Ones To Watch: SoDown Spent Years Making Music in His Parents’ Shed. Now He’s Headlining Across North America

From childhood mixtapes and a life-changing Pretty Lights show to years spent learning production in isolation, live saxophone, the GetDown community, and Scenes of Consciousness, Ehren Wright’s path to SoDown has always been driven by curiosity.

Long before SoDown was headlining venues across North America and taking the stage at Red Rocks, Coachella, Electric Forest, Lost Lands, and Shambhala, Ehren Wright was the kind of kid who was constantly searching for something new.

School never really clicked. He remembers drawing in notebooks, staring out windows, and imagining places he could disappear into. Music became another outlet for that restlessness. Wright bounced between instruments growing up, made mixtapes, rapped over songs, and experimented with whatever sounds caught his attention.

Even getting control of the radio in his parents’ car became an opportunity to explore. Rather than settling on one station, he would scan through them looking for something he had never heard before — a song capable of taking him somewhere else.

That curiosity found a new direction in 2010, when Wright attended Pretty Lights at Red Rocks.

It was his first dance show that truly shifted something. In the months that followed, electronic music went from an interest to an obsession. Wright listened constantly and attended as many shows as he could afford while balancing community college, restaurant and bar work, and handyman jobs on the side.

Eventually, listening was no longer enough. He wanted to understand how the music was made.

Once Wright started producing, almost everything else began taking a back seat.

He was still attending community college and working in restaurants, but most of the time leftover went toward learning music. Much of that period unfolded in his parents’ shed, where Wright spent years developing the production skills that would eventually become the foundation of SoDown.

“I became somewhat of a hermit,” he remembers.

His social life shrank as the hours spent producing grew. Even while constantly learning, Wright carried the feeling that he was somehow behind and needed to catch up. There were plenty of moments when he questioned whether the path was actually leading anywhere.

“I just kind of stubbornly pushed forward though, even when it felt like the odds were stacked against me.”

For a while, those doubts were understandable. Wright struggled simply to get booked.

Then Cervantes’ Other Side had a cancellation with roughly two weeks to fill the date, far less time than an emerging artist would normally want to promote a show. SoDown got the call.

Wright took the opportunity and went to work, selling hard-copy tickets through Venmo and writing a handwritten note to every person who bought one. They sold it out.

For Wright, it was one of the first moments when all those hours spent learning in relative isolation began to feel like they might actually be connecting with people.

His willingness to say yes to an opportunity was also embedded in the project’s name from the beginning.

When Wright came up with “SoDown,” he was thinking about what he wanted to represent and what kind of life he wanted to live. Being SoDown meant remaining open to new experiences, adventure, connection, and whatever might come next.

This same curiosity also led to one of the project’s most recognizable signatures.

Although Wright grew up playing multiple instruments, he had never played any kind of horn when he decided to learn saxophone. He had always loved the instrument’s sound and “soul,” but the fact that it presented an entirely new challenge made it even more appealing.

Over time, saxophone became inseparable from SoDown, helping connect his bass-heavy production to the funk, jazz, soul, and hip-hop influences that had always existed underneath it.

As the project developed, Wright initially tried to organize its different sides into separate categories. SoHeavy represented one direction, while SoGroovy and SoChill represented others.

Eventually, he realized he was spending too much time labeling music that did not necessarily need labels.

“I think I was trying to label things too much at that time,” he says. “I like to let the music speak for itself.” That thinking now defines SoDown far more accurately than any individual genre tag.

A track can move between heavy bass, funk, soul, jazz, hip-hop, piano, cinematic samples, and live instrumentation without needing to explain which version of the project is currently in control. The contrast itself became part of the identity.

This versatility has since taken SoDown to major festivals and venues throughout North America. In 2026 alone, Wright has headlined more than 50 shows while continuing to expand the project beyond the traditional artist-and-audience relationship.

