Biography
Broward-born producer HUSH FORTE has rolled with the punches, finding a new home, a new vision, and a new voice – his own.
It’s early morning in Manhattan, and HUSH FORTE is just getting home.
The sun is out, the traffic stuck, the faint din of sirens rising and falling as they echo through the grid. It’s a rough time for a video interview, and at any rate, HUSH is hardly used to them. “I was up late last night,” he explains, a touch apologetic. “Well, I hadn’t slept, and then I kind of hit that wave where it’s like, ‘I might as well just not go to sleep’.” He’s bright and invigorated throughout, enough to make me feel a little lethargic by comparison. “It’s been a hectic day.”
HUSH has been keeping busier than most. In the midst of the all-encompassing pandemic, the Broward-born producer broke from his neighbourhood, moved to New York City, discovered his voice, and recorded his album, "LOOK CLOSELY". He’s hardly had a sound foundation, but that feels like a powerful catalyst: within this COVID upheaval, mired in the complexity that change provokes, each one of us has been struck by some sort of introspection or unease. Seizing upon creative courage and rallying against pandemic stagnation, HUSH has reached for the mantle of his idols. In doing so, he’s crafted a portrait of an artist on the cusp of self-actualization.
Mere months from the release of his transformative sophomore effort, he takes it back to the beginning, charting a patient arc from bedroom beats to the new singer-songwriter spotlight. He elaborates on his formative artistic spark — an inquiry he calls, “the age old question” — by throwing back to childhood memories. ”I started when I was five,” he says. “My dad was really adamant about me playing the piano. I don’t even have a family of musicians, but he was just like, ‘You’re going to thank me for this one day’.”
That gratitude often doesn’t kick in until adulthood, and finding his passion took a little initiative on HUSH’s part. “I wasn’t really feeling it. It was too classical, boring. The music didn’t touch my soul at all, so I was doing it very reluctantly.” It wasn’t until he fell into the contemporary that his passions truly coalesced, YouTube tutorials bridging the gap between the classical and the classics. “That’s what really ignited my interest in music, because someone can actually play something that gives me the same euphoric feeling of my favorite records.”
Those formal lessons, uninteresting though they were, instilled a deeper understanding in HUSH — one that endures in his oxymoronic mantle. “I’m glad you like ,” he responds, letting out a quiet laugh. “I’m glad I like it, because I came up with that when I was like 14. You know how you come up with a lot of shit when you’re 14? The fact that it stuck is like, okay, I was onto some shit. I might’ve been ahead of my time.” Sharp, amusing, striking in cadence and euphony: all things we’d love to be able to say of our teenage Hotmail addresses. “The fact that I don’t cringe at it, that feels like success to me.”
For the better part of ten years, HUSH has been honing his craft, riding out “the obsession.” In the beginning, that meant, “… making Rick Ross type beats and Waka Flocka type beats,” on his mother’s laptop, but more recently HUSH has seen action furnishing Van Buren Records’ dense posse cut, “Nevermind.”
It’s the questions that go unanswered – fearful hypotheticals, mournful counterfactuals – that endure, assuaged only by trust and belief. Those are fickle friends, but with "LOOK CLOSELY", HUSH turns risk to a rich reward.
It seems that, so long as HUSH looks closely, he’ll find his way home – wherever it is that ends up being.
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
