by Aram Arkun
WATERTOWN — Music producer Armen Zabounian, known to most of the world as Peyote Beats, worked hard over a decade before receiving global acclaim for his work as producer of the track Boiled Peanuts on the album “Alligator Bites Never Heal” by Doechii. Break out star Doechii’s album won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album on February 2. Almost two weeks later, the elated Peyote declared, “It’s surreal, still.”
Armen Zabounian aka Peyote Beats (photo courtesy Armen Zabounian)
Born in the United States, Zabounian grew up in Palm Springs, Calif. When he was five, he said, his parents started him on piano lessons, and once a year he would play at piano recitals. As proud Armenians, his parents made him learn Aram Khachaturian and Arno Babajanian pieces, and since he was the only Armenian child at these recitals, he would be the only one playing this music, which was new to the audience.
Fast forwarding to freshman year at high school, Zabounian played piano in a jazz class in a band and heard someone play Hey Joe by Jimmy Hendrix on the guitar. This captivated Zabounian intensely and two weeks later his father bought him a guitar. He soon started a rock band, and studied every era of rock music, though his band particularly loved the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine.
He said as the band performed at house parties and high school events, its members wanted to stand out from the type of rock music famous in the 2000s, and so they also covered rap songs by the stars of the genre, such as Doctor Dre. That is where his love for hip hop was born.
Zabounian recalled that his parents, like many Armenians, especially in the older generations, did not believe that a career in the arts could provide a reliable livelihood. He said, “I wanted to leave Palm Springs, and the only way I could do it was to attend a real university with some kind of major like business or law.” So that is what he did.
After two years at the College of the Desert in Palm Desert, he went to Woodbury University in Burbank and majored in business marketing. He happened to live with roommates from Dubai who also played music, and they would all play together for fun. He said, “I was getting ready at that point, in my late, late teens, my early, early 20s, to kind of stop the music, because that is what you get in your head, that this music stuff isn’t going to bring me any real career.”
Then when he was just playing music with his roommates, he said, “One of them, I remember, just took me aside and reminded me. They were like, ‘yo, you can’t just leave music. That is what you do.’” Zabounian realized that he was right. He said, “My life has been full of signs that I have been able to read luckily — that hey, this is where you belong. That was one of those first moments, I would say.”
Nevertheless, after graduating from Woodbury in 2012, he began working in marketing and ended up running the marketing department for a business while he did music on the side. He started to get involved in music production when he was 22 because, he explained, it was easier than keeping a band together where there might be four people thinking in four different ways.
Entering Music Scene Full Time
By this point, living in Pasadena, Zabounian had a little music studio, and every day, after work, he would go there and work as long as he needed. Sometimes it was midnight and sometimes as late as 3 a.m. He would then go back home and sleep until 6 or 7 a.m. and get ready for his day job.
This was not an easy schedule and Zabounian eventually understood he could not sustain this level of work. He said, “There was a couple times that I slept at the wheel while I was driving late at night because I wasn’t getting enough sleep.”
After four or five years at the marketing job, Zabounian’s boss, who remains to this day a mentor to him, sat him down and said that during the time he was working in marketing he could have already started his own label. Since this is what he seemed to want to do, he should leave and focus on his passion.
“When they tell you not to put all your eggs in one basket, that is what I did,” Zabounian said. “You do have to do that for a career like this, my line of work, because there is no half stepping or just one foot in the door…it really just takes all of your energy and commitment.”
It was a scary time for Zabounian because he no longer had a guaranteed paycheck but had to work freelance. For the next four or five years, he was practically living in the music studio, while he applied his marketing tactics to reach the first step in success, producing music for someone fairly well known.
Finally, he said, he got one record around 2015 with two rappers on it. Zabounian leveraged that record to help get even bigger opportunities.
Armen Zabounian aka Peyote Beats (photo courtesy Armen Zabounian)
He chose the pseudonym Peyote Beats for himself, and now he said that no one calls him Armen anymore. Peyote is a type of cactus that Native Americans would take as part of their religion. It is hallucinogenic. Zabounian said though he has not tried it himself, “the reason I chose that name is that I needed something that connected me to the desert. That is where I am from. My heart is always in the desert – that is like my theme. So Peyote was the most edgy thing I could choose. It just sounds cool.”
Zabounian said that Jimmy Hendrix remains his biggest influence on how he played the guitar, and as far as production went, Doctor Dre and Kanye West were most important.
Music Producing 101
A music producer may do everything from providing beats (basically the underlying rhythmic pattern or instrumentals), scheduling, shaping an artist’s music, to recording, mixing and technical work. Zabounian said, “I had to learn to do all of those things, because there was no one else to do it. I had my studio, which was an advantage, because I could tell artists, hey, come to my studio. I can record you there. I can make the beat for you there.”
Through trial and error, he said, he learned how to produce, from making the instrumental to the vocal production, to directing the performers on how to do it — how to sing, how to rap. He added, “Being a multi-instrumentalist also gave me an advantage that other producers did not have.” In sessions with artists, he either shows them a beat that he made or he may make something with them from scratch. He may start playing on the guitar or on the keyboard and see how they react.
Another way is when music labels send briefs which describe the type of sounds they are looking for, sometimes with YouTube links to songs from famous artists as examples. Then Zabounian works with songwriters, and he provides them with a track to which they write.
He said, “I do sometimes write lyrics…There are times that I assist in that as well. It really depends on whom I am working with. If they are open to it, then I will step in.”
When asked whether what he did could be considered composing, he replied, “We don’t use [the word] compose as much, but yes, technically that is what it is. It is composing music in this day.”
