Donavon Makes Heartbreak Sound Timeless In "These Days" [PREMIERE]

The Brooklyn artist is gearing up to release his debut EP “Badmind” this spring.

Rising artist, Donavon just released the music video for his single, "These Days."

The Brooklyn singer, producer, and instrumentalist fuses gospel, funk, soul, R&B, jazz, and hip-hop for a refreshing yet timeless sound rooted in the traditions of black music and the tinctures of today's wave.

The video shows the singer playing a keyboard in the middle of a desolate train station, with a tube extending from his mouth to the instrument as his music fills his body and spirit.

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"I made these days entirely for myself so I could feel better about the way a relationship ended and so I could stop feeling sorry for myself," Donavon told Okayplayer. "I thought it was way too soft to show anyone else let alone put out. It started off as a random freestyle over a beat I’d made with my friend and co-producer Rob James at a video shoot for something else for the project... I had no intention of even putting it on the EP let alone dropping it first... I hope people resonate with it and see themselves and their own experiences with heartbreak."

Donavon also says his creation of “These Days” was inspired by decades of black music canon, but specifically by Donny Hathaway's 1973 classic "Someday We'll All Be Free." 

"This song was made in the only way I know how to make music right now which is by digging into the gold mine of decades of black music, looking for the moments that resonate to me as timeless and interpolating them and adding a voice to them in a way I feel like people could resonate within 2019. I learned this approach from studying the way Dilla, Questlove, D’Angelo made music in the early 2000's. “These Days” combined Stevie Wonder's vocoder style on the hook, D’Angelo's production style in the beat and some Southern rap flows in the verses. I always want to make things that you can't exactly put your finger on the genre of but you hear you just know is some black ass shit." 

Watch "These Days" below.