Chad Shank

I'm Chad Shank. I write, produce, sing, mix, and master my own music out of Minneapolis.

I've been writing songs for over thirty years, and I'm still a student of it. Songwriting is the kind of craft that keeps opening up the longer you stay with it. There's always another layer. A better rhyme. A tighter prosody. A melody that lands harder because the stress fell where the feeling was. I study it the way some people study scripture. I earned my Songwriting certificate through Berklee Online and later taught there myself, which kept me on both sides of the desk for a long time. I learn as much from teaching as I do from writing.

My teachers, directly and indirectly, are the ones who built the tradition I love. Brill Building writers. Jam and Terry Lewis. Prince. Babyface. Rod Temperton. Diane Warren. Carole King. Max Martin. The 70s and 80s pop and R&B I grew up on set my compass: grooves you feel in your chest, chords that open up a room, melodies that stick, lyrics that carry weight.

Somewhere along the way I picked up the whole toolkit. Production, engineering, the mix, the master. I wanted the song in my head to be the song that came out of the speakers. Everything you hear on a Chad Shank record, I made.

My YouTube channel is a library of everything I've learned along the way, left up for other writers to dig through whenever they need it. It's not where I live anymore, but it's still there, and I'm glad when it's useful.

These days my focus is on the work itself. I'm not building a platform. I'm not chasing a market. I'm leaving a trail. Music for whoever finds it. A song in a playlist, a track someone stumbles on at 2 a.m., an album that shows up when it's supposed to. The mystery is part of the point.

Thanks for listening.