Chartbreaker is Billboard's monthly series highlighting an artist's first-ever Billboard chart appearance. This month, our Chartbreaker is Trevor Daniel, who is currently making waves on the Billboard Hot 100 with his debut entry, “Falling,” which sets a new peak on the tally this week at No. 31.
Inspired by Blink-182’s Travis Barker and Steve Gadd (who has collaborated with the likes of Steely Dan, Paul Simon and Eric Clapton), Houston native Trevor Daniel started playing drums in second grade. By the time he was in high school in 2010, he was making his own music, using a computer software program called Mixcraft 5 and watching YouTube tutorials made by production collective Internet Money for assistance. One day, he accidentally brought a stick mic home from school; he and his friends quickly assembled a bare-bones home studio and got to work.
“I wrapped a sock around the microphone and duct taped it to this hanger pole,” Daniel, now 25, says with a laugh. “We didn’t even know how to have [the beat] go through headphones, so you could hear it in the background. We hung up like, 20 different colors of blankets — it was so bad.”