On the Rise
Renny Conti

Next to it hangs a comically large fish. It’s all perfect. The bar is one of his most treasured go-tos, he tells me: the kind of place where longs nights are short, where you can hang around, watch the crowd come in and out, find old friends and make new ones.

Conti has a familiarity to him that fits seamlessly in the space. He’s got an easy presence, and he’s a similarly open book. Even after a few minutes of conversation, you might feel like you’ve known him for years. His songs, particularly the ones off of his latest record Renny Conti, have these same qualities too — warm, inviting, lived-in. They’re the kinds of songs that sound like they weren’t just made to fill a quota but poured out of him because they had to.

“I was trying to make this record for the past four years,” he says and laughs. During that time, he released an entirely separate record – 2022’s might.bail – of experimental home recordings, biding his time, saving some money, and tucking away his best songs that he hoped one day he’d be able to cut in a studio. A year ago, that finally happened. It was a case of the right people and the right time. “My friend Zach knew this engineer who was down to do it, and I had the money finally, so I was like, ‘Let’s just send it,’” he says. But the road to Renny Conti – which, though not his debut, still feels like some kind of introduction – stretches back much farther than even those four years. The story of this record is, really, the creative tapestry of a lifetime.

Born in the Bay Area, Conti was playing instruments almost as soon as he could walk and talk. He started playing in bands in elementary school – he learned to sing, play drums, and play guitar before that, somehow – and continued in and out of various groups through middle school and high school. His parents, both actors who had other careers on the side, pushed him to nurture any inkling of passion he had.

“In early middle school I thought punk was really cool. I was a scene kid. I got really into metal, and then I was in a metal band as a screamer,” he says. He went straight edge at 12 and stuck with it until he was 18, and found musical reference points in bands like Suicide Silence and The Devil Wears Prada. “That’s definitely a very big part of my musical upbringing.”

As if on cue, the Anchored Inn starts booming with some heavy rock track. “I remember being probably like eight or nine and hearing music like this for the first time, and it fucking changed my life” he says with a smile, pointing at the speakers in the ceiling.

In each of these groups, Conti always found himself in front of the mic. His instrument was his voice. To compliment that, he decided it only made sense to pick up bits and pieces of guitar and lyric writing. Starting with the basic cowboy chords, he put out YouTube covers and a stripped-back but punk-tinged EP, 2017’s Missives.

After two years San Francisco State, he transferred “miraculously” to NYU, where he studied film. On that point, he does admit that he still currently holds a membership at Metrograph. "Because I was already recording myself, I decided to do audio. So I was just doing sound mixing and sound design. That’s where I learned a lot of my current approaches," he tells me.

Outside of classes, Conti began working on his proper solo debut in his college apartment, which he released in 2018. Taking the true DIY path, he explains, he promoted the record by looking up venues on Google and trying any way he could to get a spot to play. With this method, he landed at a few songwriters showcases. His musical network in the city ballooned from there.

“In the past two or three years I would say I‘ve actually found a community out here, especially in Brooklyn, that feels super real and super consistent,” he says. “I play music now with my best friends. I don’t have to be like, ‘Oh, I gotta find a bassist for my show.’ It’s just one of my best friends. And if it’s not him, it’s my other friend. So having that has changed my process on everything.”

When I ask offhand if his college film learnings are still a reference point for him, the answer is both yes and no. “This past year though I actually took a big break from consuming most media,” he interjects after rattling off a few of his 70s film favourites. The loss of a close relative shook his daily routine to its core, and prompting him to be more present in real life than lean towards escapism. “I would spend so much time, really any free time I had in the evenings, watching movies or doing something like that. … But I just started being like, ‘Let’s hang out instead and talk.’”

Songwriting, as becomes clear through talking to Conti, is one of the ways he is able to find that connected feeling. The album, though not his official debut, feels in some ways like his introduction. The artwork acts as a mission statement to this effect. A faded collage, it features a portrait of Conti playing the drums in around fourth grade. Right next to it sits a picture of his father, mother, and sister from the 90s. Scattered around those are images that correspond to lyrical easter eggs or small details about his and his collaborators’ lives.

Given the slowness of the album process, Conti explains, he wanted everything to be mapped out just right. The choice to self-title it was no accident, after all. The record allowed himself to put his truest heart on his sleeve. Sonically, the recordings are lean and clean, putting his storytelling front and center. His mixes of crisp acoustic guitar arrangements and embellishments sound like smooth, satisfying butter on the ears.

The arc of the album as a whole explores evolution and change. Sounding like a modern Conor Oberst – who Conti cites as an influence, along with Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Hozier, and Aldous Harding – he covers ground ranging from shifting identities to relationships to mental health to grief. “Being in your 20s is really weird,” he says. “Definitely some reconciling with your youth.”

On “Formspring,” for example, he writes about a friend who he lost to suicide at 13, a loss that occurred when he was so young that processing it only really came later. “I’m always skeptical about writing songs about shit like that, because I never want to be too forward about my life. But at the same time, I find it’s always a good opportunity to think about what happens to us,” he says. A show of his versatility, on another standout, “Looking At The Geese,” Conti does a thematic 180 with ease, pulling the subject matter this time from an inside joke with a friend. The track sounds like a hazy walk in the park, the kind that leaves you feeling the good kind of tired. No matter what he’s writing about, though, Conti has the kind of delivery that simply begs you to stop and listen.

With Renny Conti now out in the world, there’s now a bookend on the years that marked this album era for him. Conti wrestled his early material to the ground, waiting for the time to give it the care he knew it deserved, and he did it right. Now that he’s put the project to rest, he’s allowing himself to focus on new beginnings. “It’s really exciting,” he says of his creative future. It’s almost like coming up for air. “I was 22 when I started writing this, and so much has changed in my life. Now I feel like I get to move to the next stage of my artistic development.”