After breaking through with party hits and trap beats lined with compelling storytelling, YOUNG XAV concludes the narrative with a genre-bending final album, Dead by Dawn.
Up the driveway and through an iron gate, six bonsai trees line two long wooden tables—three on each—and one on a small coffee table. Behind the miniature Japanese forest sits a canopy lined with string lights, an ambient place for a patio furniture set. It’s clear that YOUNG XAV’s driveway is not used for cars, as evidenced by the vintage black Mustang parked on the street out front. And the garage is not used for cars either—that’s his studio.
Immediately, Xav knows how to make me feel at home. He opens up the garage door and reveals a recording studio with a giant leather couch, recording equipment, instruments, and a pool table. Posters and vinyl scatter the walls, trinkets and action figures surround us. It feels like the garage that everyone grows up dreaming about but no one actually has. But Xav has it. In his ripped black jeans and sweatshirt, he’s cool and collected, making sure the temperature is comfortable on an unseasonably warm day in April on Chicago’s south side.
I ask him about his painted black and white nails, a trend that I’ve been interested in seeing men try, and he tells me that every day he feels like he’s growing more and more into himself and caring less about what other people think.
It’s been six months since PATCHWORKdigital started shadowing YOUNG XAV as he prepared to release his final album, Dead By Dawn. In that time, I have learned so much about who Xav is as a person, and how he creates music, videos, stories, and performances. The man is truly an artist and a work horse.
YOUNG XAV tells me about his admiration for Steve Jobs, how he tries to embody that same reality distortion field. Jobs could take any idea and sell it, and Xav is the same way. He gets everyone around him on board with his ideas and turns his dreams into a collaborative experience. Trust me, as soon as you start talking to him you just want him to succeed. He brings you on board the journey with him and makes you feel like his success is your success.
But he doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk. YOUNG XAV is constantly working and innovating, trying to find new ideas, new ways to reach people. His creative process is experimental and sometimes scattered -- he calls this “embracing the delusion”-- but he never stops shy of perfection. He gives 100% or nothing at all.
This May, Xav invited the Patchwork team to his first live performance since before the covid lockdowns in 2020. It was a collaborative event with visual artist Tragiiccc, and it was a unique, intimate experience. It was also a gleaming example of how YOUNG XAV gets everyone involved in his ideas. About an hour before the show was set to start, he comes up to me, who drove just over an hour from Milwaukee, and says “well, I guess the show’s not happening.” And he proceeds to explain how the venue was supposed to provide a sound system but wasn’t able to because someone called in sick. Passionate that the show must go on, he made a couple of phone calls and got a friend to drop what he was doing and provide a microphone and speakers for him to use that night. It just goes to show that he has the charisma to get people invested in him and in his work.
So the show did go on, which is great because that’s where Xav thrives the most: up there performing in front of a group. He says that he sees performances as a collaborative experience, where his job is to entertain and the crowd’s job is to be entertained. Although he went from selling out shows pre-covid to a smaller group gathering in 2021, a path he never expected to go down, he was definitely entertaining and the crowd was definitely entertained. Xav told me that performances and storytelling are at the core of what he does. He’s an introvert at heart, though you’d never guess that if you met him; the only clues are his grandfatherly love for gardening and classic cars. The spotlight is his way of connecting with people. He thinks of performances as plays divided into acts and when he’s writing music he’s picturing the performance in his mind.
Every part of what Xav creates is all interconnected. The performances, the music, the videos, all tie back to each other. It really is the YOUNG XAV experience. He likes to try new things and take risks in his music, which we hear in immediately in the opening title track Dead By Dawn. We get notes of influence from multiple different genres in the album, like the jazzy saxophones and trumpets in Life and Times of Xavier Robert and The Rockstar, and the alternative rock Machine Gun Kelly-esque guitar licks in TV Screens and World’s Gone Mad. You would think that such drastic genre shifts in this album from its predecessor After Dark would feel obtrusive, but it’s far from that. There are lyrics, metaphors, guest contributors, and musical inspirations that tie it all together in a neat little package that feels like a natural progression and maturation of his style. What connects all of his work is that he writes about real life experiences. Xav told me, “I can’t write if I’m not living life.”
Storytelling is woven throughout all of YOUNG XAV’s work and is especially prominent in Dead By Dawn. He thinks of this album as the continuation of the story that started with After Dark. In fact, there are plenty of metaphors that he slips in there and references to his older works. Every single decision he makes, from the lyrics to the music videos that accompany them, has a deeper meaning. He really is just a hopeless romantic and uses music to put all of his feelings out on the table.
If you listen to After Dark and Dead By Dawn simultaneously, you’ll notice that it’s a story about growing up. In After Dark, it’s all parties and good times, ending with him driving west to California as the night ends. Dead By Dawn is when the sun rises and he begins in California where he left off, in his car. The album is based around the idea of coming to terms with mortality. “Ain’t no point of me living if I ain’t die for nothing” and “if I should die tonight tell my mama that I loved her, tell my father that I loved him, tell my brother that I loved him” are some of the contemplative lyrics that start the album out with a bang. With the obvious backdrop of 2020, covid, and all the uncertainty that we’ve faced in the past couple of years, we see Xav enter a new era of his music and his life.
That’s not to say that he wasn’t always this deeply introspective artist before, though. When you get to Lemonade on a Porch, or as he calls it, his swan song, we see a reference that ties back to Dear You from After Dark. Once again showing us that all of his work is part of a larger story. It seeps into his music videos and other projects, too. Xav wrote, shot, edited and starred in a short film that ties into his music video for Too Gone. Filmmaking is a large part of what Xav does creatively and he says that he has a visual idea of what a song will look like in a music video as he’s writing and recording the songs. In fact, every song off this final album will have an accompanying music video. Talk about ambition, folks. This guy has it.
When I asked YOUNG XAV what he wants people to get from this album, he said that he wants people to hear the lyrics and know that they’re not alone. All of us have our own struggles with mental health and music is something that can bring us together. “If this album means something to just one person, then I’ve done my job.”
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