To young songwriters, writing music can seem like an act of sorcery. How do you get across an idea or emotion? How do you make something another person will actually want to listen to? Are you writing the music for you or for them, the imagined audience? Is the song too simple? Or have you overstuffed it in an attempt to show off — or worse yet, to cover up perceived inadequacy? All of that goes along with the usual insecurities: Do I suck? Can I sing? Did I take enough lessons?
There are many ways to bypass the anxiety and get straight to the strange and emotionally compromising art of songwriting. The best advice I ever received on the subject came from a college professor who dropped a few pearls of wisdom before he gave me a D in music theory. (I redid the class in summer school and got a B, leading my mother to ask if I'd even paid attention during "all those goddamn guitar lessons.")
"Why are you overthinking this?" my professor asked me after I shared some of my issues with composing. "You feel something? Great. Start writing. That's it. Just start, and then don't think about anything other than finishing it. If you want to write, fucking write."
Phineas Choukas didn't need any tough love to figure that out. The Upper Valley native, producer and singer-songwriter, who records under the moniker phin, started building tracks and making beats when he was in seventh grade. By the time he got to Middlebury College, he was working with Vermont expat singer-songwriter Hans Williams and also producing the 2020 Cape Elizabeth EP by Grammy-nominated Strafford native Noah Kahan.
Somewhere along the way, Choukas wondered if he could go from just beat-making to writing his own songs.
"During the pandemic, I sort of ran out of people for my beats," he told me with a laugh by phone from his mother's house in Canton, Ga., where he moved after graduating from Middlebury last February. "So I figured I'd just slap some Auto-Tune on my voice and rap over some of the beats and see what happened."
That shift coincided with a change in Choukas' tastes. He'd been obsessed with electronic dance music since grade school, when his older brother played him a Skrillex track.
"I'd grown up listening to Radiohead and indie music but shifted hard to EDM after that," he said. "Recently I started going back to [indie] music and learning to play guitar, so I started writing in that indie folk sort of vibe."
The result is the debut single from phin as a recording artist, "you would never fall in love with me," which drops this Friday, January 19, on all streaming services. A vibrant indie-pop jam, the song combines Choukas' love of electronic music with a head-nod-inducing beat, introspective lyrics and tender vocals.
"It sort of sounds like this 'woe is me' kind of tune, but it's actually about self-love and acceptance, disguised as an unrequited love song," Choukas said. "I was really proud to be able to do that, because it's this triumphant thing about epiphanies and learning to love yourself."
The song also represents Choukas' move from rap-adjacent pop music (which he called "Honestly, just not that great") to more melodically inclined indie folk and pop. His new sound stemmed from the realization that he couldn't control what anyone thought of his music.
"This track was made just for me, and I think that's really the way forward," he said. "It's great if people like my music, truly, but it's important to make music for yourself and to make music you, you know, actually like."
That's a lesson he learned from watching his childhood friend Williams create music and later from working with Kahan. The pandemic presented Choukas with an unexpected opportunity: Both he and Kahan were stuck at home in southern Vermont when the singer-songwriter (now Massachusetts-based) asked him about producing an EP.
"It was really simple," Choukas recalled. "Noah had some songs, so he hit me up and we recorded the whole thing in the basement in a week."
Watching Kahan work on the Cape Elizabeth sessions inspired Choukas to work out his own songwriting process.
"Noah and Hans both influenced me, for sure," Choukas said. "Hans has this ability to just start freestyling over chords, and the songs seem to pour out of him. And Noah is fascinating; I've never worked with someone so talented and driven. He'll show up with some chords or melodies, then start furiously typing on his phone or scribbling down stuff on paper — it's just so cool to see how everyone writes differently."
With his first track as an artist under his belt, Choukas feels inspired and ready for the next phase. He has more singles planned for this year and will soon move from Georgia to New Orleans, joining Williams there.
"I haven't been in a physical music scene in a long time," Choukas said. "And New Orleans just has so much musical talent to work with and such a great vibe. I honestly can't wait."
It's a fresh start for the brand-new solo artist. He hopes to continue combining his talents as a producer and his love of EDM with his newfound songwriting chops.
"I'm hoping to pull all of my roots together into something really cool," he said.