Exclusive Interview with Dead Horse Beats

Patrick Wade a.k.a Dead Horse Beats is a Montreal-based producer who grew up in Halifax.
He is known for his blend of skewed layers of eclectic samples and live instrumentation.

Flanelle : So tell us a little bit about how it all started.

Patrick : I was making rap music in my dorm room when I went to Ryerson University in Toronto. I thought I was really good at rapping and not quite as adept at making beats at the time (I was pretty bad at both), and the only reason I was really rapping was so that I could do it at a party trick to impress girls. As things go, I eventually settled down with a girl in Toronto and therefore no longer needed rap to meet other ones, so I just kept making beats. A story about a girl ; isn’t that always the way ?

If you have to describe your sound to someone who has never head your music before, what would you tell them ?

Sad music you can dance to.

Can you give an idea of what your creative process looks like ? Where do you get your inspiration and what mood were you on creating your last music ?

I have a lot of stuff sitting around my studio (bedroom) I try to work on music for a few hours every day, but the process is always different. Sometimes I’ll be fooling around with a synthesizer and find a tone I really like and try to work out something off of that. Sometimes I’ll come up with a melodic line on my guitar, sometimes I’ll start with drums, sometimes I’ll start with a sample. It’s always different. The last song I did was something of a psych rock/ trip hop track that I wrote after seeing a long lost love letter that I had never read, and not wanting to read it.

If you could collaborate with any artist, who would it be ?

I want to get in with Yeezy so that I can start selling $ 300 plain white t-shirts and other lucrative garbage. To be honest though, probably Lil’ B.

What does music mean to you, and if it wasn’t for music, what would you do ?

I guess, without music life would suck. I used to make documentary films for the National Parks. That’s what I was doing when I made Campfire Sessions I would love to still be doing that if I wasn’t making music. I suppose, to be something of a cliche, it would have to be something creative.

Tell me more about the aesthetics and layers of your sound.

I use a lot of delay to cover up the fact that I can’t play piano very well.

What is the next step ? Your next goal ?

I have an album that’s going to come out in the late fall/early winter, I want to finish that up and then hopefully find a label to distribute and promote it and then I need to get out to Romania to play for all dem.

Any last words ?

You know that song “ Take You There ” by Sean Kingston ? He offers these choices to the girl who is the subject of the song, the target of his silver tongued lyricism ; you can either go to the beautiful tropics and sip mixed drinks with me, or I can take you to the slums where you can witness strangers being killed (killers get hung ?). The former is the easy choice here, but the illusion of free will is a thin veneer. Sean Kingston spends the entirety of the song extolling the virtues of the slums, effectively choosing for his muse, that they will in fact travel to the slums.
Is she to be impressed ? Did she ever have any say in the matter? What of her poor family ?