Soul Savant Gareth Donkin Talks Yearning for R&B’s ‘Classic Sound’ on Debut Album ‘Welcome Home’

Like many good things, it started with a deep dive into yacht rock. 

Scott Barkham, who manages the experimental soul outfit Hiatus Kaiyote, was trawling Spotify’s less-traveled byways looking for hidden yacht rock gems when he happened across “Dreaming,” a snappy-yet-plush track by the 23-year-old singer-songwriter-producer Gareth Donkin. “It was really well constructed and executed,” Barkham recalls. “So I investigated further.” On Instagram, he found a video of Donkin covering Bobby Caldwell’s wistful 1980 classic “Open Your Eyes.” “That really got my attention,” Barkham says. He now co-manages Donkin.

Donkin’s debut album Welcome Home, which is out Friday (Aug. 24) on the young label drink sum wtr, is grounded in immaculate R&B from the late 1970s and early 1980s — delicate falsetto, giddily elaborate vocal harmonies, opulent keyboards, nimble bass lines. There are echoes of Debarge, Kenny Loggins, Quincy Jones‘ productions for George Benson and James Ingram, and a host of fragile soul ballads that seem on the verge of evaporating like smoke before a stiff breeze.

“I really love that classic sound, and I feel like that’s a hole in today’s scene,” Donkin says. “Some people like Silk Sonic and Tom Misch are killing it by revisiting that.” His goal: “Bringing the character from that era’s music” into the present.

Growing up in France near the Swiss border, Donkin started playing piano at age eight and became addicted to the production software program Ableton at 13, the year before he moved to London. “I’ve had such a fascination with music and the creation of it since, well, forever,” he says. “Around the house we were always listening to Prince, Stevie Wonder, Jamiroquai, all the greats.” 

While Donkin spent some time playing drums, he mostly works with keyboards and technology to translate his ideas. “I can hear parts and find MIDI instruments or very realistic sounding samples to realize and execute those,” he explains matter-of-factly. “A lot of the songs I’ve made I’ve kind of written up here” — he points to his forehead — “before even coming to the piano and playing it out.”

His music found a wider audience in 2019 with “Catharsis,” which contrasts airy, mercurial vocals and a needlepoint guitar solo with an unwavering neo-soul beat. “That was the first fully fleshed-out song that I wrote and recorded vocals over,” Donkin says.  It “caught the eyes and ears of the wider producer/songwriter community on Soundcloud and Spotify. This led to a lot of collaboration opportunities, and music platforms such as Soulection to discover my music and [in turn] put a lot of people onto it.”

Much of the music on Welcome Home was started the following year, during the tumult of the pandemic. Isolation, despite its many drawbacks, did not hamper Donkin’s ability to conjure a sumptuous sound — “Nothing We Can’t Get Through” and “Tell Me Something” come on like they’re auditioning for inclusion on the back half of Michael Jackson‘s Off the Wall. (The reference point he cited for the string arrangement on the former was Disney scores.)

For more oomph, there’s “‘Til the End of Time (Night Sky),” a harmony showcase underpinned by a tricky, propulsive beat that stutter-steps like Al Green’s “I’m Glad You’re Mine,” and “Something Different,” a bright, crunchy, just-too-slow-to-disco track with a virtuosic, head-nodding outro. (That outro is “the oldest part of the record;” Donkin wrote the chords at age 18 while sitting in an airport in Greece.)

After Barkham heard “Dreaming” — and found that he had already saved “Catharsis” to his library on a previous Spotify discovery expedition — he reached out to Donkin. “When I really love the artistry, I’ll offer my help,” Barkham says. Soon he was listening to an earlier version of Welcome Home. Donkin “was referencing Ashford & Simpson, obscure yacht rock like Bill LaBounty, Brazilian music,” Barkham marvels. “The level of sophistication in his music and his production went way beyond what I was expecting.”

Barkham asked Donkin’s permission to share the music with a few people whose taste he admired. That group included Nigil Mack, a former major-label A&R who helped sign Kid Cudi. Mack was impressed: “To be so young but be able to write at that top-line level kind of blew me away,” he says. “So did his vocal tone.” Mack founded drink sum wtr, which shares services with the indie stalwart Secretly, last year. Donkin was among his first signings. 

With one album done, he is already thinking about his next release. “I’ve been on a listening binge with Earth, Wind & Fire, and their arrangements and the horns parts are just incredible,” Donkin says. “With the next project I can hopefully get bigger horn parts.”

He’s also in the process of honing a mostly untested live show. Donkin “needs to do tons of shows and start to just play in London regularly and just get himself out there as often as possible,” Barkham says. “I performed some of the songs when they were still in demo stages but not as much as I would like to,” Donkin acknowledges. “I hope to hit the road next year.”  

But first, Welcome Home: “I’ve always envisioned my first big statement being something that I work on over time that just shows where my head has been musically speaking,” Donkin says. “I’m ready to let people in.”