Who is Zayde Wolf?

Zayde Wolf is a songwriter, producer, and one-of-a-kind artist in his own right. The solo project of Dustin Burnett, a Nashville-based producer and musician, Zayde Wolf has licensed hundreds of songs - from film trailers, television shows and video games, to major domestic and international advertisements on the internet with Fox, NBC, ABC, ESPN, MTV, CBS and TLC networks. His song “Cold Blooded” was the spring 2019 theme song for the Chicago Cubs and used by Dude Perfect, one of the top YouTube Sports channels with over 40 million subscribers and seven billion views, with whom he continues an artistic partnership. Zayde Wolf’s music is everywhere.

This Spring he will unveil a new powerhouse collection of tracks: the third full-length installment in the dynamic Zayde Wolf catalog, follows his 2018 Modern Alchemy LP, which charted on iTunes in over 25 countries within hours of its release. The album is 40 minutes of pure energy: within the grooves of its 12 tracks, he acknowledges the heartbreak of 2020, reflecting on what was and what could have been. It’s about remembering and drawing inspiration from good times past and exploring our reasons to keep pushing ahead. It’s about taking stock of where we are, and realizing there’s more work to be done, dreaming of brighter days ahead. Ultimately, it’s about hope.

From the first fist-pumping notes of opener “The Reason,” in which Burnett implores us to rise up and overcome, hard-hitting encouragement anthems like “Back At It” and “Never Fade,” to the autobiographical “Look At Me Now” and “Still Fighting For It,” the message is clear: fear is inevitable - we can either allow it to keep us from pursuing our dreams or use it to stoke the coals of the fire burning within us all to become who we’re really meant to be.

Working to become greater, transcending the past, and not allowing it to define who you will be - these are concepts embodied by Burnett himself. Raised in Metropolis, a small town in Illinois best known for its fictional favorite son, Clark Kent, the level of success Burnett has achieved, both personally and professionally, is beyond anything he ever imagined or that was expected of him growing up. All of Burnett's accolades may seem to be the makings of an obvious solo success, but the Zayde Wolf project came somewhat accidentally.

"Towards the end of 2015, I was producing some new music as a concept. I had these new ideas, but when a couple of singers fell through, I just decided to sing on it myself," Burnett says. "I finished the songs, and rather than use my name, I listed, ‘Zayde Wolf,’ as the artist and sent it to a licensing company in Los Angeles called Lyric House. Pretty much immediately, one of the songs was licensed. Jessica Cole, Lyric House’s President responded, 'So who’s Zayde Wolf, anyway? We need more songs.’ That’s literally the accidental story of how I became Zayde Wolf." That one song released three years ago has led to two full-length albums, an EP, dozens of singles, and a dedicated following that includes over 1.2 million Spotify monthly listeners, 235K YouTube subscribers, 81 million views, and his music has been streamed over 200 million times across streaming services. Burnett describes Jessica Cole as, the "ghost member" of his band and his most trusted collaborator.

"I didn’t want music supervisors or Jessica to know it was me, because I had been an artist in bands before, and I wanted to get real feedback on these songs apart from anything I had done in the past," he explains.” She’s the only other quasi-creative entity for Zayde Wolf. Though it’s her company that licenses songs for me on shows and things, she is the one who has pushed me and the musical boundaries in order to come up with ideas and concepts. That’s how we partnered. Zayde Wolf wouldn’t have happened without her."

The Zayde Wolf name was a bit of an accident too, as the name was originally intended for Burnett and his wife's third child. "We already had one boy and one girl so we thought we would just wait until birth to find out this third time," he explains. "We picked boy names and girl names. The boy name my wife wanted was, ‘Zayde’, and I picked the middle name, ‘Wolf.”

Thirteen years, a leap of faith, a move to Nashville, and two kids later, Wolf has found a new sense of bravery in this project, which has led him to open up in his songwriting in ways he never has before.

"The creative process when I’m sitting working on a Zayde Wolf song is painfully slow sometimes," he 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 loop back around. It’s almost chaotic the way I’m working around in my room. ‘Rule the World,’ is a song about the dreams you have as a kid that you’re going to be able to go out and do something really big. It’s me reimagining myself in my youth with my friends, overcoming what we need to overcome."

There’s a common thread in Zayde Wolf's music: push through and overcome life’s challenges, trust that broken hearts eventually heal, and remember that music is one of our most powerful tools for connection to one another. Burnett has experienced the power of music firsthand, and he's made it his mission to share it with the rest of the world.

"The general message of Zayde Wolf is encouraging people," he says. "These songs are helping me in all these different ways. For a song to start in one place and then move 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 that the songs lead them to rethink a hard situation... and that’s powerful and humbling to me."