Photo Courtesy of Phillip “Zain” Dias Jr.
NUTLEY, NJ — Mark Borino spent years pitching song ideas and tracks to producers in an effort to have one of his tracks chosen by an artist to record. The songwriter and producer, who grew up in Nutley, finally got good news last year, a call telling him that one of his songs had made it onto the 2021 Drake album “Certified Lover Boy.” Ever since then his career has taken off; he has written and produced music for other artists, as well as for himself. But it took a long time to get there.
“It was steppingstones,” Borino said in a phone interview with the Nutley Journal on May 13. “It was years of meeting people and talking to them. I got in touch with someone who was working with Drake, and I would follow up with him. I was just pitching music and hoping. Eventually, he called and said Drake wanted to use it.”
The song, “Papi’s Home,” which Borino co-wrote and co-produced, was released last year. But even until the album was released, he wasn’t sure if it would happen.
“When you get a placement, you don’t think about it a lot,” Borino said. “Things get pulled; songs don’t get cleared. You never know what will happen. I forget that I had a hand in it. But I used to listen to Drake all the time with my friends, and we would always say, ‘Man, what if you did a song with Drake?’”
The song came after a decade of Borino trying to make a living writing and producing songs. As a student at John H. Walker Middle School, Borino joined the choir for what he thought would be an easy A and found that he loved music. He graduated from Nutley High School in 2010, when emerging technology made it easy to create beats on a laptop without having to go to a studio. After spending a semester as a student at William Paterson University, he dropped out to pursue music and earned an audio engineering certificate from SAE Institute of Technology.
“It really is the Wild West. You just have to work,” Borino said about breaking into the music industry. “From then, it was just working on music. It had to be a full-time thing; I was just home making records. I worked 15 different side jobs and seasonal jobs.”
According to Borino, people who want to work in the music industry have to be OK with delayed gratification. It’s rare to begin writing and producing with artists right off the bat.
“I would send so many ideas to producers, even if they never replied,” he said. “It’s been a long 11 years of grinding. It’s delayed gratification, but I just saw something I wanted to do.”
Borino grew up listening to a wide variety of genres but gravitated especially to house, dance, hip hop and R&B. The latter two genres are where he does most of his work these days, partly because it’s what is the most popular in the industry and partly because there is a do-it-yourself element to it that made it easy for him to learn.
“If I’m making a rock song, I need live instrumentation,” Borino said. “When I was starting, I didn’t have money to go to a studio or pay musicians. I can mess around on the piano, but that’s it. But to make beats, you can learn how to program on software, and there’s a lot of videos on YouTube that help.”
Borino sometimes tries to write songs with a specific artist in mind, but for the most part he makes tracks and tries to place them.
“Sometimes I gear it towards one person,” he said. “Sometimes they are looking for something different. So I just do my thing and hope for the best. The melodies are important no matter what, so if you can write a great melody, it will catch on.”
The easiest way to get into the industry, Borino said, is to just start writing songs.
“You can start by getting a computer and just getting going,” he said. “People look for shortcuts, and there aren’t any. You just start creating.”
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