David Burke, who performs as d4vd, was a teenage streamer, posting highlights of Fortnite when his YouTube videos kept being taken down because of copyrighted music he’d attached to them. What happened next would change his life.

“I talked to my mom and she was, like, ‘Make your own music, honey. You can do it. Make your own’,” he says. “I was, like, you know what, that could be a thing.”

Within an hour, d4vd had made his first song after recording the vocals in his sister’s closet. Songs like “Romantic Homicide” have since been streamed more than a billion times. He released a string of EPs, including Petals to Thorns, and opened for SZA‘s SOS tour. On his new album, Withered, d4vd is reintroducing himself.

“So, Withered is kind of that nostalgia-baked project, where I’m physically taking myself from where I was in the closet with the BandLab and all those EPs and taking myself back to that area. Symbolically, back to the dirt,” he says.

In this session, d4vd talks about making his debut album and about how he went from posting Fortnite clips on YouTube to going supernova in the pop world.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.