Rising Stars: Meet Conan Gentil

Today we’d like to introduce you to Conan Gentil.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My story is a roller coaster ride with a lot of highs and some serious lows. I was really blessed to be born and raised on the island of Maui in Hawaii. At about eight years old, I started competing in little surf contests and fell in love with the sport. A little while later, I started playing music in the ukulele class at my middle school, which got me really into ukulele playing, but I didn’t totally catch the music bug until I was in tenth grade. During that year, my friend Trent Steele (who’s now a talented producer) and I got obsessed with the 21 Savage album “Savage Mode” and just couldn’t stop playing and talking about it. He showed me an iPhone app that lets you make beats, and then we just started making beats on our phones all the time.

From then on, I started writing songs to the instrumentals we were making, going to summer camps for production and songwriting, and meeting all sorts of people that liked making music too. But I didn’t really feel like I knew who I was as an artist or what I liked singing about yet. Then in 2019, during my first year in college at UCLA, my whole life changed. My sister passed away during the spring break of my freshman year. Following that were the hardest and worst months of my life. And about one year after that, my now ex-girlfriend and I decided to break up so we could each get to know ourselves outside of the relationship we had. The combination of those two events happening back-to-back was heartbreaking and traumatic, to say the least. But after that storm of events had passed, I felt fearless. I felt like, well, I have nothing to lose and all I know is that I love music, surfing, and my family and that I want to make my sister proud (who was a singer).

That’s when I wrote a song called “Lockness” which is the first song I ever released, about two weeks ago. It took a few crazy events to get me where I am but I really feel like everything happens for a reason and that we can come back from even our lowest points. Without a doubt, music has helped me immensely to get through some traumatic events as well as to just have fun on a daily basis. Which is why I love it so much. Today, I’m spending time in Maui where I’m studying at UCLA (where I normally live) online, working on my junior year as an undergrad there. Being back home, I’ve been making tons of music, surfing, and working on myself as an artist and my team so that every release in the next few months just keeps getting bigger and better.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I struggle a lot with overthinking and perfectionism. To give you an example, I started working on the song “Lockness” in April of 2019 and just released it in February of 2021. A lot of that time was me actually just improving the song and establishing a platform to drop it from but much of that was just me thinking I wasn’t good enough. Also, because I grew up surfing, most of my close friends are surfers, and it was only in college that I met friends that I really started making music with consistently. Another factor that I feel made me hesitant to pursue my dreams as an artist are that Maui doesn’t really have a big youthful music scene, so it often felt like I was making music for just myself and my friends, which still felt special, but it also felt like there’s no way that more people would really want to hear pop songs coming out of Maui.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I grew up watching surf movies every day before and after school, even on the way up and down from school in my dad’s car. I fell in love with the way the music made the surfing feel and how they complimented each other. When I first started making music I wanted to make songs that would make surf clips feel super raw and just amazing for a lack of a better word. But because my main instrument is the ukulele, I developed my own style of surf-rock or surf-pop that’s often ukulele driven or at least has ukulele in it. But without a doubt, my vocal influence comes mostly from pop-rap, making my tracks a blend of pop and surf, which is basically me. Also, I’m a control freak which is part of why I learned how to produce before even writing songs because in rap, especially, good beats are essential to a good song, and I wasn’t able to find people who were making the kinds of beats I wanted or was hearing in my head so I decided to learn composition/production. Being a singer-songwriter that also produces is just about the best thing that this control freak surfer could ever ask for.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I’ve always been a really loud and bubbly person. I get really excited about things and make sure to let everyone know because I like when people are excited about things with me! I am also very interested in being a well-rounded person too, never focusing too much on one aspect of myself or my interests, meaning that I have a lot of hobbies like surfing, playing pickleball, cooking, and baking. I also have a really addictive personality which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. From about sixth grade until ninth grade, I was obsessed with Call of Duty (a video game) and these days, thank god, I’m mostly just addicted to making beats, songs, and certainly TikTok. Doing all these things definitely made me feel burnt out though because I’ve never known how to not give my entire being into something I’m doing. Like, I even made it to the cross country state championship because I didn’t want to lose to kids. Crazy times.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conangentil/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nangentil
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDwDxcGLU4o
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/conanmusic
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@conangentil?lang=en

Image Credits:
Marc Chambers, Daniel Frees, Siena Curtis, Tasha Jahrmarkt