Hitmaker of the Month: How Johan Lenox Brings a Classical Music Background to Metro Boomin’s ‘Creepin” and Other Essential Hip-Hop Tracks
10.05.2023 - 20:05
/ variety.com
A.D. Amorosi Johan Lenox, Variety’s Hitmaker of the Month, is known for the supple grandeur he brings to different projects as a producer, arranger and/or composer. These range from the sublime, stringed swell of “Creepin’,” Metro Boomin’s current top 10 smash with the Weeknd and 21 Savage, to the epic orchestral and choral arrangements of Travis Scott’s “Astroworld” and Nas’ “Nasir” (both produced by Mike Dean), and tracks for Selena Gomez, Shawn Mendes and Machine Gun Kelly. Lenox’s background is as a classical music prodigy (by 18, his compositions were heard at Boston’s Symphony Hall and New York’s Alice Tully Hall) and as a musical theater composer (his 2012 off-Broadway musical “Independents” was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick). But he exists in his own lane, one that’s expanded greatly with the release of solo projects such as his 2022 chamber-pop-hop vocal album debut, “WDYWTBWYGU.”
“I’ve never figured out all of the factors that brought me to classical music in the first place, save for the fact that I didn’t grow up consuming pop culture in general,” says Lenox. Born Stephen Michael Feigenbaum, he had his stage name come to him by matching his favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, with the town of Lenox, MA, where he studied music at Yale. In Lenox’s youth, modern pop, R&B and hip-hop were not a part of his listening diet. “I was excited about film soundtracks such as John Williams’ — say, ‘Indiana Jones’ — without having seen the movie, and my parents, academics who supported my love of classical, took me to see Williams with the Boston Pops. Orchestration such as that fed my musical inspiration.”Lenox’s long-story-short when it comes to classical composition, orchestration and production comes
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