d4vd loves roses—white roses, in particular. But like love itself, the Houston-based songwriter knows that the flower also has potentially dangerous qualities. “The white rose has carried through my visual identity as long as I can remember, because I love the contrast between such a beautiful flower with thorns that could hurt you,” the artist born David Burke tells me. “I view my music as that flower. When people listen to my music for the first time, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, it’s such a beautiful song.’ But then you hear the lyrics and it’s painful, things that can hurt you—just like the rose and the stems with the thorns.”
d4vd explores the many layers of love throughout his dynamic debut album, Withered. Containing lush, often euphoric sonics that sometimes belie the heavy subject matter, the 14-track collection stands as the ending of the musical lifecycle that began with d4vd’s first two EPs, Petals to Thorns and The Lost Petals, both of which were released in 2023. “The decaying process of the rose, it’s kind of like a goodbye letter to this era,” d4vd says. “It’s a completion. chapter one, chapter two, and this is like the final chapter.”
Now 20 years old, d4vd injected some real-life experience into his material, with Withered chronicling the wild highs and painful lows, the exhilarating joy and the overwhelming pain of relationships. Early on, though, he had to inject his tunes with outside inspiration. He got his start writing songs in 2022 for Fortnite montages after other players’ montages from the popular video game series helped shape his taste in music. He was homeschooled then, and didn’t spend much time going outside. “I didn’t have much of a social life, so I was writing these songs and people were asking me where I was getting my inspiration from,” he says. “‘How are you writing such introspective lyrics if these experiences haven’t happened to you yet?’ I was really writing songs about what my friends were telling me.
“The decaying process of the rose, it’s kind of like a goodbye letter to this era. It’s a completion.”
“I would get on video games and online chat rooms and all these people would vent to me about things that were going on in their lives,” he continues. “I was able to take that information and live vicariously through those people and write about their experiences. Now that I’ve grown and have been able to experience these things by myself, firsthand, it makes me realize that we all kind of go through the same things. So as a songwriter, I’m able to pull things from my experiences, my friends’ experiences, someone in my DM’s experiences, someone on TV, a movie, a book, a magazine—it’s all the same. When the inspiration starts to flow, songs start to make themselves because of the overflow of information that’s readily available to me in my head.”
What d4vd didn’t initially possess in experience, he made up for with innovation. His most popular and earliest hit, 2022’s “Romantic Homicide,” showcased distinctive compositional characteristics that deviate from songwriting standards. For instance, the somber song doesn’t have a traditional chorus. “That song is the biggest one because of the relatability factor of it,” d4vd says. “I love not using the same lyrics throughout the song—especially in that song, because the technical ‘chorus’ is, ‘In the back of my mind you die,’ and at the end you expect it to repeat. But at the end it says, ‘In the back of my mind I killed you.’ I like altering lyrics and different sections of songs to bring a new thought into it, because when people think they can predict your lyrics, but then a new lyric comes in, it adds a new level of learning and catchiness. It’s like a subliminal thing that I experiment with and see what lyrics stick, what melodies stick from an audience standpoint.”
On Withered, d4vd employs a similar writing tactic on the guitar-driven “Sky” by slightly changing the words preceding the chorus. He goes from singing “I’m hanging over the edge, won’t you give me a hand?” in the first verse to “I’m hanging over the edge, was this part of the plan?” in the second. But the narrator isn’t the only one running out of time in the song’s relationship story. “It’s like I’m on the edge of this relationship,” d4vd says. “Was this supposed to happen? Were we supposed to fall out like this? It goes right up to the chorus, ‘The sky is falling / And I need someone / I need someone now / I missed you / I missed you somehow.’ That lyric might be misinterpreted. It’s not that I miss you. I missed you. It’s like I was at the edge of this cliff and I was reaching for a hand and I missed the hand, and I ended up falling regardless. It’s like losing a lifeline in this song.”
Elsewhere on Withered, d4vd taps into the confusion surrounding his partner’s lies on “You Left Me First,” which was inspired from d4vd’s first relationship, one whose foundation he says was built on untruths.
“I’m able to pull things from my experiences, my friends’ experiences, someone in my DM’s experiences, someone on TV, a movie, a book, a magazine—it’s all the same.”
Although he’s been able to turn to more real-life experiences in his music over the last few years, d4vd has remained in sync with his fans. In fact, he still gets tremendous insight from his online community and seeing how they react to his songs. “It’s always learning,” d4vd says. “I feel like I’m in a college class every time I listen to a song. That’s why I like experimenting with different things, just to see what the fans react to. I listen to music through my fans—especially my own music, because I can’t tell what’s going to stick anymore, so I have to kind of try new things all the time to accommodate attention span changes, all my fans going through new things in their lives. I keep up with my Instagram themes and I’m making sure I’m taking everybody’s personal experience into account, too. People tell me they write songs about their experience at all times. I try to do that and keep my fans involved as much as possible.”
In all, the results may be straightforward, but like love, the journey is less direct. That’s why d4vd used “Afterlife,” the first song he recorded for Withered, as the last song on the project. He wanted a clear starting point for the project as it was gestating. “Love is never simple,” d4vd says. “It’s very complicated, and I like to make sure that [I express] the contrast and the complication and implications of being in love, being in a relationship, forming these connections and falling out of love, the different stages of this thing we call ‘love.’ It’s a universal experience that we all experience in different ways, which is such a beautiful thing. There’s also beauty in the loss. That’s why even the songs where I’m talking about the really sad themes—even ‘Afterlife’—they sound like they’re supposed to be happy with the way I put in the strings, the way the songs are structured, and the instrumentation on them. It’s just me as a person and how I view things in my day-to-day life, more than just a musician.” FL
