Renny Conti has been one of my favorite musical discoveries this past year. Since stumbling across his self-titled release over the summer, I’ve had it on heavy repeat. His music feels like little vignettes that make you nostalgic but you can’t quite place why.
The self-titled album shows Conti perfecting his sound. It leans into more of a folksy/alt country style than his past releases, but retains the lyrical storytelling bones of his earlier work.
This is especially apparent in tracks like “Looking at the Geese,” which has him reflecting on conversations with a friend. The accompanying music video is shot on film and features Conti on a serene walk through nature with various woodland creatures. It’s a perfect companion to the mellow and warmth that exudes from the song.
There’s a lot of instrumental layering that creates a lush and immersive soundscape throughout the album. A lot of the tracks have heavy guitars that rip through the softer, acoustic melodies in a really satisfying way. One of my standout tracks, “Room to Room,” ends off with a really cool frenetic guitar breakdown.
Back in August, Conti teamed up with fellow singer-songwriter Darryl Rahn and a few other friends to release a twangy, pedal-steel heavy album under the name “Hut.”
Last Friday, the Brooklyn based singer-songwriter released his newest single, Valley Ford. It’s an intimate tune that feels like a bittersweet memory.
I got the opportunity to talk with Conti last month about how he got started, his move to New York, and Hut.
I guess we’ll start out with how did you get into making music?
Renny Conti: I probably started making music when I was in fifth grade, fourth grade even, with my older brother and some friends. I had a good friend named Jeremy. We started a band.
Then it kind of just snowballed, band to band all throughout middle school into high school. I was in two bands in high school. Everyone in my band was older than me, so when they all went to college, I was the only senior. I didn’t have very many friends senior year, so I started making solo music and then did that all throughout kind of my late teens early 20s.
Did you start out doing punk? I know you had some punk influences.
Renny Conti: I was in a metal core band that was real breakdown heavy… I was in that band for six years throughout my teenage years and then I was in kind of traditional…I guess you could say punk, kind of a little more like pop punk like Joyce Manor or something.
How do you find yourself kind of transitioning to the lower key music you make now?
Renny Conti: Yeah, I think it was a natural progression just having an acoustic guitar in my house and not having the bands as accessible or other people growing out of it. So, I was writing songs on that and I didn’t really play piano and I couldn’t write songs on the drums.
I was trying to kind of get my musical fill and that’s where I was able to find it. Then I was into it. It’s like, I guess I’m just writing songs on the acoustic guitar, I should listen to other people who do that. And then I started finding a lot of other music that’s songwriter heavy kind of stuff.
So you started out in the Bay Area. What was that move like from the West Coast to New York?
Renny Conti: It was a big move. The catalyst of the move, I was 19, 20… I was transferring from a state school, SF State, and I just went in totally blind and suddenly I was in New York. I’d been here once but I was really excited because I grew up in the Bay, never left the Bay, never really been to other countries, didn’t travel much and I was just suddenly in New York.
Now it’s been like eight years and every year I feel like it changes…my relationship to the city. I used to be like, will I move soon? And now I just don’t even think about it anymore. I feel like I’m just like here.
Do you feel it’s influenced your music or how you write music or anything like that?
Renny Conti: Big time. So many of my friends now I met here in the music scene. I think there’s the cool thing about New York, it’s like there’s so many micro music scenes everywhere.
The whole city kind of for me…it feels like all my friends, all the people I know who make music. It’s like this is the music scene in New York which isn’t true but it’s like I met them. We write songs. We send songs. I play music with a bunch of friends I met here, and honestly, in the past two years, I feel like my whole relationship to music has changed through those people because I was making music for so long just alone in my room recording and now I primarily make music with other people again back like I did when I was young.
So it’s more collaborative?
Renny Conti: Yeah. It’s like they inspire me and I think we all kind of bounce stuff off each other and I can bring them songs and they’ll come up with drum parts or whatever.
Whereas before was kind of drum machine focused…like my early music stuff.
You studied film at NYU. What kind of place does film kind of have in your life?
Renny Conti: I mean when I was young it was a pretty big part of my life, film making. Like being on set, working on set. I was working as a sound mixer, that was my focus at NYU.
I was recording music growing up playing in bands and I was like “Oh, I’ve gotta go to college.” I went to the state school. Applied to NYU totally on a whim.
I did really poorly in high school so I think I was trying to make up for that by applying to these big schools and then I got in. So I just sent it here and by that point I was really into film. I was trying to do it but I was doing sound as my focus because I had been recording music alone, I knew microphones and how to work on sound and stuff. So then it was just my thing for three years probably. I was working on set every weekend, all the student sets.
