We were lucky to catch up with Alexis Donn recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alexis , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
When I decided I wanted to pursue music I was twenty years old and going into my junior year at the University of Notre Dame. I had been very shy about my singing and writing, doing both pretty privately except for a handful of talent show performances in high school that took me a lot of nerve to do. I knew no one in the industry, knew no one else that was pursuing music, didn’t know how to play an instrument, and didn’t have any technical training or knowledge of music theory. I had just secretly known it’s what I’d always wanted to do and I’d gathered just about enough courage to give it some sort of try.
I knew the most essential skills I needed were knowing how to write songs and record myself. How I learned to write songs and vocal produce was through a lot of trying. I couldn’t play instruments, so I’d write songs acapella, just recording voice memos of the songs and doing my best to stay in key. Then I’d try to find producers to show the songs to – I’d bring the acapella toplines to kids at school who were into music, a friend of my family’s who was doing music in the Seattle scene, and just try to get any kind of demo together to post on Soundcloud and post about it on instagram.
My senior year, a friend of mine introduced me to a student who was a DJ at school (JP Warner), and I sang a verse on one of his EDM tracks. After the song came out, I was DM’d by other DJs on Instagram asking me to feature on their songs. I didn’t know that featuring on an EDM song most often entails writing the entire lyrics and melody (called the topline) by yourself and recording your own vocals, but I quickly realized that. In hindsight, it was the greatest bootcamp I could’ve ever had. I bought a $40 mic and recorded myself singing in a free audio software called Audacity. The vocals I recorded didn’t sound great but I was proud to have been able to record something at all.
About a year later I asked for a $200 Focusrite recording kit for my birthday from my parents (because $200 out of college was a really big investment for me) and learned to record myself in GarageBand, using some vocal presets to make my vocal sound a bit cleaner and brighter. I just wrote and recorded for different DJ tracks probably 3-4 times a week (on top of a full time job) for a year and a half, just DM’ing DJs for tracks and accepting every project I was approached with. By the end of it, I’d only had three songs to show for it on my Spotify, but I’d grown a lot. I didn’t know how to vocal engineer (make the vocals sound all pretty and polished), so my friend JP cut me a deal and would run my vocals through his vocal chain and send them back to me before I sent them off to DJs.
I sort of fell backwards into meeting my EDM topline manager, Craig, after that. I’d reached out to a local Northwest artist management team, who ended up inviting me to Craig’s daughter’s birthday party in LA. My husband and I flew down and spent $1200 on travel for that trip, which was an insane amount of money to us still at the time. At the party, I met Craig and discussed a couple projects he’d sent me to work on through the artist management team. Craig managed a bunch of topliners, including his daughter, and DJs. A few weeks after we got back home to Seattle, Craig told me that a song I’d worked on for him was picked up by Monstercat, which is a huge EDM label, and they wanted to feature the song as the home screen song of the video game Rocket League for 2020. I was beyond thrilled and I realize now at the time I didn’t even understand just what a big deal that was.
I began working directly with Craig and in the next three months we’d also secured placements with Excision, BEAUZ, and Tiesto. My music resume felt like it’d gone from 0 to 100 overnight. The Tiesto track actually fell through because it was set to release in March 2020 and by the time things had revived in the music scene the track was considered outdated stylistically. But it was a major confidence boost that I could’ve gone from having no presence in a genre, to having worked with its shining star.
Later in 2020, JP sent me his vocal chain and showed me how to engineer vocals myself in Logic Pro X so I could save his time (I was getting a lot of projects after those big placements) and become more skilled at it myself. This began an entire new chapter – and after years of continuing to write, record, and vocal engineer – I’ve become a very proficient artist and vocal producer. The only answer I really have to give for learning these skills is just stubborn trying.
Knowing what I know now, being less scared of trying new skills and spending more time on YouTube could’ve definitely sped up my learning process – especially for vocal producing. I just didn’t have the confidence in my own intelligence and thought everything was too convoluted for me to learn. These insecurities are things I still have to chip away at every day because as I’ve begun my own pop project, I’m finding that there is so much more to learn. You have to be open to learning how online merch shops work, how music marketing works, how social media works, how branding works, how live show production is done – there is so much ground to cover and while you don’t have to do it perfectly, you do have to try.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Hello! I’m Alexis Donn and I’m a songwriter and vocal producer. Bios make me anxious because I definitely have a history of performance anxiety and a nagging worry of whether I’ve done enough, but here we go. I have two artists projects – my namesake one is a pop project I describe as “glittery multiverse pop” that makes you wonder about the meaning of life, yourself and the universe & I also run an EDM vocalist project called Donna Tella. I have over 20+ million streams as a songwriter and artist, and you may have heard my music on shows such as All American, Love Island, Love Is Blind, Teen Mom, and video games such as Rocket League and Roblox. I really, really love to write and sing and I’m so grateful it’s led me here. I’m also grateful to have bullet points at all on my music resume. I’m also in the process of publicly launching my own music publishing company (an extension of my current work) called Donn Publishing, with an intention of getting more involved in TV/Film music. My career goal has changed from being a mega pop star to understanding what music and creative activities truly support my most authentic self, and I work every day to try to honor that journey.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
At the end of 2021, my first solo EP “it all makes sense in the end” had just dropped with a second music video, and at the same time I started suffering from a mysterious disease essentially overnight that involved constant body restriction (feeling suffocated), intense fatigue, new allergic responses, and sheer panic. After 8 months of seeing every specialist Vanderbilt had to offer with no answer, an alternative functional doctor in Nashville found that it was a combination of longcovid, parasites and mold illness. Healing physically from this entire ordeal was tumultuous – the process was slow and my body could only tolerate 3 foods for a year and a half. Not to mention, my nervous system is still in the last stages of recovering from the trauma of feeling trapped in your own body. But a couple months into healing, I actually flew out to be on a popular-singing-show-I-cannot-legally-name-due-to-an-NDA-but-you-can-probably-do-the-math, and although wasn’t selected – was so proud of my resilience. I hadn’t told anyone how sick I was, and just did my best to go through with it despite the illness, feeling of suffocation, and food restrictions because I was so invested in the opportunity. This was a moment where I had really pushed myself farther than I thought possible and showed myself I was more capable than I’d thought.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I think on a very real level what has been historically driving my creative journey has been a need to feel seen and heard. However, I am in the process of pivoting that goal to be a journey of self-discovery. I’m hoping to continue to pull back the layers on myself through this creative journey and get closer and closer to my most authentic self and life – whatever that looks like.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.alexisdonn.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexisdonnmusic
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/alexisdonnmusic
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexisDonn_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexisdonn
- Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5oS6l0G47YindNtVFTzuGf?si=2UnZOYsxRD681_r-zOAukg
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/alexis-donn/1279444361
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexis_donn?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
Image Credits
For the photo where I’m in a white space suit – Credit: Austin Crowley
For the photo where I’m performing live – Credit: Lillian Gattis
For the photo where I’m on the phone in a spaceship – Credit: Emily Camacho