes that “music is only a small portion of being an artist.” He elaborates on this critical sense of dynamism inherent in any artistry: “If you’re not building a world that people can live in and be excited about then you’re not really building an artist. You’re just building songs. I want to build my own world and tell my own story.” In this sonic world his MINUTES PAST VOL. 1 bootleg pack serves as the big bang. And Brown is hellbent on telling his story through DRYDEN until it’s a world teeming with life.

Tags: bootleg, bootleg pack, DRYDEN, interview, Lemay, minutes past, minutes past vol. 1

Categories: Features, Music