But aside from that, watching movies became a big thing for me. Just through friends I had from the film program I kind of got introduced to a lot of stuff like that and it still influences me. I stopped working in film or doing that to make money sort of thing or looking at it in that way probably since 2021, right after I graduated. I just want to focus on music and so I went back to food service and started serving tables.
So it’s more like a hobby now.
Renny Conti: Yeah. It’s nice because for a while I got to do this. I went to college for it. I got to work in it. And I felt this pull, I felt guilty not doing it. But I learned so much working on pre-production for filming I feel really can kind of translate to any sort of…making a record or going towards the logistics of all that.
Everything can go wrong when you’re making a film, it’s like everything goes wrong all the time and it can be a lot.
Do you kind of incorporate it into making your music videos?
Renny Conti: These days I just recruit all my friends from film school or even from before that because I went to a charter arts high school and we had a film program there. One of my best friends who works on a lot of my music videos, like visuals and stuff, he’s a DP and I’ll just kind of hit them up and they all know what they’re doing. They’re so deep in it still. So, it’s nice to kind of just give them the reins ya know?
Kind of switching gears, a lot of your songs feel very personal. How do you find yourself translating your personal experiences to song and songwriting?
Renny Conti: A good amount, because that was the initial sort of like…I think for most musicians or anyone who makes any art, a lot of times the initial thing is to get how you feel out of yourself. I think when I was young, I didn’t care what the music sounded like at all. It was purely just for me. I would like process whatever was going on through music.
Now, I think it’s maybe become a little less that way and I’m thinking about things more instead of just kind of doing it and seeing whatever comes.
I think there’s a balance there for sure and I still try to do that but I think a lot of songs are stories and we kind of know our lives the best, so that’s kind of how I’ve historically approached it at least, just trying to kind of give another perspective on my own life.
It’s like some people journal and I always kind of saw songwriting as where I can be the most just free of any sort of self critical overthinking space, ya know?
Your self-titled kind of has all these old photographs and a lot of your music videos look like they’re made on film. Would you consider yourself a nostalgic person?
Renny Conti: Yeah, I mean, I’ve always loved film photography and in school a lot of old movies and stuff. I think it’s just something that’s always caught my eye for sure.
But yeah, I mean my first record I found all these little scraps of the original prints from photos from the 60s that my mom had and they were super small and the album cover there is a photo of my mom as a baby and I think that was just the first instinct I had. That record also opens with a cassette recording of her from the 60s. I mic’ed up this little tape player we had at my old house and it just kind of felt like the right thing to do. It’s fun to have that idea. You’re young. It’s easy to just be like, I’m going to take these old pictures and these old recordings. And now I feel like I’ve just tried to follow the thread of it kind of throughout.
I had an idea to do a whole album a few years ago that was field recordings and music based around field recordings to give that sense of past and stuff, but I never did that.
That would be awesome.
Renny Conti: Yeah. I feel like it’d be cool to write songs based on field recordings, which I’m sure a lot of people do, but maybe one day.
You have a new album out with your band, Hut. How did that project end up forming?
Renny Conti: Yeah, dude. I’m glad you’re asking about Hut because it’s been the most fluid, lowkey feeling project I’ve ever been in.
I have a good friend named Darryl Rahn who’s the other songwriter and singer and we kind of have half and half the songs on the record. We were listening to a lot of bands around on the east coast that we really liked and we were both sending so many songs to each other every time we’d write some a song or an idea we’d send it, text it to each other.
We were both working on records and then we knew there was a handful of songs each that weren’t going to go on our solo records. So, we were like, ‘let’s just get some friends together and record it.’ And it really did happen that kind of fast and easily.
So, we hit up a couple of our friends: Noah and Isaac, who plays guitar also in my solo project live and on the solo record.
And yeah, we went into a studio for four days and we just tracked it live and did a couple overdubs and that was a while ago. It was almost two years, so it took a minute to come out.
But, yeah, we were like, let’s just record and self release them. It was really nice to just kind of not have to worry. The reason it took so long is because we were just trying to have extra money to spend on getting it mixed and mastered and because it just felt real, like this is our little place to be in a band.
I think sometimes it feels like I really want to tour with this or do this and get signed or something but it didn’t feel that way and it’s fun.
Do you see yourself making more music with the project?
Renny Conti: Yeah. Darryl and I have been talking about how it’d be fun to do. I feel like I have ideas for songs that I would want to pursue with that project that I wouldn’t pursue with my solo project for some reason. Tonally really different, but that’s the fun of it. It’s almost like a place where we get to experiment. I mean we’re not working on anything right now but feel like we still hang out all the time. Everyone in the band except Isaac plays in Samia’s band and I’m touring with her soon and we’re all going to be hanging out for weeks and weeks and just like spending all that time and inevitably I feel like something will happen.