Last week, WSN sat down with Steinhardt Music Business senior Dalton Corr to talk about his experience working with NYU student-run label Village Records and his upcoming single “I Think Of You.” Corr blends ‘60s era pop with electronic soundscapes to create catchy, retro-futuristic tracks. He took some time to discuss his songwriting process and how he learned to collaborate with others while making his new song and music video.

Washington Square News: How would you describe your sound?

Dalton Corr: I feel like the sound is really transitioning. This single I’m about to put out kind of represents connecting my old self, who I was in New Hope, Pa., to who I am now, four years after moving to the city and having gained all of this experience. So my sound now is kind of a mixture of all my musical interests from back in New Hope, like ‘60s rock — The Beatles, The Byrds  and then combining it with more electronic produced sounds.

WSN: How have you evolved as a musician from your last EP, After The Show, to this one?

DC: The last EP was very Beatles influenced, it’s pretty basic and actually, everything on that album was recorded through one microphone — there were no electronic sounds whatsoever. And this is something else that has changed. I was obsessed with being an auteur, meaning I did everything. I recorded every instrument and I produced every sound and I was directing the cover art for that. For some reason I was obsessed with doing everything from beginning to end. And this project has been flipped on its head and it’s the exact opposite. I have a label of 30 people coming into the recording sessions, I have people in the studio, I have people engineering the song and I have a producer working on it. So now there’s 30 people that are all involved in this song and in that sense that’s also a big change for me — having to relinquish some of my control over it and hand over this precious thing to a bunch of other people.

WSN: Could you speak a little bit about your songwriting process?

DC: Well, it always starts — you know, even though I’m trying to incorporate more electronic sounds — it always starts with really sitting down at a piano or on a guitar and just working on some chords and then I’ll hum something or sometimes a melody will come to me and I’ll want to transcribe it, but it always starts with the music really. If the lyrics ever do come first then it’s like a phrase or a couple of words that I’ll write down in a notebook somewhere and then I’ll write the song and then I’ll kind of connect them that way. So in that sense, I’m not really sure which one comes first, but I always see the word as a function of the song and vice-versa. I see the words as another instrument and I want to articulate them in certain ways that sound like any other instrument that sounds good. And so then I record a demo version of that song, sitting down performing it at the piano and singing, and then the process starts of making the actual recording and making it digitized, I guess. I usually start with a simple bed of chords, maybe baseline, and then I build it up from there. That’s where the sound art/electronic stuff comes in.

WSN: When was the first time you really felt confident about a song you created?

DC: I guess on my first EP, “After The Show,” I had a song called Radio Café on it that was recorded in a matter of two hours in my basement at home in Pennsylvania, and it just kind of felt like a throwaway track to me. But a couple days before I was going to release that EP, I played it for a few friends and my friend Saleh listened to Radio Café, which I had as the last track, and he’s like, ‘put that first, that’s the best track on the album,’ and I took his advice and I did. And sure enough because of his advice, a couple of blogs started writing about it and picked it up and I checked the song in a couple of days and it had, like, 50,000 plays or something — which totally blew my mind because it was some low-quality recording I did in my parents’ basement and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to include it on the album. When I saw that people online were talking about it and people were listening to it, that’s the first time I really realized that people are going to listen to [my music], potentially, if I put it out online. It was exciting but also kind of scary to think that the artistic decisions I’m going to make might actually matter, somehow. It makes the process less inwardly turned and after I heard more people were listening to this song, I realized writing music isn’t just about expressing what I want to hear but expressing what other people would like to hear, too.

WSN: How would you describe the concept behind the new track, “I Think of You”?

DC: If I could summarise it in a few words, I would say it’s a reluctant love song. I think my label describes it as “an accidental case of falling in love,” and that’s a nice way of putting it. What I like to do lyrically is give tiny details and let the audience connect the dots and make their own story from there. I think that makes it more personal at the end of the day. People are going to be able to relate to it more if you leave room for them to put their own lives into the song.

Dalton Corr’s single “I Think of You” comes out April 14 with the accompanying music video dropping April 28.

Email Sara Nuta at [email protected].