A major part of that expansion is the GetDown community. For Wright, the idea traces back to something he loved as a fan: watching an entire crowd move together and briefly exist on the same wavelength. Extending that feeling beyond the venue eventually became a natural progression.

GetDown activations have brought fans together for hiking, paddleboarding, indoor skydiving, Topgolf, and other shared experiences. Instead of allowing the community around SoDown to exist only for a few hours inside a concert venue, Wright has increasingly used the project as a reason to bring people together outside of music as well.

Wright’s emphasis on shared experience has gradually become more reflective as he himself has changed.

His newest album, Scenes of Consciousness, takes its central idea from the experience of watching life unfold almost like a film.

Cinema, classic films, vintage recordings, music history, spoken dialogue, jazz, soul, hip-hop, doo-wop, piano, saxophone, and modern bass production all intersect throughout the record. Rather than treating samples purely as production elements, Wright uses them to connect different eras, memories, and perspectives.

“Who Knows” places a soulful sample from Marion Black’s 1970 recording alongside movie dialogue stretching across decades. “Gold (Can’t Hold Me Down)” pulls from Ray Charles, N.W.A., Low Profile, and Austin Powers in Goldmember. “L I V I N” with Oddly Eazy connects hip-hop references with Dazed and Confused, while “H U M A N” with Shlump opens with a sample from 2001: A Space Odyssey before moving into psychedelic low-end production.

Yet beneath all of those references, Scenes of Consciousness is ultimately rooted in something much more personal.

Wright sees the album as another chapter in a longer attempt to understand life and find ideas that make moving through it a little clearer.

Some of his earlier work wrestled more directly with mortality and the knowledge that everything eventually ends. Scenes of Consciousness approaches the same uncertainty from a more hopeful place.

“There’s still sadness in it, but I think it comes from a more hopeful place,” Wright explains. “A lot of it is about trying to stay present and keep that observer perspective, to watch your life unfolding almost like a movie, without getting completely consumed by every moment of it.”

This idea comes into particularly clear focus on “Enjoy The Ride (Stay Present)” with Steller, a track centered around stepping outside distraction and reconnecting with the moment happening in front of you.

There was no single movie, sample, or memory that unlocked the album. Instead, Wright says old films, memories, different eras of music, and the idea of observing your own life gradually began connecting around the same creative lens.

“I wanted it to feel nostalgic but still alive,” he says, “like you’re looking back at something while also realizing you’re still inside it.”

That perspective has also changed what Wright wants from a SoDown performance.

Earlier in the project, his primary focus was energy and impact. Those elements have hardly disappeared, but they are no longer enough on their own. Now, Wright wants the audience to feel like they briefly stepped inside something rather than simply watched him play a collection of songs.

“I care just as much about creating a feeling, a story, and something people can actually carry with them after the night is over.”

SoDown’s approach is now taking shape across the Scenes of Consciousness Tour, a 25-date North American run combining headline shows, festival appearances, and dates alongside artists including Manic Focus, WonkyWilla, AHEE, BLOSSM, Phyphr, Noetika, Green Matter, OVEREAZY, Def3, Chozen, and Oddly Eazy.

The run eventually leads back to Denver on February 13, 2027, where SoDown will headline Mission Ballroom for The SoDown Picture Show, an expanded hometown production built around bass music, live instrumentation, visual storytelling, and a full marching band. The scale is a long way from the beginning.

There was a time when Wright could not get booked at all. When Cervantes suddenly offered him a date with two weeks to spare, he sold tickets himself through Venmo, wrote handwritten notes to everyone willing to take a chance on the show, and somehow filled the room.

Now SoDown is headlining venues across North America, developing increasingly ambitious live productions, and bringing the same curiosity that once kept Wright searching through radio stations into an album built around memory, perspective, and presence.

For an artist whose career began with constantly searching for what might come next, Scenes of Consciousness represents an interesting turn.

SoDown is still moving forward. He is just becoming more interested in experiencing the moment while he is there.