Today we’d like to introduce you to David Birdsall
Hi David, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I first started writing and recording rap music when I was 16 years old after discovering an online hip-hop community in the early 2000’s. Through the connections I made all those years ago, I was invited to participate in an online song tournament in 2022 which pitted artists head to head against each other with different topics provided each week and only the winner advancing into the next round. After the tournament was over, a lot of us who had known each other from the forum days continued chatting online and started collaborating on music together. It was this small community of talented artists/internet acquaintances working together and catching up which eventually led to the birth of the White Collar Rhymes community as we know it today. Once we all started making music together regularly, the topic naturally came up about how the sound quality between artists is noticeably different since we’re all geographically dispersed using different recording equipment. Someone suggested we meet up in person so we can all be on the same page quality-wise and I knew instantly that this could be an awesome opportunity to capture not only the story of 10 relative strangers meeting in person for the first time to create an album, but also to showcase their individual stories of sacrifice highlighting what they’ve given up in their personal lives in order to pursue their passion for music. So I basically used my savings to rent a mansion where we converted several rooms into makeshift recording studios, reached out to a buddy from college who now working as a film producer in LA, and hired a camera crew to follow us all around for a week and a half. This is how my pet project of ‘The Last Mixtape’ came to be.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Pretty much everything that could have gone wrong, did. We had several people who were supposed to join us for the filming back out at the last minute. You’ll see this in the documentary if you watch it, but one of the main characters left in the middle of the night without any warning 3 days before we were supposed to wrap. Then once I got all the footage we lost several months going through 2 different editors before finally landing on a third one who was luckily the perfect fit for this project. Even though our editor was eventually able to sort it out, he initially told me we had about 15 minutes of usable footage from 10 full days of filming. For a lot of us it was our first time doing anything like this and through a connection we ended up getting a good deal on some professional, yet extremely technical, high-end cameras. The editor pointed out that with the model of camera we were using there’s a separate button to turn on the attached shotgun mic, so the only audio we picked up was recorded through the pinhole input on the side of the camera which mostly just caught a lot of heavy breathing. Luckily with his experience, our editor was able to clean up some of the raw audio and salvage a full 60 minutes out of what he said could have been a full 10-part series if the technical difficulties hadn’t gotten in our way.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Music is my way of exploring my emotions and relating to the world around me. I pride myself on making the type of music that I would want to listen to myself, with everything coming from a place of authenticity with a lot of thought put behind it. I can make a party anthem, a breakup song, or a jokey track about inane pop culture things – these are all different parts of my personality which I enjoy writing about depending on which mood I’m in. I’ve never been the type of artist that can make music just to make music, I have to be inspired by something. With over 20 years of writing under my belt, I’ve learned how to harness strong feelings such as sadness, joy, arrogance, or anger and funnel them into songs in what I think is a pretty relatable way. When we were recording ‘The Last Mixtape’ together in Texas, I have never experienced such an electric atmosphere of creativity. The White Collar Rhymes crew is made up of extremely diverse individuals from different backgrounds and artistic styles, so the fact I was able to bring my sad boy/party energy to the experiment and have others organically build off of it in real time was a really awesome experience.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
This project could not have been successful without my old friend from college Hardy Awadjie who was bought in on the project as soon as I told him about the idea and was integral on getting the crew and the filming logistics in place when it came time to shoot. The crew – Orisel Bejaran, Varun Das, Mitchell Dolphin, Gabe Gomez, and Skyler Thomas for working long hours following us around with cameras and genuinely wanting this project to be successful. The White Collar Rhymes crew – Pair-A-Dyce, Cody Nash, Jaykub, Nikey Joe, Ness Lee, Almighty VA, Passive the Rapper, and DJ Zone for being some of the most talented artists I have the privilege of calling my friends. Justin Cullimore of Lone Star Chefs for cooking us amazing food for the duration of our stay. And lastly, Jon Meyer for cleaning up and editing together a masterpiece.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://wcr.world/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dbirdisdope/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dbirdisdope/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteCollarRhymes
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/dbirdisdope
