Conner Youngblood parks his truck next to a Two Rivers Greenway trailhead in a Donelson shopping center, exits with water bottle in hand and eases into tour guide mode. “It’s just the nearest trail to my house,” he says, “and it’s where I come to come look at some birds, walk around, film some videos and sit by the river and read sometimes.”
He points out a crude fire ring under a nearby bridge where he captured some of the scenes that he used in the video for his new song “Blue Gatorade.” Further down the path, he recognizes another spot where he filmed: “There’s some scenes from Nashville at this park that look like just leaves flying by extremely quickly. That was in these trees.”
Youngblood’s new album, Cascades Cascading Cascadingly, is tenuously connected to Nashville by the visuals he shot here and the home recording he did on his own nearby.
That type of quietly self-sufficient creativity is his style.
A lot of artists move to Nashville to be part of the music community and land opportunities in the business. But Youngblood was drawn here shortly after he finished college by the environment, outdoors especially.
“I love Nashville, and not because of the music scene, which I feel like is blasphemous,” he says. “There’s something about the city, the people. It’s really pretty. I love the nature. I love getting out of the city, around the areas to go hiking, camping.”
Most of his friends here are fellow outdoorsy types, not musicians. And he’s done very little industry networking or trying to make his way into the music scene. During his dozen years in Nashville, he estimates that he’s only done a few local shows: “I’ve probably played more in Poland, than Nashville.”
Traveling widely is very much also Youngblood’s thing. This year alone, he’s made visits to Denmark and Japan and completed a three-month music residency in Argentina. If he hadn’t already completed his album before those trips, he could’ve taken his solitary music-making along with him.
‘It helped me create my own unique style‘
The only time that Youngblood welcomed someone else into his recording process was at the very beginning. He was a Dallas high schooler when his parents bought him studio time at a spot where the likes of Vanilla Ice, the Jonas Brothers and Selena Gomez had once worked. The deal came with an engineer who was willing to try whatever outlandish sonic ideas Youngblood brought to the table without fretting over whether they were right or wrong. He says, “It helped me create my own unique style, I feel like, based on never knowing what was the proper way of recording music.”
Even after he relocated to Nashville, Youngblood kept flying back to record with that guy in Dallas. Then, he’d put out the music in his own impromptu way, posting newly finished tracks to SoundCloud and burning CDs — mixtapes, really — of whatever songs he felt like including on any given day. Though he had a manager and booking agent, in many ways, he was operating outside the industry.
Occasionally, music supervisors would hear his immersive soundscapes and hit him up about putting them into ads, movies and TV series. But it wasn’t like he was seeking out those placements.
“I’m just sitting there clicking refresh every day and hoping that someone wants to pay me to just let me (make my music),” he says, grinning slightly. “It’s not the most efficient or effective way of going about it, but when it hits, it hits.”
Venturing beyond his first language
After Youngblood finally pulled together 13 tracks for his first official album, Cheyenne, in 2018, he felt like he’d said all he had to say — until he ventured beyond the English language.
He’d begun learning Danish years back while he was driving from tour date to tour date, alone in the car with hours to fill. Then, he signed up for daily lessons with an online tutor, eventually advancing to the point that he does his own Danish instruction at a summer camp.
Youngblood took up Russian, Spanish and Japanese, too, and once he could speak them conversationally, his virtual tutors challenged him to write lyrics in those languages. “And that opened up getting really excited about writing songs again from different lyrical perspectives,” he says, “and having all these new vocab banks and melodies and words and phrasing, all this stuff to use.”
Youngblood prefers an elliptical ebb and flow to a concise, linear pop song. For his new album, made entirely on his own, he expanded his sonic palette too. Since he was engineering for himself in his improvised home studio — which not only occupied the bedroom, but spilled into the bathroom too — he might start by looping a beat for hours on end, so that he could build a world atop it.
“I would try to record an array of instruments, instrumentation, 10 different ones … a harp, a clarinet, a keyboard … there was a lot of electric guitar this go around … this old ‘60s, ‘70s organ with those drum machines on it … I used a lot of stand-up bass … and who knows what it sounds like after being processed?”
He pulls up a demo on his phone to demonstrate how much the feel of a song changed as he tinkered with it, and he can be heard singing softly over a dinky, brittle bossa nova beat from his vintage organ. “That one made the album,” he explains, “not that version of it, but that’s ‘Conner wants to write a song in Danish’ phase and get have to excuse to use that beat.” The song’s called “Misundelig,” and the final version swells into an undulating dreampop collage.
While working on the album one day, he had a tennis match on in the background, and when he saw one of the players pause to take a drink, he transformed the moment into the central metaphor of “Blue Gatorade.” “That one I wrote not word for word, but scene for word, to the tennis match I was watching,” he says of the song, “and it gave me a spark of writing this love song.”
Plenty of artists rely on collaborators to help them turn inner feelings into outward expression. But there’s a whole different impulse behind Youngblood’s comparatively cloistered writing and recording: He’s radically attuned to the inspiration surrounding him, and it often leads to exhilarating freethinking.