MUSIC FEATURE
FREE YOUR MIND
Midas Black escapes his own personal hell with debut album BY RYAN PITKIN
Usually when an artist drops an album, especially a debut, they want to spend some time pushing it out to the public — performing the songs and building a following around what they hope to become a defining piece of art. For local singer, rapper and producer Midas Black, his debut album Free Midas, which dropped in December 2021, is already just a reminder of the past. “A lot of people are telling me, ‘You should keep performing the songs, keep pushing the album,’” he told Queen City Nerve. “The only reason I don’t want to do that is, it’s really dark. I’m not in that place anymore, I’m really not.” The Monroe native recorded Free Midas when he was struggling. Relationship trouble, financial issues and an over-reliance on self-medication had Midas, whose real name is Daniel Thomas, feeling trapped in a cycle of depression and negativity that he could only escape through self-expression and music. What came out was an impressive, if downbeat, collection of 11 songs that are rooted in hip-hop but mix in aspects of R&B, mumble rap and emo alternative. He’s proud of the work, and rightfully so, but listening back to it brings up mixed emotions. However, the feedback he’s received after dropping the album has helped him boost his self confidence, and learning how to love himself has helped him build stronger relationships with his family, his friends, and God, he said. But before he could get there, he had to free Midas.
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The making of Midas Black
Like so many other musicians, Thomas’ interest in music started in church, watching his mother and grandmother sing as he grew up in Monroe. It remained only a minor interest, however, up until middle school, when at age 12 he received a laptop from his school in the hopes it would help him do his homework. He was pleasantly surprised to find Audacity, an open-source digital audio editing app, downloaded on the computer.
MIDAS BLACK “Instead of doing schoolwork I would record songs on Audacity — record beats then record me rapping over that,” he said. He took inspiration from his three favorite rappers at the time: T.I., Lil’ Wayne and Kanye West, with sprinklings of Gucci Mane, Ying Yang Twins and other Southern rappers. He got put onto Outkast thanks to his three older brothers. After having fiddled around on Audacity, he grew an ear for production, specifically citing Drake’s Thank Me Later — which features beats from a list of iconic producers that includes Timbaland, Swizz Beatz and Kanye — as an album where he truly awoke to the possibilities of production. Though he trailed off from the production side of things during his high school years, he never stopped writing songs. Growing up in Monroe, a suburb located about 20 miles southeast of Charlotte, Thomas didn’t have trouble finding kids who shared his interest in hiphop, but he felt as though many weren’t sure how to pursue their passion. “A lot of kids were actually really gifted, but I feel like coming from that area they were afraid to pursue that because we all run into the idea of ‘What
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if.’ Like, ‘What if it doesn’t happen,’ or ‘What if people don’t like it?’ They start selling themselves short of their own expectations, and I started falling into that as well.” It wasn’t until he moved to the Queen City that he began to truly pursue music as more than a hobby. When Thomas moved from Monroe to Charlotte to attend UNC Charlotte in 2018, he built a studio in his bedroom, which didn’t leave a lot of room for a bed. He put in a futon and slept on that. He would wake up every morning in the studio and go to sleep in his studio. He was listening to a lot of alt emo rapper XXXTentacion at the time, specifically the 2018 album ?, which inspired much of the sound he would curate on Free Midas. “I was listening to X’s album and realized you can still create art that you love and still be versatile,” Thomas told Queen City Nerve. “You don’t have to be versatile within a box. I feel like that’s what’s happening a lot; people want to curate versatility within these restrictions. I feel like it’s being broken slightly, but whenever it gets broken it gets labeled too much as straight pop. It gets watered down. I just don’t like that. Just call it what it is; call it art.
Call it something you wasn’t expecting.” It’s hard to know what to expect when listening to Free Midas, and that’s just how he wants it. The tracklist keeps a throughline but jumps around in genres and vibes. “King Freestyle” is a melodic bop with soul. “Yerp” is an auto-tuned joyride, the lightest track on the album, while “Lord Farquaad” is a repetitive banger over a Latin-style acoustic guitar riff. The song ends with a ferocious verse that Thomas describes as channeling his “raw aggression” at the time. “Pony Boy” takes listeners into a psychedelic space, while “Normal” is a straightforward twominute track that follows Thomas through all the anxieties of a day in his shoes at the time. The album peaks as it ends, with the final track pairing Midas with one of his closest friends, Charlotte-based R&B singer Trent Dominic. “This World” isn’t just the only track on the album with a feature, it’s also the only one on which Thomas plays the guitar. He describes his own playing as intermediate, but he knew he wanted to play on one of his own songs, so he woke up and set a goal to finish a whole
