Aaron Frazer

Hip-hop has always inspired Aaron Frazer’s artistry. Born in 1991 in Baltimore, he started playing drums at the age of nine and remembers listening to Will Smith’s Big Willie Style in 1997 and Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” in 1998. “That blew my mind,” he says of the latter. “I learned to play the drums studying a lot of classic rock, but my pocket developed the way it did because of rap-drumming along to Jay-Z’s ‘Reasonable Doubt’ and Nas’ ‘Illmatic’ until I knew every break on that record.” Additionally, The Roots’ ‘Tipping Point’ was particularly significant with its electrifying live instrumentation. “It was a world that I didn’t know existed. You could fuse those two elements of a live band and hip hop together?” He tinkered with creating beats on FL Studio as a teenager and pivoted into sound engineering at Indiana University. It was here that he met the musicians who would become his band Durand Jones & The Indications and discovered his signature falsetto.

In 2021, Frazer released Introducing…, his debut solo album with Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach. Now, says Frazer, “I’m excited to keep breaking some of the expectations around what exactly I’m supposed to be, artistically and musically.” Into The Blue is a continuation of that spirit of fearless, fun experimentation. “The distance between genres is arbitrary,” he says. “And the distance between Carole King and Westside Gunn for example, is a lot shorter than people realize.”

Though Into the Blue is born out of heartbreak, Frazer hopes it leaves listeners with a sense of optimism. “You know, you can still laugh on a day when you’re grieving,” he says. He’s excited to bring the music to life on stage, even when performing such intimate material will be both a visceral and vulnerable experience. “Oh my God, I’m gonna cry so much on stage,” he laughs. But he knows that this is all part of the process and his evolution. “There’s no peaks without valleys,” he says, but Into The Blue sees Aaron Frazer at new heights.