Music isn’t just Rowan Drake’s craft – it’s his way of life. Just a few years ago, the pop-singer songwriter re-discovered just how powerful it can be to share your sounds with the world, but more importantly, your own heart.
Rowan Drake grew up in Ithaca, New York, and began taking piano lessons at 7 years old. He also had a passion for snowboarding, and devoted his teen years to the sport.
“Music was already a massive part of my life, long before snowboarding,” says Rowan. “Long before everything. I wasn’t necessarily writing music, I definitely wasn’t recording music, but I was consuming music and singing along to music and probably just getting all the early stages of music embedded into who I was as a person, long before the snowboarding thing.”
But at age 15, Rowan’s life changed drastically. An unfortunate accident caused his competitive snowboarding ambitions to come to a halt. But once Rowan found his passion placed on pause, he knew he needed to press play on something else in his life immediately. For Rowan, it was music.
Rowan elaborates, “I’ve always needed something to dive into, or else I really have no purpose in life and I lose myself. I kinda started looking around me and seeing what brought me joy, what I knew in life, what I thought I might be good at. Music was the closest thing to me. Music had always been a safe space for me, but I had been curious about creating it. I think it was just an easy place to shift my energy, and it’s stuck ever since.”
After playing gigs at local bars and self-releasing his debut single “Closure,” Rowan decided it was time to pack his bags and move to LA. While he started to work on his debut project after settling in, he also realized just how lonely it felt to not be surrounded by the support system he was used to back at home. He found himself channeling all the feelings of loneliness and anxiety into his new single “Abandonment Issues.”
Here’s more of Rowan and I’s conversation about his journey, “Abandonment Issues,” and his ability to make an impact on others with just one song!
Have you had any regrets, and how did everyone around you feel about you shifting to music? Also, how did everybody around you feel about that… were they like, ‘hey, you don’t want to keep going with snowboarding? You don’t want to give it one last shot?’
I think my regrets in that realm aren’t very present. I think I did it to the point where I believed I’d be at the Olympics, so my only regret with that would be my body wasn’t able to keep up with my dreams in that sense. I would say everyone around me has been here to support, they’re never here to judge or push, or to tell me that I need to be doing something. For them, it was like alright… you gave it your all in that part of your life, and now just make sure you give it your all in this part of your life.
That’s a pretty big pivot to make, honestly.
It is, yeah it’s a big pivot. But again, it’s like, if I don’t have something to pivot to or put everything into, I feel very lost. So I needed that.
I’m sure that in itself was motivation to keep going and try to make your dreams become a reality when it came to music.
I think the dream started with just wanting to excel at something, and then it grew into… I knew how much music impacted me, but I guess I didn’t understand how much music impacted other people until I started to create it. Once I started to create it and I realized the impact it could have, I think the dream shifted to just oh I want to be a massive artist to wow, even just talking to two people who have been impacted by this music… I’d love to do that for millions of people. It’s kinda cool how it shifts and grows as the course continues.
I was stalking your TikTok a few days ago and was like, I see a lot of people connecting with what they’re hearing with the snippets and everything. It’s incredible. The fact you can reach so many people with just one video…
We are blessed to live in this time for so many reasons, but the fact we can just go online and say how we feel and potentially be heard by millions of people, I think now that TikTok is a thing and these social media platforms are a thing, we start to undervalue what one person is, and the fact me and you have lived a whole life up until this point. That’s such a beautiful thing, and I think we start to get in our head when we don’t see numbers in the tens of thousands. We’re just such complex people on an individual level, where it’s like… this video got 500 views, but that’s 500 people who could’ve potentially had an experience with that. To me, that’s pretty cool.
That’s an awesome way to look at it and honestly, that’s the way I think everyone should look at it… but unfortunately that isn’t the way things always go ya know?
True.
But anyways, I want to congratulate you on “Abandonment Issues” because we love it. We love it. We love it. I kinda want to talk about that now though, and I know this is about feeling kinda homesick. This is about being away from your love, you’re away from pretty much everything you know.
Mhm. That song was like the first song I wrote when I moved to LA. I moved out here and didn’t know anybody, and I realized how much my support systems meant to me. I’ve had lots of experiences in life just with feeling like the people who I need to trust aren’t always there in the right way, so this felt like a little bit of a continuation of that. I was like, how do I say this in the most simple way possible? That’s how it kinda came out, I feel like you don’t need to overcomplicate it. It really boils down to feeling a bit isolated, and sometimes we take our emotions and we kinda warp how they feel. So, isolation turns into abandonment, but it isn’t really fair to the people… I just moved to LA, it’s not like anyone abandoned me by moving here. But I took an emotion and it kinda changed.
I know that music has obviously been something that helped you cope with the change, because… that’s how this song came out! What are some other things that you’d say helped you with this big move?
I think… I’m not religious in the sense of a lot of ways, but I do believe that something somewhere has given me a lot of opportunities and blessings. I take time to sit by the ocean and feel really connected by the ocean. I take time to go to a viewpoint and overview all of Los Angeles, take a deep breath, and appreciate the small things.. whether it be the fact I get to go get coffee in the morning or see and talk to a new person every day… I think appreciating those things really made me feel a lot less alone as I really started getting into the LA world out here… which is a lonely place if you don’t do it the right way.
That’s very true… Mulholland Drive
Totally
*raises both hands in the air* it’s life changing! But with this song, would you say your sentiments have changed a bit since this song came out?
It’s funny because as someone who makes music, and I think a lot of people will understand this too, we take an emotion that we’re feeling at the time… but we might have also felt that same emotion 5 years ago or in a little bit of a different light 5 years ago, and we kinda mush it all together. That song came about from the 18 years prior of life I had up to just that one moment. I feel different today, but I’d say the overall sentiment of it, I can feel it one night and not the next night. But that’s just life! Something’s there one day, something’s not there the next day. I can say this song will always be around for me when I need to feel it, and that’s kind of why I make music.
That’s one of the most important things about this journey, you know?
I have all these songs that when I do feel an emotion, I get to go tune into that. It’s so nice.
It’s like your own form of self-therapy… accessible 24/7, and it’s free!
It’s a bunch of therapists, but they don’t charge me.
Check out “Abandonment Issues” below, and be sure to say hi to Rowan Drake on Instagram @rowan.drake!
