Jacob Mühlrad: Where Classical Music Meets the Unexpected

AMAARAE wears JACKET by OTTOLINGER, BODYSUIT by ORIENS, SHORTS by I.AM.GIA, SHOES by FANCI CLUB, GLOVES by CARHARTT

Preparation for our conversation began with endless plays, examining the intricate realms in which her music lives: genre-defying songs layered with the experimental production that Amaarae prides herself on. A producer first and foremost, the Ghanaian-American artist understands that singing is simply a welcome embellishment on her first love — sound engineering and intentional production. 

In an industry that continues to put artists in a box, Amaarae is not so easily confined. Her unmatched pen, interdisciplinary perspective, and distinctively complex production have built her into a superstar whose creativity takes continually evolving forms. Midway through a triumphant year, Amaarae sat down with us via Zoom — her dog Dior popping in and out of frame — to discuss her creative process, musical influences, astrology, and love for Janet Jackson.

[Originally published in office magazine Issue 20, Fall-Winter 2023. Order your copy here.]

The last few months have been crazy for you. How are you? 

Exhausted. Yeah, exhausted, but honestly grateful to be able to do what I do. Also, partially, I'm a little bit nervous about the record and how people are gonna respond to it. 

How is Fountain Baby different from your debut album, The Angel You Don’t Know?

It's definitely more cinematic. The approaches to production and songwriting are, I wouldn't say better, but more expansive, and also more intentional. I grew a lot as a vocalist on this album and did more with my voice, and understood the subtlety of even how to use one's voice. Ever since I wanted to make music, this is the level that I've wanted to get to as far as having an idea in my head, and knowing exactly how to execute it. I did a lot of learning this time around. 

And you executive produced this whole project? 

Yes, sir! A&R’d and executive produced. I’ve executive produced all my albums, along with two of my other execs, KZ and Cube. So this is probably the third project I’ve produced. 

That’s amazing! You released your debut EP in 2017, Passionfruit Summers, which introduced your production abilities but also your recognizable voice. What was the journey to finding your sonic style? 

It happened a lot during my first EP of understanding what I wanted to communicate, which was sensitivity and vulnerability. I could do that by using my voice in this kind of high-pitched way. But what the development has been, and what the journey has been, is learning the parameters and how to color with my voice. How to make something sound sad, versus something that sounds excited, versus something that has a lot of attitude, versus something that sounds very controlled and subdued. My first project was knowing how I wanted to use my voice, and now it's knowing exactly how to use my voice, which is where I'm at right now.

AMAARAE wears JACKET by OTTOLINGER, BODYSUIT by ORIENS, SHORTS by I.AM.GIA, SHOES by FANCI CLUB, GLOVES by CARHARTT

Now there are more eyes on you with the exposure from social media, specifically TikTok, where you saw your first platinum record, “Sad Girlz Luv Money Remix,” featuring Kali Uchis and Moliy. What’s your relationship with social media? Do you like it, or do you just have to use it for promotion? 

I like it for entertainment purposes. I love Twitter. I go on Twitter and see funny jokes and discourse on a range of topics. But as an artist, I grew up watching artists like Michael, Janet, and Britney. So many artists I knew then didn't have to be social media marketers. Their job was to be good at music, sit with people, and figure out how to make a great video for television. How do we do interviews? How do we do XYZ? That was it. It wasn't; you have to create a personality that you sell to people on socials. 

I can't tell you the number of times people have said to me, “Yeah, you should just do off-the-cuff content,” and I'm like, “Fuck, no, with all due respect.” I'm an artist, so I care to curate my art. If you're gonna come to my page, I care that the videos you see are curated in a certain way and the outfits are curated in a certain way. I think it's a battle of finding the balance between what works for me and what my boundaries are as far as something completely out of context with what I want to communicate to the world. 

TikTok has warped people's perception of what a musical artist is. There is this added pressure and influence on the artist’s career and overall musical output. How do you feel about TikTok’s presence in the industry and the ongoing expectations for artists? 

