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When Letdown, aka Blake Coddington, appears in my Zoom meeting, he’s much more upbeat than I anticipated, considering his stage name and the title of his recently released new single, “Bad Childhood.” I ask him how he’s doing. “I’m wonderful! How are you doing?” he says enthusiastically, a big smile on his face. Letdown is in the middle of the Idobi Radio Summer School tour with five other artists, somewhere between Syracuse and Geneva. The tour’s next stop is in Chicago.
Coddington began posting his emotionally-vulnerable songs about his mental health journey on TikTok in 2020 as a pandemic project and as of this writing, has more than 680,000 followers, along with nearly 1 million listeners on Spotify. Still, that doesn’t stop him from waking up every day, telling himself that it’s all just a dream and that none of this is actually happening.
“Bad Childhood” is his second single release this year, following May’s “Raincoat.” It’s a song, like many of his others, that’s steeped in childhood trauma that he still wrestles with on a daily basis. “I think a lot of people feel the same way, where no matter how good it gets, those bad feelings come in,” Coddington tells me. The therapy, the way he’s able to overcome those feelings, lies in the process of writing and recording his music, “Bad Childhood” is his strongest, most direct song about confronting his past to date. Not only is it meant to help cleanse himself of the negative feelings about his upbringing, but, he says, it’s a way to help those who have suffered similar trauma.
“I would just say listen to it and don’t try to read into it,” he says. “Take it literally. And if it’s something that you vibe with, if it’s something that strikes a chord with you, and if it’s directly something that you’ve dealt with, take it to the chorus. One day you’ll wake up and everything will be la-da-das. So just gotta let that go, man.”
Let’s talk about “Bad Childhood.” I’ve got lots of questions.
Let’s hear ’em, man, I got lots of answers.
“Bad Childhood,” musically, sounds upbeat. But the lyrics are pretty dark. Tell me about juxtaposing the bright sound of the instrumentation against darker, more personal lyrics.
I think it’s kind of a representation of how my brain has been working this last year. I’ve kind of stopped caring so much about what people think and a little more about being a little more directly honest, instead of speaking and singing in metaphors now. But my brain also is fighting against that 24/7. Because I want to just be happy and I want to be upbeat, and I have all these amazing crazy things that are happening in my life. I have no reason I should still be depressed about things that happened in my childhood. But I am. So, I think it’s an actual metaphor for the inside of my head. I am still upset about these things. I’m now able to directly speak about them, but the music actually represents who I am and who I’m trying to be.
Tell me about the story you’re telling with the lyrics.
My mother left when I was a kid. She has made her way in and out of my life a lot through my young adult years and even as recently as a couple of years ago. And I’m over it. I’ve accepted that. I used to blame myself and I’ve accepted that the problem’s not my fault anymore. And it never truly was. I mean, how do you blame a little kid for wanting to have parents? But yeah, it’s really cut and dry. It’s one of the only songs I have out that leaves nothing to the imagination. I mean, my mom left home. I got kicked out of school. No one gives a shit. I hate it. But it’s your fault, not mine.
Even your stage name, Letdown, there’s a very deliberate meaning to it, right?
It’s how I was treated as a kid by my family and people I called my friends, everyone in school. I wasn’t a very liked person. Everyone always had low expectations and low hopes for me. And I never really understood why. And I always cared too much about it. And when it came time to give this a name, I didn’t even think about it. When I wrote the first song, I don’t ever remember deciding. I was just like, yeah, that just feels right. That’s what everyone’s always made me feel like. It’s been told to my face a million times. If it quacks like a duck, man…
How has living through such a dysfunctional childhood fueled your desire to become a musician?
I don’t think that it actually fueled a desire to become a musician as much as it fueled me having things to write music about. I always wanted to touch on this topic and I’ve always wanted to help other people that have been going through the same situations. I’ve always been an ear to a lot of friends around me and stuff, but as far as the music stuff goes, I still, to this day, am in awe that anybody even listens to it and relates to it. I never thought it would go here and I never thought it would help other people. It’s wildly insane and I’m truly grateful and thankful for it.
Can you talk about your music career progression from being a pandemic project to a full-time career?
During the pandemic, I moved to a new city. Then as soon as I got there, the world shut down. I had nothing to do. I’ve always been a music producer. I’ve always produced other bands. I’ve always written my own music. I’ve never put any out. And a friend of mine was like, ‘Yo, you have this one song that I think is really good and there’s an app called TikTok. You should try it.’ And I was like, ‘I feel like that’s for little kids…’ But I gave it a shot. My very, very first post granted me 100,000+ followers, and it took off. I remember laying in bed, I’d been on six hours since I posted it and every time I refreshed it was like 30,000 followers, 50,000, 70,000. I was like, ‘What is happening right now?’ Me going viral on the internet was like a dream that was out of reach…like, that’s not going to happen to me. I’m just some guy. But that happened and it got a little more serious. I started taking social media seriously. I started treating that like a full-time job. I was making content, posting every day. Fast forward a year from there, and record labels started talking to me, managers started talking to me. And I signed a deal with a manager. He is still my manager. Three years later to this day, Roger Jansen is one of the best humans I’ve ever met. He taught me how to take it seriously and how to turn this thing from just this hobby that I was obsessed with on the internet into an actual business.
Letdown is on tour until August 17.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.