Porter Robinson

Nurture is the act of tending something frail into blossom; of patiently caring for something so it may grow. No wonder acclaimed producer/songwriter Porter Robinson turned to this word for the title of his second album. A joyous, brave explosion of electronic ideas, introspection and melody, Nurture – named Album of the Year by The FADER – took six long years of care amid crisis to flower into existence. Nursing it to life meant overcoming existential panic, creative drought, depression and family illness. “It really was an extensive period of just total emotional struggle,” says the North Carolina-based artist, who recounts “literally crying in the studio and in therapy sessions, thinking my life was over.” Nurture is made up of songs he found on the other side: catchy, adventurous, uplifting diaries of his own path back to happiness, each one imploring listeners suffering their own periods of hardship to hold on, to battle through. “I want this music to be helpful to those people,” says the 31-year-old, who evolved his musical style on Nurture, rewiring his epic electro-pop fantasias of old into something intimate, raw and for the first time, driven by the producer’s own vocals. It’s a remarkable record that was met with a remarkable reception, debuting at number 1 on Billboard’s Top Dance/Electronic Albums Chart and iTunes’ Electronic Album Chart. But almost as fascinating as its corkscrewing sound is the journey it took Porter Robinson to arrive at it.

Robinson may now be a household name, with over 1bn streams to his name, 1m subscribers on YouTube and the highest-grossing electronic music tour of 2021 to his name – but it wasn’t always this way for the star. He first emerged in 2010, exploding onto the dance scene with frenetic, fist-pumping productions meant for electro-house basement raves. Four years later came his debut album, Worlds, which established him as one of the most restlessly creative new names in electronic pop – a visionary crafter of “gorgeous textures, contemplative storytelling and remarkably sharp melodies,” to quote the New York Times. Robinson’s success didn’t stop there: in 2016, he released the RIAA Gold-certified single single ‘Shelter’ with Madeon, backed by an anime video created in collaboration with A-1 Pictures and Crunchyroll that’s since amassed over 74m views. A Shelter Live Tour spanning 43 dates and five continents followed before, in October 2017, a new chapter of Robinson’s career began: ‘Eon Break’, his first single under the alias Virtual Self, signaled a growing interest in interdisciplinary art and Y2K trance. The project was another hit, earning the producer his first ever Grammy nomination.

All this acclaim, on paper, should have left Robinson feeling confident about his next move. Behind the scenes, though, he was floundering. The songwriter fell into a state of creative paralysis that soon mutated into depression and despair. “I was so incredibly hard on myself and had such impossible expectations,” he recalls. “After the first album, I felt respected – like I had proved myself. I thought I should be able to write the next thing easily. But starting over is like staring into the void. You have nothing again. A blank slate.” He started writing but nothing stuck. For each idea he began that went nowhere, he became more convinced he was “a failure and a fraud. I got more and more desperate to prove to myself that I could still do it, thrashing around trying to force something that worked. There was no aspect of play or exploration, which is a terrible way to make music.” The problem, he thinks, “was all tied up in my ego. I was identifying way too much with the work I was doing.” The more he struggled to write, the more his sense of self-worth grew unstable. Robinson began to unravel. “I stopped going to the movies. I stopped listening to new music. I cut a lot of things off. The only thing I had in my life was my music, so when I felt like I was failing… well, it was devastating.”

There were other challenges. In November 2016, his younger brother, Mark, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer known as Burkitt lymphoma. “He was so, so sick. The chemotherapy they use to treat it is brutal because that particular form of cancer is so aggressive,” he recalls. Mark has since gone into remission – good news that Porter recently marked by launching a charity raising money for sufferers of the illness in Malawi – but one memory from that time stands out for Robinson. “I remember driving him back to the hospital one day and listening to the song ‘33 God’ by Bon Iver, my favorite artist of all time. We were crying – but dancing too, to the drums as they came crashing in. It was just this transcendent moment with music that we got to share,” he says. It reminded him that “music has the potential to be so transformative and meaningful that way. Sometimes you can be listening to music and have something just move you in the most unbelievably blissful way. Suddenly, the sky seems so blue and the world feels so full of possibility. You’re excited about everything and you want to do everything all at once.”