It's interesting how people view TikTok when it comes to music. To me, TikTok has shown, time and again, its ability to shed light on great music and music that previously went under the radar. “Sad Girlz Luv Money” is a great example, because I think it's a great song and I never made that record for TikTok. I just loved making a record about girls wanting money. Or Miguel's “Sure Thing” had an explosive TikTok moment. I liked that song in 2010 and thought it was the best in the world; 15 years later, people are rediscovering it. It's going crazy on the pop charts. 

I don't think anyone should set out with the intention to make a record specifically for TikTok; I don’t think those types of songs last as far as impacting culture. But that's what some artists choose to do because they're looking at things from a monetary perspective. For me, I like to make great songs, and the way I make records, people just love to use it for TikTok videos. A lot of people, when I would play “Costar” back to them, pitching the album, they’d be like, “This is such a great TikTok song,” and I was like, “This is actually a musically complex record.” For you to minimize it to, “I bet you wrote this song for TikTok,” like, nah. This is actually a great musical piece if you strip away the fact that we're talking about zodiac signs. It's a real record that we put thought and energy, and effort into. If it happens to do well on TikTok, that's great, but I'm not making records for that purpose.

AMAARAE wears JACKET by GIVENCHY, CROPPED JACKET by DANZ, TOP by OTTOLINGER, PANTS by I.AM.GIA, BELT is STYLIST’S OWN

Unfortunately, people make catchy, fun songs synonymous with TikTok. Or view it as something that should only exist on the internet.  

We’re always relegated to, “This is great for TikTok.” Like, it's okay for people to like songs. 

You touched on a few musical artists who consumed your youth. Who are some inspirations that influence your craft and approach to music? 

I love Stevie Nicks as a songwriter, instrumentalist, and vocalist. She is able to strike a real beauty between what can be edgy and unnerving but with great, soft, very thoughtful lyrics. I also like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Anthony Kiedis is a great vocalist. I think Flea is a great bassist. And for me, what I like about them is their audacity at the time, and their ability to fuse so many different concepts from jazz to pop to rock and roll to heavy metal, death metal, and funk. The bass guitar is funk. I've talked to Flea before, and you realize he has a very deep knowledge of jazz and funk. He's applied that in their music. When I think about Janet and Michael Jackson — legendary entertainers that have done this for years — those are the people I look up to and care about, their art, and how they've navigated and built their careers. 

Your inspirations speak to the genreless music that you create. When creating a track, are you someone who writes lyrics and then creates the production afterward, or vice versa? 

For me, it's always production. I am more of a producer than I am an actual singer. Singing is a means to an end, so I can be involved in producing songs and records. It's creating the production and thinking of ideas and how far we can expand our production in a song. How can I apply all of my influences and roots in different ways, or in ways I've seen some of my predecessors apply them? Because I've found a distinct way to use my voice, I can experiment in many different genres because the vocals become the through line that connects all of these different sonic worlds.

AMAARAE wears TOP, HOODIE, SHOES by DIESEL, PANTS by CLARA COLETTE MIRAMON, SUNGLASSES by OAKLEY

When you have the urge to write and pour bits of yourself on paper, what does that look like?

So many different songs have happened in different ways. I have a record on the album called “Sex, Violence, and Suicide,” and I was in my bedroom by myself, scrolling on Instagram, and I found a guitar loop on my friend's page. He was just freestyling on his guitar; I took the loop and started freestyling over it and wrote that song in five minutes versus a song like “Co-Star,” which people wouldn't guess was a really thoughtful record, in which we thought, “How can we make these lyrics fun, but also very witty?”

Then a record like “Disguise” is a cross-pollination of: what if Britney Spears did Afrobeats but then wrote great melodies, and even tapped into an artist like The Weeknd and how he would use his voice in certain ways. For me, songwriting comes in different ways, depending on the song, but what I care about every single time is writing very good lyrics. I always think if a fan is sitting and listening to the song, they should be able to pull up the lyrics on their phone while listening to the song and think to themselves, “Wow, these are really great lyrics,” or “This is a great melody, but what the fuck is she even talking about?” I pride myself on caring enough to be that detailed in the execution of the art. 

