First thing you notice on one of Da Ko Ko Ko LaAa’s music pages is his artist pic, and you wonder, is that just a placeholder or does he really want his picture to look like Gollum in a turtleneck sweater-jacket?
Looking down through the titles of some of the 50 songs he has released this year, you have to think, “Yeah. I believe he does.”
“Daughter of Darkness, Just Like Her MOTHER.” “Crows, They Scare Me.” “My Yellow, Very DIRTY TRACTOR.” “I’m Strange But Alive.” “Sitting Besides Me, When We Stole That Car.” Some of the others have names that shouldn’t be printed for a general audience, like “SHE IS, SHE IS a RAGING, RAGING _ _ _ _.”
But listen to the song he is currently promoting, “I’m Over the Moon for You,” and you will hear a great rock love song with fun vocals, guitar and drum work.
“I started working with another writer, in Florida, and I asked him if he wanted to contribute, collaborate a little bit, and he sent me that piece,” he said. The lyrics are a straight-up love song. Once he had them, he called in a drummer and a bass player, “just basically two hard working guys that actually have 9-to-5 jobs.”
“Their talent is just incredible, how they put the sound together.”
Then, he said, “I went to town with it and made it.”
“People have about a billion love songs in their Spotify account. I wanted to make it interesting with beats, sound and stuff like that. I wanted to separate myself and the music from anything out there.”
Da Ko, born in Ukraine, is the son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother. He moved to the United States with his family when he was 8. Up until three years ago, when he took up producing music, he was in the paper end of mortgages. About 20 years ago, he started promoting bands.
“Basically, I buy, sell tickets. I got into that because of a friend.”
Then, he said, “I went to get a little bit of education on engineering, and from that point on, it was like, I am good with putting things together. That’s like some kind of gift or something.”
He discovered Auto-Tune and other software programs, and he started putting things together musically. As he says, he “went to town” on it. He creates through his production. Many artists do a lot of their work on the production end, but with Da Ko, it is his artistic method, and he is up front about it.
It started with Auto-Tune. He likens his gently raspy voice to that of Metallica’s lead singer, James Hetfield. But, he said, “My voice isn’t too top notch.”
But with Auto-Tune, “Holy buckets! It changes your vocals, along with other software that you can build into the system. You can be a female if you want to be.”
Vocally, he wants to be a lot of people, including a woman on two of the tracks he has released so far.
“A lot of people, they’re going to be like, ‘Well, Auto-Tune is for fake.’ Not necessarily,” he said. “It depends on what you’re doing or what you’re trying to do.”
What Da Ko wants to do, and does, is play his software like the instruments that, in his hands, they are. His programs are also his voice, which he changes up to suit the song and the music.
When he says he “went to town,” this is what he means: “In the last, I would say, almost three years, I created roughly about a hundred different tracks. There’s actually 500 total instruments that I’ve made, and a hundred different songs.”
He plans on putting out another hundred songs over the next two years, all as singles. He has his own studio in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, and that’s where he creates his music.
All kinds of music.
“I’m Over the Moon for You” is rock. “What Do You Want Now” is beautifully acoustic. “Come On” is pop, “Neighbor’s Wife Is Ugly, MAYBE That’s Why She Likes Me,” is Appalachian country, and “Runaway Train” is some kind, maybe more than one, of alt.
“SHE IS, SHE IS, a RAGING, RAGING _ _ _ _,” by the way, is a kind of swinging, easy pop with an island vibe. The song that immediately precedes it, “SHE IS a Raging _ _ _ _,” is also pop with an even more pronounced island beat, but the lyrics take a different angle on the proposition of the title, and it has totally different instrumentation and a different voice.
Oh, yeah. Gollum. The answer to the question is yes, artist as dressed-up Gollum is a deliberate choice.
“There is a reason to that,” he said. “I want people to be like, ‘What they hell is this stuff?’ So they will want to see what it is.”
So, “What the hell is this stuff?” What it is, is some great listening.
Fun listening.
Hear for yourself. Connect to Da Ko Ko Ko LaAa on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
“I’m Over the Moon for You,” YouTube
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