How Ricky Himself & Mark Hoppus got together
Ricky Himself is stoked to release Parasocial because he got to collab with his hero, Mark Hoppus from Blink-182!
“Parasocial is about feeling like you love someone you don’t even know, maybe it’s a celebrity or someone who is a friend of a friend, or someone you see on social media.”
The 25 year old Californian musician explained that he and Dylan Bauld, the song’s producer and mixer, “made this song on our first day meeting each other. We were bonding over the bands we grew up on and Blink-182 came up. Dylan said ‘I think Mark would really like this song’ and in my mind I was like ‘yeah, right!’ Two days later, Dylan said, ‘I sent it over to Mark’ and within a week we were in a session with one of my idols re-writing and working on the song together. Blink has been a soundtrack to so many moments in my life and to have my voice recorded on the same song as his is insane.”
Imposter
Fitting for a record exploring emotions and states of being, new single Imposter is “about the tightrope between narcissism and self hatred… the fear of an audience finding out that you don’t even believe in yourself but have duped them into believing in you.”
Imposter and Parasocial are both on Ricky Himself’s new EP, Poser. He explained “it was a complete creative reset, after years of working in a completely different genre…this EP is something that the 12-year-old version of myself always wanted to make.”
How Ricky Himself was discovered
Ricky Himself’s exploration of the sounds of his youth stems from an old skool discovery tale. When he was a screenwriting student, Ricky was out skating with friends on Ventura Boulevard. He met Hit-Boy (JAY-Z & Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, and Drake) outside a famed dispensary. He decided to shoot his shot and it worked! Hit Boy loved the song that Ricky played for him, and they ended up working together for years.
After several years of musical experimentation, his current focus on pop punk shone out in the satirical track I Know You Like Black Flag. It has lyrics like “there’s nothing less punk than listening to punk rock…it’s funny how punks became the jocks”
Ricky Himself’s Poser EP is out now on Alamo Records.
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