And your pen game just continues to get stronger. With a track like “Co-Star,” each lyric is punchy yet playful, especially since the song is about astrology. What compelled you to write a song about signs?

I honestly didn’t start getting into astrology until I started coming to LA for work. The baseline for every conversation seemed to be, “What’s your sign?” When I wrote “Co-Star,” I didn't know much about star signs. I was just getting into it. I was having a conversation with my engineer. He said, “This girl I used to date told me to download this app called Co-star. You connect with your friends on it, and it tells you about your relationships with them and your day in detail.” A few days down the line, we were working on a song, and it was like, this would be a fire way to approach a song — writing about star signs. I don't think anyone right now has caught on to astrology being the main conversation piece of our generation. I actually read my horoscope every day. I read my family's horoscopes and my friends, but not in a way where people make it their whole personality. 

What’s your favorite thing about being a Cancer? 

People never have anything nice to say about Cancers. I've been gaslit to the point where I don't even know what I like about myself. I do know that we’re very emotionally intelligent and intuitive, which can also, if channeled the wrong way, be very manipulative. Fortunately, I'm one of the good Cancers. So I'm just intuitive.

AMAARAE wears DRESS by OTTOLINGER, SHOES by FANCI CLUB, LEGGINGS are STYLIST’S OWN

Astrology is so prominent in America, and having friends from all different places, when you bring up astrological signs, is there culture shock? 

No, honestly. The world is so interconnected because of the internet; something that started in LA in 2020 is now a conversation in places like Ghana. Now girls in Ghana want to ask what your sign is. It's become a universal topic. It's cool that people want to know more about themselves spiritually and are hungry to connect to the universe and the people around them. 

You’ve been able to experience the rippling of culture growing up in so many different places. How has that influenced your craft, and what pieces from each place have you kept with you? 

I've been doing that my entire life. I was born in New York, then lived in Ghana for my formative years, then moved to Atlanta. I lived there for about four years, moved to Jersey, moved back to Ghana, and moved back to Atlanta for college. It's cool because I've been in all these places, in different eras, in culture, and in music. I’ve been able to take all the things that I love about all these periods and these different cultures and apply them sonically. 

I grew up in Atlanta at a time when Southern Hip-Hop was just bubbling and making its mark. What I remember most loving about Southern Hip-Hop is the drums and how dirty and aggressive the drums were. When we were making this album, I remember saying to my producers, “I want the drums to knock every single time in your face.” It was maybe a bit more subtle and softer with how we've approached it, but the influence is dirty Southern drums. 

It was the same way when I grew up in Mount Olive, New Jersey. I was at a house party, and this girl named Alexa played Britney Spears’s “Blackout" from top to bottom the whole party. That was my first experience with Britney Spears’s “Blackout.” I didn't realize it, but it was a transformative time for me regarding how I saw music, how I even viewed Britney Spears, and what she was doing as an artist because it wasn't pop. It was trance and progressive house mixed with pop, but very dirty and nothing like anyone else at the time. 

I've been in Ghana in so many different eras of development. Ghana had a SoundCloud era that was an underground African rap, but it was very cloudy and spacey rap. Most people don't know about that. That’s an element that I bring into my music. Traveling and being nomadic have allowed me to expand my reach and the way I think and create music.

Since you’ve been able to call various places home and continue to travel for work, how have you established and maintained a community? 

That's where the internet comes into play. When I started going to Lagos, the way that I connected with a lot of artists was through SoundCloud DMss and also Instagram. The main thing was an artist in Lagos would post a song on SoundCloud, and their friends would repost it, and it'd somehow land on my SoundCloud feed. Then I’d DM the artist, “Yo, I love this song; let's work together.” That was a big initial community builder for me in Africa. 

As far as the UK and America, being on Instagram and the internet, like being in the depths of the internet, where I might like a song and follow the engineer, and through the engineer, I find out he's a producer, and find out another producer that he likes, that works with another artist who has a dope sound. That's how I discovered Stacey Adams; she's an artist from Memphis, Tennessee. She’s a crazy rapper, one of my favorite rappers of all time right now. It's also how I discovered Bear1Boss, who's another Atlanta rapper. Having community and great spaces like SoundCloud is such a great place for artists to congregate, meet, and communicate. 

