Meet Nami Dae | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Nami Dae and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Nami, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking.
I feel like risks are necessary sometimes in order to move to the next step of your journey/career. Especially if they’re well thought out and won’t leave you too unstable if you do them. I’ve taken many risks in my life and my career. One of the biggest risks I’ve ever taken was moving to LA a year ago. I had no family on the west coast and no real jobs lined up. However, I felt that I had outgrown all the other places I had lived and that I wanted to give LA a try. I won’t say that it was an easy start, but I do not regret my decision at all. After I got over the hump of readjusting to a new place things started to get better. I’ve gotten more work out here as a musician than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. My career also got more fun to do. I was able to make more friends and learn more about my passions and myself. Being essentially on my own helped me to grow and discover more of who I wanted to become as I got older. I don’t think I ever would have made half of the progress I’ve made in this one year if I never took the leap and moved here.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My journey as a musician wasn’t always easy but it felt very natural. Growing up in a family of musicians, and being thrown into situations were I have to deliver, whether I was ready or not, prepared me to take on a lot of challenges and grow very fast. Between doing musicals, writing camps, and being in multiple singing groups, I’ve built up my ability to perform under pressure. The greatest challenge I have these days is the amount of pressure that I put on myself, because my standards are very high. However I am learning to stop trying to achieve perfection all the time and just enjoy the process of creating, which has been much more fun and fulfilling. And since I’ve done music my whole life, it is something that has grown with me and I feel good when I get better.

I take great pride in the music and art that I create. I have spent years consuming different styles and genres, so something that sets me apart as an artist is my ability to blend them together in my music. Like putting classical vocals over an alt hip hop beat like in my song “Insomniac” or a swing jazz delivery over an indie rock song. One of the songs I’m most proud of is my latest single “Like I Do”. I’m from New Jersey and always grew up dancing to jersey club at parties. After years of studying different types of music, I finally figured out how combine R&B and jersey club in a way that makes me feel good as both a singer and a dancer.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
First we would get breakfast at Bea Bea’s in Burbank, and got to Los Feliz Flea Market. After that we’d head over to lil Tokyo and look around and et some ramen from Kouraku and get something sweet from Somi Somi.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I want to shout out my college professor Brian “Raydar” Ellis. I took a hip hop ensemble with him for 2 years and he became an important mentor for me during my time at Berklee College of Music. The class had to be able to understand and explain the cultural significance of the artist we wanted to focus on each semester before we did anything else. And then we did a catalogue study to pick songs that would be beneficial and fun for the whole ensemble to play, which would only increase your knowledge and understanding of the artist you were studying.

Raydar showed a love for the craft of music itself that was very inspiring to me. He also was one of the first teachers that made me focus on more than just singing. I was able to learn more about the mental and physical skills that come with rapping. I would study the rhyme-schemes and figurative language in the songs, and I would also practice my breath control to be able to properly perform the verses each week. Between doing that and writing some of my own verses for certain songs, I came out as a better all-around artist.

Website: https://namidae.com

Instagram: @nami.dae

Image Credits
Matt Mojoub

Marco Stills