DeBolt Builds “SINCE 92” From Memory, Production and Reinvention
DeBolt opens up about learning production from an early age, becoming a songwriter through experience, using AI-assisted vocals as a creative tool, and building the nostalgic world behind SINCE 92.
GHR: What inspired you to start writing music?
DEBOLT: Music has been part of my life for a long time, but writing songs came later.
I started producing when I was around ten or eleven years old, working in FL Studio and learning everything on my own. Production was always where I felt most natural. I was never the person who wanted formal training or somebody telling me the “correct” way to create. I learned by experimenting, making mistakes, listening closely, and figuring out how to turn something I heard in my head into something real.
For years, I considered myself much more of a producer and composer than a songwriter. I could build records, create atmosphere, structure songs and understand what emotion a beat needed, but I wasn’t really sitting down and writing complete lyrics.
That changed fairly recently.
Once I started writing, I realized that a lot of the things I had already learned through production applied to lyrics too. Rhythm matters. Space matters. Repetition matters. Sometimes one simple line delivered correctly can hit harder than sixteen complicated bars.
Writing also gave me another way to document real experiences. Relationships, being a father, working long hours, success, failure, frustration, faith, ambition, losing people, rebuilding yourself — all of that started finding its way into the music.
I think that’s why my writing developed so quickly. I wasn’t starting from zero creatively. I already had years of experience communicating emotion without words. I was just finally adding words to it.
GHR: Can you tell us more about your experience incorporating AI tools into your music?
DEBOLT: AI became useful to me primarily as a vocal production tool, not as a replacement for the creative process.
That distinction is important to me.
I’ve always considered myself a producer/composer first. I’m not traditionally a singer, so one of the biggest limitations I had was being able to fully realize songs that I could hear in my head. I could produce the instrumental, arrange the record and understand exactly how the vocal needed to feel, but performing that vocal traditionally wasn’t necessarily my strength.
AI-assisted vocal technology gave me another instrument.
I use it to help bring the vocal performance closer to the sound, tone and delivery I’m imagining. The writing, concepts, production decisions, arrangement, cadence, revisions and overall creative direction are still mine.
And I’m extremely hands-on with it.
I don’t just generate something and accept whatever comes back. I’ll change lyrics because one syllable isn’t sitting correctly against the drums. I’ll rewrite a line because the vowel sound doesn’t carry enough emotion. I’ll change the cadence, vocal tone, pauses, harmonies, background vocals or production around the vocal until everything feels connected.
To me, that’s no different philosophically from producers embracing samplers, Auto-Tune, synthesizers, drum machines or digital recording when those technologies first appeared.
Technology doesn’t automatically create taste.
The person using the tool still has to know what they’re trying to say.
AI has allowed me to remove one of the technical barriers between what I imagine and what I can actually release. I think the interesting part moving forward is going to be seeing artists figure out how to use these tools without losing their identity.
For me, the goal is the opposite of sounding generic. I want somebody to hear a record and immediately recognize the production choices, cadence, atmosphere and attitude as DeBolt.
GHR: How is your process of songwriting set around?
DEBOLT: My songwriting process is probably different from somebody who approaches music as a traditional vocalist or rapper because I normally think like a producer first.
A lot of songs begin with sound before they begin with words.
I might hear a chord progression, sample texture, 808 pattern, vocal sound or strange little moment inside a beat and immediately know what kind of emotion belongs there. Sometimes I’ll have a topic before I produce anything, but a lot of the time the production tells me what the song wants to become.
Then I start searching for the strongest central idea.
I’m big on hooks and replay value. I don’t believe every line has to be overly complicated to be powerful. If five words make somebody immediately understand the feeling of the entire record, I would rather build around those five words than bury the idea under unnecessary writing.
Once I find the hook, I usually build outward.
The verses explain different sides of the same emotion or situation without over-explaining it. I’m constantly cutting things. A song might start much longer and then I’ll remove anything that doesn’t deserve to survive.
Cadence is extremely important to me too. I’ll change technically “better” wording if a simpler phrase feels better against the beat. Sometimes the pause after a word is part of the lyric.
