Music
Adam Wright was a math kid growing up.
But you won’t find him pushing pencils behind a desk. You’ll find him behind a DJ booth, remixing and mashing together some of your favorite songs under the name Adamusic.
His latest hit: a mashup of Ariana Grande’s “hate that i made you love me” and Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time.”
“I knew what I wanted to do with the new Ariana song,” Wright says. “I knew I wanted to put either an R&B or early-2000s vibe behind it.”
Max Martin not only produced both songs, but he used the same chord progression for each, Wright says.
“A lot of music is math. It’s counting, it’s phrasing,” he says. He again points to Martin: “A lot of his hits are so mathematical. Those melodies are fine-tuned to a grid.”
Wright will often browse the catalog of music in his head until he can find a good match for two songs. Lately, he’s been listening to Slayyyter, Kim Petras and JADE.
He’s been releasing mashups online since 2014, but not every song fits into a mathematically proportioned box.
Take, for example, Rihanna’s “Breaking Dishes” — a track from her 2007 album Good Girl Gone Bad that had a resurgence last year.
“I was trying to think of a way to remix it in a way that kept the original elements but brought it more to a club or festival setting,” Wright says. “I kept getting stumped, because I didn’t want to remove too much, but then if I didn’t remove it, it would clash with what I was trying to do, because that song just hits so hard.”
Still, Wright has a large library to choose from for his live shows, which he says are made up of 90% his mixes with room left over for the original songs.
Wright had been releasing his mashups online for eight years before transitioning to a DJ environment.
The transition was difficult at first, he says. Wright would pre-make his DJ sets for those early shows, but he eventually learned to “let go of the reins” and listen to the audience.
Now, he says he’s found a middle ground.
“I still prepare sets, but I can jump around in them,” he says. “I don’t feel like I am restricted to what I planned and I feel like I’ve also just gotten better that I can do more things on the fly.”
Wright is currently playing a number of shows across the country for Pride Month.
“[Pride] is a time where I really try to bring joy to the sets. Not that I don’t do it normally, but I think it’s a heightened version of it, and it’s a lot more pop. It’s a lot more good vibes,” Wright says. “I feel like that’s the point of Pride, especially in today’s age, where I feel like we are regressing in ways.
“I just try to approach Pride as a celebration, leave negativity at the door, leave worries at the door, because this is the one time we can actually celebrate.”
Now, Wright is working on producing and writing his own dance music.
“It’s satisfying to be at this point knowing that I got here because my 14-year-old self started to make mashups in eighth grade.”
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