By Kalena Reynolds | Staff Writer
Creativity and inspiration are two things that are familiar to Baylor student musician danO powers. With one album out and another on the way, danO powers is capitalizing on his time in college by taking the time to craft himself as an artist.
Houston junior Ayinda Marshall, who goes by the artist name danO powers, started to create and record music on an app called BandLab. After the song was finished, he showed the final product to his friends in order to get feedback.
“When I first got into music, I started on BandLab, and that’s basically a little app on your phone,” Marshall said. “If you don’t have the right equipment to create music, then you use the app. I think I made a little indie song, and I showed it to my friends, and I’m not going to lie, I got judged a little bit, but it was OK. I had a lot of people who liked it.”
In 2022, Marshall reassessed his career in music and decided to go all in by uploading his songs to SoundCloud and exploring more of the creation of his music.
“I made a song with my cousin, and we made this little indie song called ‘Ghost Ride,'” Marshall said. “We were just joking around and made the song, and all of our friends loved it. They were like, ‘This is something different. This is a different wave of music.’ It was around the time Lil Yachty dropped his indie album, and that’s when I really knew I wanted to make music full time.”
Since coming to Baylor, Marshall continued his craft and began managing his time between academics and music.
“It’s been difficult trying to do school and music, but I mean, honestly, I look at it like, there’s 24 hours in a day. And I go through school, and I get all my schoolwork done, and there’ll be days sometimes where I don’t sleep till like 4 a.m. or 5 a.m.,” Marshall said. “But if you listen to the greats, they always say they never had sleep, and I mean, if they went through it without sleep, I feel like I can too.”
Currently, Marshall has an album titled “Everybody wanna be a rapper” that he released in 2023. He said the album is an experimental mix of genres that was crafted in a collaborative process with his producer Graham White, who is a Baylor graduate.
“The album that I have out now was most definitely an experiment,” Marshall said. “That’s when I just started getting a producer, and people really started taking me seriously. It’s a mixture of rap and indie. My first five songs are indie songs, and then it goes into my rap songs. I would say four or five of those were made professionally, and then the rest were all mixed by me. And I mean, I love it because it was just such an experimental time.”
White said he and Marshall first met when training for the Baylor football team. A year and a half after meeting, the pair discovered each other’s love for music and began collaborating.
“Neither of us knew that the other one did music,” White said. “We kind of got mad because, you know, things would have been different if we did, because we could have started another year and a half earlier than we did.”
When the duo began working together, White sent Marshall samples of songs, and shortly after, Marshall began to realize that both of their visions aligned perfectly.
“It started with me giving him some instrumentals, and him really liking them and realizing we could work together,” White said. “He sent me back some stuff, and I was like, ‘OK, this guy’s got some good melodies coming. You know, he’s coming up with good stuff.'”
Marshall and White then worked together to improve on the production of his sound with audio engineering.
“I was like, ‘Come over. Let’s sit down. Let’s work on songs so you can sound better, because the talent’s there; you just need some audio engineering,'” White said. “So he would come over, and we would mess around. We’ve had so much fun. I was very shocked at how well he could come up with these really catchy melodies.”
danO powers is now streaming on every major music platform, and he plans to pursue music full time after graduation. After releasing a new single, “CHOZEN¡” on March 16, he is in the process of releasing a second album featuring his softer side — more R&B and underground rap influences.