My production and writing also happen together rather than separately. I might change the instrumental because of a lyric, then change the lyric because of something I did to the instrumental.
It’s almost like the record keeps negotiating with itself until everything belongs together.
And I’m not afraid to completely abandon an idea if I’ve already heard myself do it before. I’ve made a lot of music, so lately one of my biggest goals has been making sure every new project gives me a reason to explore somewhere I haven’t already gone.
GHR: What motivates you to create music and bring awareness to different situations through your songs?
DEBOLT: The biggest motivation is making somebody feel something real.
I don’t want every song to be a lecture and I don’t think music has to carry a serious message every time. Sometimes a record should just be fun. Sometimes it should make you drive faster, laugh, turn it up, remember somebody, or forget about everything for three minutes.
But when I do write about something serious, I want it to come from an actual human situation instead of sounding like I picked a “meaningful topic” because it would look good.
Some of my songs deal with relationships. Some deal with personal growth, work, fatherhood, faith or pressure. Others look outward at things happening around us.
What interests me most is usually the uncomfortable part of a situation.
Why do people stay somewhere they know is destroying them?
Why do we repeat the same behavior and expect a different life?
Why do people confuse what they’re accustomed to with what they deserve?
What happens when children absorb everything adults put around them?
Those are the kinds of questions that can become songs.
I think music has a unique ability to put somebody inside another perspective without forcing them to agree with you. You can tell somebody something directly and they might immediately become defensive. Put the same truth inside a song they connect with and suddenly they’re thinking about it differently.
That’s powerful.
At the same time, I never want to become predictable. I can make something thoughtful and philosophical and then make something completely reckless and entertaining the next day.
Both can be real.
The common denominator is that I want the listener to feel like something actually happened during the record.
GHR: Could you share some insights into your next projects?
DEBOLT: The project I’m focused on right now is called SINCE 92.
That record came from wanting to deliberately reach backward while still moving forward.
I was born in 1992, and I wanted to build something that captured the atmosphere and character of music from that period without simply making a retro imitation.
There was something about records from the 1990s that I think is difficult to reproduce when everything becomes too clean. You could hear texture. Samples felt imperfect. Vocals could sit farther back in the mix. Records had warmth, haze, space and personality.
So with SINCE 92, I started experimenting with pitched-down soul and R&B textures, washed-out reverb, old-record atmosphere, floating harmonies, warmer analog-style production and that late-night feeling older records could create.
But underneath that, the drums and low end are still modern.
That contrast is really the point.
I don’t want to recreate 1996.
I want to imagine what that musical DNA sounds like after surviving another thirty years.
That project has also changed the direction I want to take moving forward. I’ve made a lot of different styles of music in a relatively short period of time, and SINCE 92 helped me find another lane that feels natural to me: nostalgic without being dated, soulful without becoming overly sentimental, dark and atmospheric without losing energy.
Songs like “Fluent With It,” “Turn It Up,” “Loco,” and “Some Nights Stay” all approach that world differently.
“Fluent With It” is especially important to me because it naturally connects the title and the identity of the project. There’s a “since ’92” reference in the record, and it became one of the songs that helped everything click conceptually.
I also chose artwork connected to my childhood because I wanted the project to feel like more than just a production aesthetic. The title is personal. It represents where I came from while the music represents where I’m going.
And I think that idea is going to continue influencing whatever I make next.
I’m less interested now in chasing whatever sound is currently popular and more interested in pulling different eras, emotions and production techniques together until they become something identifiable as mine.
GHR: How would you describe yourself as an artist?
DEBOLT: I describe myself as a producer and composer who became an artist through the process of creating records. Production is still the foundation of everything I do. I use AI-assisted vocals as part of that production process because it allows me to perform ideas I otherwise couldn’t execute in the same way, but I don’t consider the technology the identity of the music. The identity comes from the writing, production, decisions, experiences and taste behind it. At the end of the day, I’m interested in making records that people remember, regardless of what tools were used to get there.
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