Hi, everyone! I recently got to talk with Nathan Martinez, the Salt Lake City-based lofi producer making music under the name chief. I first discovered Nathan's music on a through his song "Yesterday" on a Chillhop Essentials playlist a while back, and I was hooked on his tunes from there. He is a very well-known figure within the lofi hip-hop scene, accruing over 1,000,000 monthly listeners regularly and getting featured on a variety of Spotify curated playlists. I was really excited to hear more about his story, and I'm glad he was willing to speak with me!
br: When did you first decide you wanted to have a music career?
N.M.: I guess you could say one of two things. I’ve been making music for about eight years or so just to see where it’s been going, but it wasn’t until last year when I stopped having a day job to focus solely on music. It was a big transition, really, a blessing and a curse. I was hyped when I quit my job, but it got at a point where I would just keep making music 24/7 and got burned out doing it. I wasn’t going outside and got stressed out due to the new demands I felt I had to reach. That’s why having a job sort of helped. It just takes a good balance between work and personal time, and I’ve been getting better at managing that. I’ve been able to make more wholesome music, and it’s still crazy to have gotten the listening numbers I’ve been getting, and I can’t be more thankful to those who have tuned in.
br: Which artists or albums inspired you to start a music career in the first place?
N.M.: At the beginning, I was listening to a lot of Joey Badass and made beats like his. When I was first starting to learn lofi hip-hop, I fell in love with a lot of bsdu’s music. I found out how to use an SP-404 drum machine and relied heavily on sampling, which I don’t do anymore with my music. Outside of my music career, I’m really into R&B artists like D’Angelo and stuff.
br: What’s the significance behind your stage name?
N.M.: It’s a pretty simple story. In the middle of high school, I switched from a Catholic high school to a public school, and I had this friend group where we would just chill and smoke weed together. I’m half-Native and half-Mexican, so I guess whenever I got high, my eyes would go super low. One of my friends started calling me “Chief Low-Eye”, which kind of just stuck. I’d never had a nickname before, so that made it all the more special. In retrospect, it’s not the best name I could have chosen, and sometimes I wish I can change it. Since I’ve already established such a big identity with that name, it would be pretty difficult just to snap your finger and go under a new alias.
br: Can you describe your process for making songs?
N.M.: It’s different for each track. I’ll usually just get up in the morning, drink some coffee, and then just sit in my studio and work out some different elements. I have a Nord keyboard, so I sit around and play until I find something I like. Once I hit the sweet spot, I’ll try to remember it and then throw it into Ableton and use some MIDI controllers to play it out. Drums come next, then some other textures. I have a field recorder, a microphone, and an electric guitar, so I like to utilize those when I can. At the end of the day, if I make ten songs over the span of a week, I might only choose to keep one of them. I have a lot of other ones saved on my hard drive, but I usually like to pick the ones that are up to par for chief. You can tell when an artist is really forcing something, and that’s not what I want my music to end up becoming.
br: What, in your opinion, is the most important aspect of a lofi hip-hop song?
N.M.: For me, it really is that first feeling you get when you hear a song. For instance, you might hear a song where you instantly fall in love with it from the first few notes you hear. Other times, you might hear a song and not like it, but it could grow on you as time goes on. With my music, I want each song to sound good as soon as one hears it. If I were to release a project, I don’t want there to be any “filler” tracks of sorts, so making each track sound like a single would be my aim. Each cut could stand alone and be good in its own right.
br: You’ve worked with a few vocalists and rappers on some of your tracks, what do you believe having vocals on a track adds to a song?
N.M.: It depends. If the vocalist catches the feeling that the producer was going for, then yeah, it’ll sound really good. It adds more detail to the picture the producer is trying to paint. If I were just a producer who made beats, not knowing who was going to rap or sing over it, I’d just be making beats based on what feel sounds good. There are plenty of songs where people try to rap over beats I’ve made or friends have made, and they can sound super rough sometimes. At that point, it feels forced. Don’t get me wrong, I love working with other vocalists, but I can be nitpicky. Like I said, I want it to feel natural and see if that vocalist can work with my artistic vision.
br: What songs have been your personal favorites to have made?
N.M.: My most popular song, “Sorry”, was made at a time when me and my girlfriend at the time had a big fight. It was one of the first songs that I made for a project titled Late Night, and I think it really influenced the way I made the rest of that album. I think the best track I’ve ever made was “Be Here Now”. I think it’s one of the best chord progressions and melodies I’ve ever made, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to top it. It actually ended up making a Chillhop Essentials compilation last summer. It’s just a main piano line, and I put electric guitar on it, too. I had just recently gotten it and it’s barely in there. Unfortunately, it ended up sounding really out of tune, and I fixed it to the point where it didn’t completely sound like s--t. I do have another project called Aura from 2017, which I made with my good friend, Flavors. The work we did on that project was very worthwhile. It got overlooked upon release, and might have done better if we’d released it recently.
br: I know you just dropped a single recently, but do you have any other projects in the works right now?
N.M.: Yeah, I do. That single, “Cold Summer”, that dropped is in support of my newer project, Phases. I didn’t have the best of summers emotionally last year, so a lot of my composing revolved around that energy and moving on from it. There’s some happiness, some sadness, and everything in between. It’s going to be five other tracks aside from what I’ve dropped so far- three solo and two collabs. Going back to that question about favorite songs, there’s one on there with my friend, Martin Sky, that might be another contender for my best song. I really enjoy the guitar and vocals he added to it.
br: What music goals do you have for the future?
N.M.: Honestly, I want to be a producer who’s trying to push the sound into a genre where all the songs don’t sound the same. It’s really easy to see an aspiring producer look up “lofi beats” on YouTube, find the most viewed one, and try to replicate that in a producing software. I don’t agree with that idea, that’s the easy way out. The main idea should be to make music that sounds refreshing and original. I also want to keep a mindset where plays and making playlists doesn’t matter. You never know if any song is going to get noticed or not, so I think to focus on making music that I think sounds good- no matter what- is the biggest takeaway here.
I'd like to thank Nathan again for sitting down with me, and I wish him the best of luck with his new music endeavors. I cannot recommend his music enough. Thanks so much to everyone checking this out, you guys are really appreciated! See you again real soon with more br content!