Rap and J-pop Meet Aznavour
Zabounian started working with hip hop music and rap, but, he said, “Now, it is really everything and anything….It is just to the point that whatever room we are in, whatever they are asking for, I am able to switch gears to do.” He began producing a lot of J-pop (Japanese pop) and K-pop (Korean pop) music, as well as American pop. He has done country, Mexican traditional home music, Latin, reggae, rhythm and blues.
He listened to Japanese rap and pop when he was much younger and wanted to be a part of that. Around eight years ago, Yuki Chiba, the most famous Japanese rapper came to America and as a result of a connection visited his studio. Two years ago, in 2023, Zabounian went to Japan for the first time and stayed with him. Yuki Chiba had done a record in 2024 with American female rapper Megan Thee Stallion.
“What I am doing in Japan is I am shifting the culture,” he said. Chiba usually did straight rap but together they started doing enka, a traditional 1960s type of Japanese music in which he is singing. People did not know that he could do that. “It is funny that he chose me, an Armenian American, to craft that sound for him. He could have just gone to some Japanese person to do Japanese traditional.”
Zabounian introduced Chiba to Charles Aznavour, which he loved, and then suggested to make songs like those of Aznavour. This led to preparing a whole album’s worth of songs in this style, which Zabounian said will hopefully come out this year.
Working with Chiba allowed Zabounian entry into the rest of Japan’s music scene, including the pop realm. Zabounian said that he goes once a year to Japan to work for a month. He said, “I love Japan. I think it is my favorite country. The people are so respectful and honorable. It is such a clean country and their culture is very strong.”
Armenian pop is one type of music Zabounian has not yet worked with. He said, “I am open to it now. I just don’t think that Armenia has the artists that are popular worldwide and I wish that would change. Maybe I can discover someone or if I can help make that happen, with my networking and my position, that would be amazing.”
He observed that a lot of Armenian artists straight from Armenia sing in English, and there should be a different approach not just trying to imitate Americans.
He has been to Armenia several times, but has not worked on music there. After the Grammys, Armenians have reached out to him though, and he already is going to meet with an Armenian-American rapper.
The Grammys and Doechii
Zabounian has worked with popular artists such as Tyga, NBA Youngboy, French Montana, Jhene Aiko, Pop Smoke (the late rapper Bashar Barakah Jackson), Trippie Redd, Roy Woods, Blxst and 6ix9ine.
A number of the songs he produced received awards. He produced the song Never Ever Land on Trippie Redd’s mixtape or album “A Love Letter to You,” and this album in June 2019 received the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)’s Gold-Certification for combined sales and album-equivalent units of over 500,000 in the United States. In November 2022, the same album reached the platinum level with sales of 1,000,000 units.
Zabounian received the ASCAP Pop Award for producing Tyga, Jhene Aiko and Pop Smoke’s hit Sunshine, which became one of the most performed pop songs of 2023. This song reached the #1 billboard position at Rhythmic Radio in 2022 and Zabounian was both a contributing writer as well as a producer for it.
Zabounian said he had wanted to work with the hip-hop music label Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) for around 12 years, since rapper Kendrick Lamar’s debut album came out, but it was too big a firm to easily connect with. Around four or five months ago, however, he saw an email from someone in TDE and looked her up on Instagram. She was Cheyenne Chaves, head of the TDE A&R [Artists and Repertoire] Administration. He wrote to her that he would like to work with TDE, so she invited him to bring in his tracks and beats.
TDE executives picked out some, he related, and a few days after the meeting called Zabounian to ask him to make a specific type of beat. “After the call, I took maybe two hours to make it. I sent it to them, texted it to them, and from there, just a couple of changes back and forth [occurred],” he said.
Then one or two weeks later, the artist Doechii recorded on it. She created the melody and the lyrics. Zabounian said that he played the keyboard and bass on it and did the drum programming as well. While there might have been some post-production added, he produced all other musical elements.
He said, “I was excited about the record but I didn’t expect it to blow up to historic proportions like it has to become one of the most important female hip-hop albums out really. I had no clue.” Many celebrities began praising the album after it came out.
“When I had just landed in Japan in November it was about 4 a.m. and I started getting notifications on my phone that the album had been nominated for the best rap album category [of the Grammy Awards], and that was crazy, emotional. I may have shed a tear or two in bed in Japan.” Even afterwards, however, he was not sure that she could actually win the award, because the other people in her category were male rappers that were considered legends, like Eminem, Future & Metro Boomin, J. Cole, Command & Pete Rock.
The album kept on breaking sales records over the next few months, and the song Zabounian produced was performed along with some of the others at festivals and on a few shows like “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Concert, so he started to think the album had a chance to win. When he walked into the awards ceremony on February 2, it was the first Grammy he had ever attended, and the album won the first award that was announced. Zabounian said he thought, “If I had been fashionably late, even ten minutes, I wouldn’t have even seen it. It was so early.”
Aside from the fame accompanying the production of a Grammy-winning song, Zabounian said, “There is another amazing part — to see what you created in a dark room being played all of a sudden to the whole world outside.”
He said that literally the day after the award, new doors began to open for him, and he expected that this would continue for the rest of the year. However, he said, “I am going back in to work as if I hadn’t gotten that award, because I have seen a lot of people win Grammys and then you notice afterwards that they don’t really do much. There isn’t much coming out from them anymore. Maybe they got comfortable. I can’t afford to do that so I will still work the same as before I achieved the Grammy. I am right now taking massive advantage of it and reaching out, and my game is leverage.”
When asked which of his songs or work he would consider the best, the industrious musician and producer exclaimed, “Always in my mind I haven’t gotten to my best record yet and that’s what keeps my chops up. I don’t even listen to my songs that I make after they come out. I am not really into it. I am already on the next one. It is always going to be a forever process in my mind to get to my biggest record or my best record.”
