EthanUno
July 10th, 2023
“I don't really speak Spanish that well” Ethan laughs, and trust me, I’m just as confused as anyone else.
“Pensando en ti”, a song I was so entranced by that I DMed EthanUno about an interview before listening to any of his other music, is well… sung in Spanish. EthanUno lays his own up-pitched vocals over a punchy Jersey club beat layered under a sped-up version of Prince Royce’s Corazón Sin Cara and it’s crazy and unexpected and most definitely in Spanish. Spanish, the very thing that seems to be drawing a lot of attention to his music as of late, comes with a complex backstory for EthanUno.
Both his mother and father are immigrants, he tells me. His mother moved to the United States from Mexico when she was 9, and his father from El Salvador when he was 11. Neither of them knew any English when moving, they both just had to figure it out. Knowing this, it seems like Ethan would have been brought up in a very Hispanic-centered household. Instead, the norms of his “very white suburban neighborhood” in North County, San Diego took precedence; there were very few Hispanics at his school, and his life unfolded parallel to this reality.
Ethan’s face lit up when telling me about his relationship with Spanish implying it was a crucial part of his story and he had been waiting to be asked about it. “I was probably the only Hispanic in my class at my elementary school. That’s the kind of environment I grew up in so naturally, I am assimilating and doing what I can to be cool; to be accepted. My parents didn’t speak a ton of Spanish to me at home, but I still knew a lot of the culture. Spanish music would get played, my mom would be watching Spanish shows and I would go to Houston to visit my grandma and have to speak Spanish to her. I played soccer in a league in Chula Vista which is closer to the border and a very Mexican-American community. I didn’t quite fit in because they knew I was from North County, but I still fit in there just as much as I fit in at school. I didn’t really fit in at either place fully”.
When it came to “Pensando en ti”, Ethan tells me rather unbothered, that “the song just told” him to sing it in Spanish. Whether it was a case of divine intervention, sonic personification, or his Spanish identity clawing to manifest outwardly, he can’t pinpoint a moment where he consciously decided to start infusing his music with Spanish, it just kind of happened. “I black out every time I make a song, and if I don’t, it’s not good. I just turn off all thought processes, it’s really just a dream, it’s a fever dream. When you are making something dope you really can’t think it through, you are capturing a dream state. Every time I’m in the studio I try and go blank and let the instincts do it”.
The “instincts” though, don’t necessarily come with the prerequisite of proper Spanish. On TikTok, Ethan shows his song progress with Google Translate on the ready. He self describes his Spanish as grammatically incorrect, first-grade level, and often, slightly wrong. Despite this, “Pensando en ti”, the Spanish-infused, Jersey Club hit, is his highest streaming song with over 300,000 plays on Spotify and the most virality on TikTok. This buzz doesn’t feel like a fluke accident.
Something that stood out to me immediately about EthanUno is the sheer breadth of his musical work. His earliest SoundCloud upload is from 7 years ago, he has dozens of well-thought-out music videos and has seemingly explored every genre you could ever imagine. With work that ranges from beat-heavy trap music to Jeremy Zucker-esque indie pop, explorations in house music, and dabblings in acoustic, songwriter-style pop hits, his landing on this explosive fusion of Latin-inspired Jersey Club feels like the whirlwind of a century. I’m both perplexed and amazed at the range.
Ethan began making music at age 10, he tells me. When they asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up at his 6th-grade graduation, he proudly announced he would be a music producer. He and his brother would make music at night to avoid doing homework, quietly creating beats with headphones in so their mother wouldn’t catch on. “We found autotune on Garage Band and it was over. You could use autotune? This is the future!”.
His first fascination with music was hip hop, describing the genre as his home base. Memories tracing back to when he was only 6 or 7 place him in the backseat of his Dad’s car listening to “In the Club” by 50 Cent and being awestruck by the 808s that bumped through the sound system. “I am a very sonically driven person, sound, rhythm, and melody. I love Pharrell Williams and his production and writing. It's very strong musically and sonically, and that to me is the driving factor. I was just talking to my younger brother about how I don’t connect much to 70’s rock because the sonic information doesn’t really click with me even though I think it’s good music. Hip hop for some reason has always stuck with me”.
Conversely, Ethan describes his younger self as a “little skate kid”, laughing as he recalls his days playing Tony Hawk Underground, dreaming of being a pro skater, and thinking Green Day’s “Basket Case” was the “best song ever”. This range of interests, even early on, is very apparent in Ethan’s sonic journey. He notes a deep interest in 80’s Synth-Funk-Dance vibes. He tells me about his obsession with “Thriller”, his excitement about the “chordal information” of pluggnb production, and his interest in the grungier sound of artists like Quannic. It’s “always the production” that sticks with him; “I just always had an ear for how a song should come together”.
When I first browsed his YouTube, something I was particularly curious about was the drastic difference between the worlds he had created around different eras of his musical exploration. For more stripped-back songs like “Miss Me” where Ethan leans into his vocals and lyricism while singing a poppy melody over guitar or a light, bouncy beat, the energy of the music video is almost a complete 180 from his visuals for newer music like “Pensando en ti”.