Also, being inquisitive, being a researcher, and going down rabbit holes. Exploring things and people you like, following them, and shouting them out. And saying, “Hey, I'm in your city; let's meet up.”

AMAARAE wears TOP, SKIRT by AREA, SHOES by FANCI CLUB

Out of your creative circle, who has supported you from the beginning and keeps supporting you? 

My supporters have been some of the most unlikely people. This rapper who's huge in Ghana; his name is Medikal. He’s a local rapper and raps in the local dialect and Pidgin, and he’s the last person you would expect to like my music. He is somebody that championed me for years. Stone Boy is another Ghanaian artist who has championed me and always told me, “I think you're gonna be the first artist to bring a Grammy back home.” Also, people behind the scenes, Lawrence Burning. He used to write for The Fader and gave me so many exclusives. I remember he let me take over The Fader’s Instagram, which was a big one. Also, Amara who's a Nigerian director. She was also doing PR for a while and helped open a lot of doors for me. Kojey Radical, also my cousin, was one of the first people in England to champion and get behind me. There have been so many people that have supported me very early on. 

Now, with your album, Fountain Baby, you’ll have even more supporters. Why that title?

What does a fountain do? It flows and flows and flows, and it never stops. I like to think of myself as a person who's a source of endless ideas, endless swag, endless everything, and endless blessings. It's a conscious and consistent flow state of abundance — an abundant child of God.

This album touches on many themes, from abundance to sexual fluidity, power, and spirituality, but it also possesses this sexiness to it. 

I had a great muse when creating this album. They brought a lot of passion into my life, insight, and nurturing to the point where I felt so confident and Godly in my expression. I was getting that affirmation and expression of love and sexiness on a regular basis. It spilled out into the music, an understanding of how I was feeling and enjoying that feeling. I wanted to inject that into the music, not really as a calling card for people to approach me, but much more so as some type of indoctrination for people to feel that within themselves and then exude that onto others. 

You represent that so beautifully and stylistically in your music videos. How do you use your music videos to further contextualize the themes and overall intention of a project? 

The music videos I've done so far are a childhood dream come true. Once again, I've mentioned Janet Jackson so many times, and I'm sure she's tired. But honestly, my focal point is Janet. The way that she can express sexiness, unity, and love, but everything is so subtle and so soft and so sexy. And I think “Co-Star” has a bit of an edge. But what I wanted to come across was not too overexposed. Everything is very tasteful and very subtle, but it still hits hard. That was just me wanting to emulate Janet Jackson. “Reckless and Sweet” is a straight-up reference. I want to communicate community, love, and the subtleness of how to love in the sexiest way possible. My music videos are an homage to Janet. 

As you continue to grow and evolve in your craft, are there moments where you think to yourself, “Should I keep going?” 

Do I even want to keep going? This is the best question anyone has ever asked me in the entire universe. Man. When you look at the history of artists, the ones that give the most of themselves rarely ever feel reciprocation. Whether it be by fans, or the music industry itself, we're at a time now where the concept of art is very murky and muddled. Where social media used to be a tool to communicate and bypass the middleman and the execs who might have stalled the process, but I think social media has now forced people to become caricatures of what they initially wanted to represent. Are we artists who go into the studio, grind it out, make great records, and come up with great visuals? Or are we social media marketers? So the short answer to your question is, it's a daily struggle to want to keep going. because it's not an easy time in music. I find myself wanting to explore other creative options so that I can take a mental break and see where music goes. I just hope and pray that we come back to what truly matters, which is the art and artists that want to create and share with the world.

Although these thoughts swirl in your mind, your career continues to flourish, showing the world what Amaarae can accomplish. What would you say to your five-year-old self? 

What would I say? What can I even say? Because I think I became what my five-year-old self wanted me to become. So maybe, “Keep believing in the shit that you think is fire because it's gonna pay off. Don't ever doubt it because it's gonna happen. A lot of people like to say shit can't happen, but not you. You're not one of them. So keep it pushing, baby.”