Daniel Fonseca is a rising artist hailing from a small town in São Paulo, Brazil. The sophomore Business major is balancing his musical career with the life of being a student, where he said his studies are intended to help him become familiar with the business side of the industry. The 19-year-old first touched a guitar when he was 13 and in just six years, has amassed over 50k followers on Instagram. Fonseca said he doesn’t like to be labeled, but his work is inspired by Radiohead with a blend of alternative rock, rap elements and many other styles of music.
Q: How did you first get into music?
A: I grew up in a very small town, so it was very hard to have any interaction with music early on. My grandpa bought a guitar for my sister, but she didn’t really want to play it. So, I started fiddling around and found that I actually like it and quickly it was something I resonated with.
Q: How did you go from fiddling around with a guitar to making music your career?
A: I bounced around with a few teachers but found I learn better by myself. Early on, the first thing that was a big accomplishment for me was getting into School of Rock. I toured the U.S., and then as I was growing, I developed a friendship with Kiko Loureiro. He’s a famous guitarist. When I was 16, I released my first EP with some pretty well-known people from Brazil. I was gaining a lot of traction so now I released a full length album.
Q: How did it feel releasing that first album at such a young age?
A: It was a really good feeling because around the time I was making the album, I saw shifts in my spiritual life and seeing things that I wasn’t seeing before. I felt like this album wasn’t just musical, it was a way for me to communicate whatever was happening. I kind of remade the whole album because I finished it, but I wasn’t really content. So I said, “Scratch it. Let’s throw everything in the garbage. Let me do it again.” So knowing that I have the capacity to reinvent myself, to communicate a message that’s beyond me, that’s all those feelings culminating into something bigger for me.
Q: You had a quick turnaround from first touching a guitar when you were 13 and now to this point where you’ve produced a full length album. How did you get to this point of that turnaround?
A: It was a lot of luck and a lot of hard work. There was also a spiritual element to it because around the time I started picking up the guitar, I started seeing the number 33 always and everywhere. That immediately drew my attention to it because I felt like I was doing something important. So I started growing really fast because I used to play 10 to 15 hours a day. I used to skip a lot of school, and that’s not very good, but I just played a lot and poured all my emotion and heart into it. It was all pretty fast, so there was this big factor of something that was meant to be.
Q: Can you tell us about your rise to fame and how music supported you through those transitions in your life?
A: When I was growing up, it was very hard because where I lived [Alphaville], people were kind of the same. They all had a specific way of thinking, and since my family was of that way of thinking, very conservative and very Catholic, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, but music made me think differently. When I got exposed to art, I noticed that was not the only way of thinking, and as I developed my writing and playing, I thought to myself, “I can think whatever I want, and nobody can dictate that.” Music made me try to understand the world better and have different perspectives.
Q: Growing up in a small town where music wasn’t well accepted with that mindset you were just describing, what helped you through those hard times you were facing early in your career?
A: Music was the only thing I had. It’s just like love; it’s hard to explain, but there’s no straying away from it. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t deny who I am.
Q: From growing up in Brazil to coming to school in Malibu, how has music kept you grounded in such a tumultuous time of your life?
A: Music made me understand why I’m here and gave me a reason. It made me vent my negative energy into something that’s productive. A lot of people have this built up, negative energy, and they don’t have anywhere to put it, so they just use it as an excuse to treat people poorly. I found music as a way to vent this frustration. Music is always my saving grace.
Q: Music can be a bridge across cultures, languages around the world and you have seen that firsthand. What has music taught you in your time around the world?
A: Nowadays when we think of it, we know there’s different places, but when you’re a little kid, you don’t really think of that. You just think that everyone thinks the same way. So music made me expand my intellectual horizons in a way of understanding different cultures and the things that have meanings and their symbolisms in their lives.
Q: What purpose does music serve in your life?
A: Music is all about feelings and when you can really communicate your feelings. It opens a portal inside of your head, where you can express your feelings without actually doing it because in society, it’s kind of hard for you to express certain things that are not very easy to talk about. So to me, music was always a means of expressing. When I was young, it was harder to express myself with words, so that was a way for me to find it.
Q: Has music ever helped you through your own personal rough patches?
A: 100%. The times where I was at my lowest, music brought me up. Music always elevated me spiritually and got me closer to my understanding of what God means in my life.
Q: Can you elaborate on how music has a spiritual connection in your life?
A: Everything creative doesn’t always come from you, it normally comes from something above. So when we create, we’re tapping into a different dimension. I don’t believe it’s like something just physical and from this plane of understanding, because a lot of times we’re just living and something creative pops into our head, and it’s not really normal or something that you would expect. So to me, I’ve always felt that whenever I get a good idea to write a song, it’s always when I’m in a deep emotional state, and when I’m feeling like I’m in that place in between the know.
Q: What made you want to stick with the guitar instead of expanding beyond that?
A: I started with just a guitar, because that’s how I grew in popularity really quick, and I got tons of achievements really quick on that. Then at some moment, I started not being content just playing the guitar and knew this was not enough for me. I started writing songs and singing, and that became the bigger thing. Music is more now. It’s different the way I look at it because now, when somebody asks me and I say that I’m a guitarist, it doesn’t make me feel good, because to me, I want to do something that’s more important with more words and meanings.
Q: What kind of messages are you trying to communicate in your songwriting?
A: The main idea is finding a truth inside of yourself, like trying to find God inside of yourself and not following the words of anyone and getting to know who you are as a person. There’s a lot of messages about not conforming to any standards or anything that anyone says, just finding your true self away from my groups, and away from anything that can stray your ability to critically think.
Q: What has music given to you throughout your life?
A: It has completely shifted my way of being. I used to be very introverted, then with music, if anyone meets me as a person, now they’re gonna see I’m very outgoing, always smiling, even though I’m going through a hard time. It didn’t used to be like that. Music made me become a happier person. I found it as a way of making me feel better and growing as a human being, as who I am and what I can offer to the world in terms of kindness and being a genuine person. When you’re exposing yourself to art and raw emotion, you shift the way you look at the world, you end up growing as a human being.
Q: How do you see music in your everyday life?
A: It’s literally all around, 24/7. That’s basically all I think about, which can be hard with different elements of school and social life, but I really connect with people who listen to music like me. A lot of my friends on campus have a very deep connection with it too. When you allow yourself to immerse in a topic like that, it’s hard not to think of it always.
Q: Has music given you a new perspective on life?
A: Of course, especially the way I deal with bad things in my life. It’s easy to feel alone when you don’t really have a big passion or something that you’re really interested in and pouring your heart out into. The daily struggles, they can seem bigger because you don’t have something that you’re actively working on. Having this one goal that you focus on can help you so much from a happiness standpoint, because then you’re actively making something out of your life.
Q: Looking forward as you navigate through the rest of your life, what do you want out of music?
A: I want it to be 100% of my life. I want to live a life where I don’t really need to worry about anything, just like making art. I want to just help people who may be going through whatever I was going through because music saved me a lot of times in my life. I feel like I need to give a lot of things back to God and the universe and society as a general. The driving force is always a philosophical standpoint of what I want to give to the world, so when I die, I know that I had a life that’s worth living.
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