“Miss Me” has smooth, purposeful camera work, a romantic plotline, and a general air of clean, planned-out production. “Pensando en ti” on the other hand, opens up with a hand-drawn title, flashy lighting effects, Bitmojis swirling around the screen, and a highly accessorized EthanUno singing and dancing at night outside what appears to be a closed Spanish cafe. The camera work feels sporadic and the quality is unmistakably from an iPhone. The editing is playful and cheeky, and the video feels much more spur of the moment – like Ethan was just walking on the street and decided it was the right time to shoot a video.
I ask him if this radical differentiation between visual styles was orchestrated, and he doesn’t quite tell me, which I sort of like. It is almost like he created a brand new character with the new music he was making, outlining a purposeful boundary between different works of art and stamping their moment in time clearly as something separate from the rest.
By the end of the interview, I began noting a really consistent theme in Ethan’s work ethic and outlook on life and it all centered around the notion of consistent practice. He had been creating music for over 10 years, hopped from genre to genre as his interests evolved, and told me about how he works hard to carve time out to make music every single day. “Right now I have been making at least one song a day, I have been doing this since February. On a good day I’ll go ‘yo I’m going to start making songs at 8 PM and I’ll go until 12 and it’s just whatever comes. It’s really great when I’m inspired. If I’m dry off inspiration it kind of sucks. The thing I have learned about it though is that even if you make shitty stuff when you don’t really want to, once you get back into a good headspace you hear those ideas and see them in a good light and can salvage them”.
Despite his confidence and relaxed demeanor, He tells me about days when he gets anxious and doesn’t want to make any music. It’s especially worse on days when he has created something really good the night prior and feels a lot of pressure to live up to that standard. Nonetheless, he tries again. Earlier in our conversation, he talked about his project “Old Ways” which came out in 2021. During that time he was making more chill, acoustic-driven music and would go to open mic nights to get better at performing. He would sing at bars 6 nights a week for 8 months; “It was ridiculous”.
But I’m not sure I see it that way. To me, EthanUno is all in. He knows what he wants and he has held himself accountable for it. Even in college, he explains to me how he would practice scales and chords on the piano for two hours every day for a period of time. “I don't know why I do any of these things”, he tells me, reflectively. From an outside perspective though, Ethan’s commitment is tangible. He has an air of passion surrounding him when he speaks, a disposition so warm, and an energy so eager to keep making more.
Ethan's buzz isn’t just a viral moment, a happenstance, or a lucky break. Instead, his persistence has been paying off. He’s amassing over 1,000,000 combined views on TikTok, his streaming stats are climbing, he is creating new genres by combining his interests into something new, and just a few weeks back, Frank Ocean played his song “Pensando en ti” on Homer Radio. The day after I had DM’ed him inquiring about an interview, he had posted about the radio placement on his story. I wasn’t surprised at all about this recognition. Instead, a wave of stress washed over me, as I feared he would now be too inundated by messages from all of his new fans to get back to mine. What a great problem for someone to have. When you work at something every single day, how can you not reap the rewards of it? EthanUno seems to be a perfect example of what happens when you just keep going.
He talks a lot about never wanting to be defined as “one thing” and dreams of continuing to see where his interests lead him when it comes to making music. He wants to be able to create whatever he is excited about, whenever he is excited about it, but this new traction has caused him somewhat of a dilemma. “I’m torn between wanting to keep exploring this sound, but also hearing that little kid in me that wants to be excited and explore what’s next. If people want to hear more of something I feel like it's kind of your duty as an artist to not gatekeep it. At the same time though, I want to find what that next sound is that excites me. I have so much music inside of me to share and I have so much passion for so many genres. I’m going to be doing music till the grave because there are infinite possibilities in music. It’s like exploring the galaxy – you can just keep going and going”.
While I am eager to see what might be next in the world of EthanUno, a selfish part of me is on the edge of my seat for more songs like “mas dificil sin ti”. I haven’t been truly addicted to music like this since my friend Annie Herring sent me Late Night by 454 back in 2021. Something about both “Pensando en ti” and “mas dificil sin ti” gets me on a very specific music high that I am always chasing but can never seem to find. They are songs that are catchy, dreamy, hard-hitting, and feel like they are on the edge of something really great that I can never quite place my finger on. I always seem to find myself at a loss for the proper jargon to explain why I love songs like EthanUno’s “mas dificil sin ti”, 454’s “Late Night”, or other songs that I have routinely self-diagnosed myself as being addicted to, but I think EthanUno is close to vocalizing that feeling. “Music is a conversation. If something does well it’s because it's adding something that’s not redundant to the conversation, it’s a new take. You need music that’s so wrong it’s right. My dream is to keep making things that do that. I just love that feeling when I hear something and I’m like ‘yo this was not supposed to happen, like how did no one think of this, it’s so beautiful, how did we not come up with this before?’”
Since our conversation, Ethan has already released two new songs, “Dices” and “c u girl” before I even have time to finish writing this piece. Both songs come with their own accompanying music videos picturing Ethan clad in eccentric outfit choices like an “I Heart Latinas” shirt and a white fur hat. Riddled with somewhat ironic flashing graphics, Emojis, and swerving camera angles, his comments capture a steady stream of hungry fans who I am sure can all agree that even if this amalgamation of sounds was not “supposed to happen”, they are pretty damn excited it did.
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