Zayde Wolf is the solo project of Dustin Burnett, who is a Nashville-based musician and producer. His debut album, Golden Age, came out late in 2016 and opened a lot of doors for Burnett. Aside from becoming an established indie darling, the Zayde Wolf project was featured in trailers for Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, Gold, and even TV shows such as Shameless and the Real World. In addition, he also has licensing deals with Fox, NBC, ESPN, ABC, TLC, MTV, and CBS. The chances that you’ve heard a song from this project, even if just playing in the background, are fairly high.
If you have any doubts, feel free to go listen and find out for yourself on his Spotify page. What you’ll notice is of the top 10 songs, 5 of them have over a million listens, and the other 5 have no less than around 389,000 listens.
“The creative process when I’m sitting working on a Zayde Wolf song is painfully slow sometimes,” Burnett explains. “Sitting here by myself, I’ll make a beat and then I’ll sing a few lines and then I’ll sit back down, and put a guitar part in, or a synth, and look back around. It’s almost chaotic the way I’m working around in my room.”
The road might not always be clear, and it might take some soul searching to find it. “The general message of Zayde Wolf is encouraging people,” Burnett says. “The songs are helping me in all these different ways. For a song to start in one place and then one all over the world to people who speak very little English is wild. These people reach out to me daily and say they are impacted by these songs in ways that turn their week around for better, or the songs lead them to rethink a hard situation…and that’s powerful and humbling to me.”
This encouraging theme is apparent throughout the music of Zayde Wolf, and we’re premiering the music video for their latest anthemic single, “Gladiator,” which was released last month and is pushing 400,000 streams on Spotify already. With this video, he asked fans to submit their own videos showing how his music helped them find strength within themselves and push through challenges. Some highlights include an upstate-New York man who had to battle through injuries to play basketball, a San Francisco man who skateboards through the city, and a Malaysian MMA fighter that finds their inner strength through fighting.
At the top of the post, you will find our exclusive premiere of the “Gladiator” music video, which shows Burnett pulling inspiration from his childhood obsession with wrestling. It is an incredibly entertaining high-flying music video that goes along with the empowering music that Burnett has become so known for with this Zayde Wolf project.
