Toronto’s Frank Dukes undergoes artistic rebirth, releases new album as Ging

In the world of record production, Toronto’s Adam Feeney is no longer putting up his Dukes.

The 39-year-old Feeney, who, as Frank Dukes, has factored in sales upwards of 50 million records either producing or creating samples for Drake, The Weeknd, Shawn Mendes, Daniel Caesar, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Post Malone, Camila Cabello, Lorde, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar among others, has not only retired the moniker, but also his producer-for-hire status.

Moving forward, Feeney will be known as Ging (a play on his middle name, King,) and take on a role that throughout his 20-year career, he swore he’d forego: that of recording artist and performer.

Feeney released his debut album, “We’re Here, My Dear,” independently on Nov. 11, and the most intriguing question surrounding the project is, what changed to make him consider an artistic rebirth?

“I think my life’s changed,” said Feeney over a Zoom call while he was holidaying in Japan.

“For so long, I wanted to accomplish something. With Frank Dukes, I think I came to that point in my career as a record producer where I got a lot of the things that I thought I wanted. Arriving at that moment makes you sort of re-evaluate what it is that you now want, and that started a chain reaction in my life that started with my career but sort of transcended into every part of my life.”

Feeney shared that there were some radical transitions in his personal life.

“When I started an inventory, I started really changing,” explained the father of two. “My relationship with the mother of my children — we had been together for 10 years — resulted in separation and that was a huge change. We lived in California and co-parented, and for me it was like, making this record and becoming an artist, it wasn’t a frivolous desire that I was repressing to be an artist. It was kind of out of a sense of urgency — of exploring myself as a person — and then knowing that I wanted to make art.

“At the beginning, I didn’t necessarily know what that meant for me exactly.”

Feeney said he initially entertained the prospect of making a Frank Dukes producer album featuring many of his high-profile superstar friends, but then soured on the idea.

“In the back of my head, as Frank Dukes, I thought maybe as a producer record I’d get my friends to be featured on it,” he admitted. “That was the first place my mind went: maybe I’ll make a producer-artist album. But that felt really unchallenging for me — not vulnerable and not scary enough.

“Everything I’ve done in my career had some sort of excitement coupled with the right kind of fear. The fear of, ‘am I going to be able to do this?’ Doing a producer record would have been really safe and comfortable, especially because when I was making records as Frank Dukes, I never really had an ambition to be the artist. I was never sitting in a studio with the artist thinking, ‘that’s supposed to be me.’”

But the lure of the unknown served as a catalyst for “We’re Here, My Dear,” a nine-song alt rock effort that’s very much an ode to love.

In fact, Feeney’s voice is reminiscent of Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan — something that surprised him as much as those that will listen to this record — mainly because Feeney had never even heard his own singing voice prior to creating “We’re Here, My Dear.”

“As a record producer, I’d write songs for people all the time and I’d never record my voice singing,” said Feeney, no slouch as a songwriter with such chart-toppers as The Jonas Brothers “Sucker,” Camila Cabello’s “Havana,” the Shawn Mendes/Justin Bieber duet “Monster” and Post Malone “Wow” among his credentials.

“Even the formation of my singing voice was forming in real time. I started singing maybe three years ago — and to my surprise — that’s what my voice sounded like.”

As for “We’re Here, My Dear,” named after the first full song Feeney ever wrote for himself, he said the project is “really influenced by the records I grew up with — like The Beatles and Nirvana and sonically and texturally like Wu-Tang and RZA’s productions.

“I think that’s like the foundation of everything for me — almost the core of the music I followed first as a child. And that process of disseminating almost where I was at with Frank Dukes and almost going back to his core as an artist was a really important part of the process for me.

“The foundation that I want to build Ging on … I want that to be the foundation for me to merge all my worlds together where the new music that I’m making is a lot more exploratory and experimental and free and colourful and fun, because that’s also where I’m at, at this moment in my life.

“I finished writing ‘We’re Here, My Dear’ two years ago. It was very indicative of where I was at in my life. It’s a record that has a purpose that is intentional and is a period of my life that was very serious and very emotional that I want to share.”

Speaking of merging his worlds, his legacy as Frank Dukes is far from dead. It was as that persona that Feeney served as mentor and helped evolve a number of local talents ranging from Charlotte Day Wilson and BadBadNotGood to Daniel Caesar, Mustafa and River Tibor on to bigger and better things.

He created and owns the Kingswood Music Library — with one volume of it called Parkscapes including performances by Regent Park School of Music students, part of which was sampled by Taylor Swift for her song “It’s Nice To Have Friends” on her 2019 album “Lover” — and the proceeds of that sample library has financed — and continues to finance — D’Bi Anitafrika’s Who Am I workshop, a program designed to help young artists and creatives connect with their cultural roots and express them through both visual and musical arts.

While he was transitioning from Frank Dukes to Ging, issuing an earlier “The Ghost of Frank Dukes” project called “The Way of Ging,” Feeney also issued a number of NFTs (nonfungible tokens) and tipped a toe into Web 3.

“That exploration had taught me a lot,” he said. “I got really excited about the prospect of the future and I still am. ‘NFT’ feels like a little bit of a dirty word now, but even the web 3 in general, the evolution of the internet, and this idea of ownership and artists rewriting the rules — it’s still an exciting prospect and I really believe that in the future — I don’t know when, I don’t know how — but that’s where we’re all going.

“It is going to revolutionize the models for everything, especially for art and creators. This idea of generative music and building a music library that exists in Web 3 — really, the first of its kind — felt like throwing a party that started at midnight and I showed up at 1 p.m. to DJ and wondering, ‘where is everybody?’

“I realized that I was working with a niche within a niche: the producer market that is into NFTs, and ultimately my goal with that was an experiment to explore a radical concept in generative music and a music library and in experimenting with sampling, which has always been in the ethos of my world.

Next up for Ging is performance, and Feeney said that he’s performed in L.A. and Paris thus far, and promises a Toronto appearance at some point in 2023.

In the meantime, as tracks like “Never Want To Leave,” “Miracles,” “Dear Boy” and “Can You See Me” continue to attract more fans into the Ging fold, Adam Feeney is willing to bide his time and soak in and grow with this new chapter of his life.

“As a person I constantly shift and change, and all my ideas of how I thought I was supposed to do this have changed over the course of doing it,” he concluded. “The music is precious to me, but the way of sharing it doesn’t need to be so precious. I make music. I love making music and I want to continue to share making music.

“It’s almost that simple.”

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