It was moments like this that helped him “claw myself out of that dark spot” as he describes it. Eventually he started writing music in the hope of soundtracking moments like that in the lives of others. “Once I realized it’s not about me, once I balanced my life more and just started writing music that I wanted to hear without so much analysis and pressure, something lifted. It became so much easier to move forward. I picked a direction based on what my soul and my gut were telling me and just moved towards it with purpose.”

The direction he picked was a unique one. “I wanted it to feel more intimate and close-up, less epic. I didn’t want it to feel so vast and fantastical and imaginary. I wanted it to feel mindful and real-life. That manifested itself in a lot of different ways in my routine. I tried to record instruments up close and softly, without big wide spaces in the mix. I also realized quickly it had to be me singing and writing the lyrics. Part of the reason it took so long was that I needed to develop that skill set – I didn’t know how to sing at all really,” he laughs.

On Nurture, that decision paid off in spectacular ways. Tracks like the glitchy, gorgeous ‘Unfold’ and ‘Something Comforting’ – a slow dance full of starry wonder – found Robinson layering ghostly melodies and evocative poetry over sheets of synthy ambience, toying with the timbre of his voice using computer software. “A big part of this album is me pitching my voice up in a way that feels alien, robotic, feminine and childlike. I wanted a little bit of a cute quality, for it to be light – because lyrically the album is so heavy. I’d begin with very sweet sounding instrumentals, then I’d sing over it these lyrics made of almost pure pain,” he says. “Producing the album, I reached for sounds that had the aesthetic of real drum kits, real pianos. A lot of my old music was about escapism, whereas this is about mindfulness, presence and realness...  until the augmented voice comes in,” he says. “I really like how that injects some weirdness. It’s this little lightning strike of the digital, the synthetic, the artificial.”

That dynamic came thrillingly to life on songs like ‘Look At The Sky’, on which devastatingly human lyrics took on inhuman hues: “I'm still here, I'll be alive next year, I can make something good,” Robinson sang atop J-pop-inspired keys. Which makes sense: the 27-year-old wrote that particular track and portions of the rest of the album while in Japan. “We stayed in an Airbnb and I would take the train to the studio each day. That was really cool. But a lot of the rest of Nurture was written just at home, surrounded by my dog and a million cups of half-drunk coffee.”

Its creation wasn’t easy, but Nurture was worth the wait. The album not only broke the top 10 Billboard Albums Chart and top 5 on iTunes – it also was met with critical acclaim, winning rave reviews from NME, Billboard and Pitchfork, who heralded it as the work of an artist “[emerging] from the fog with the realization that struggle gives life its color.” The record propelled its maker into erupting 17,000-cap venues on a sold-out tour, and sparked music festivals both virtual and IRL: on April 24th, 2021 the artist hosted his very own digital festival, Secret Sky II, streamed over 1m times across YouTube, Twitch, Oculus, Android TV, PlayStation consoles and Facebook (the event was the number one trending topic in America that day, and number eight worldwide) ahead of a physical Second Sky festival, which took place in Oakland, California on September 18-19. The event sold 40,000 tickets in under an hour – a sign of the fervor around Robinson and his unique, balming brand of electronic pop. The demand for his groundbreaking stage show isn’t limited to America, however: every date on his upcoming Nurture Live Asia Tour sold out in the blink of an eye.

Soon, Robinson will begin bringing the Nurture era of his career to a close, with a final US performance of Nurture Live with a full band on the Main Stage at Coachella 2023. A recent single, ‘Everything Goes On’,  in collaboration with Riot Games and League of Legends, hinted at a future containing sparkling pop melodies, tender acoustic guitar and even greater success: with over 40m streams to date, the song charted in eighteen countries on iTunes and was the number three overall trending video on YouTube on release. Whatever it is Robinson does next, expect him to pursue a similar ambition to the one that made this record such a rousing success. “I’ve figured out that with my music, my number one goal is to be understood, to make people feel the same things that I feel,” explains the songwriter. Prepare to feel plenty of emotion when you listen to Nurture – an album that makes the sky seem blue, the world full of possibility. Porter Robinson is still blossoming.