Cade Hoppe is, in a way, living a Troy Bolton-esque “High School Musical” story in real life. He grew up in Sacramento, CA and was poised to pursue both finance and basketball, which he had been playing since the age of four, professionally. Hoppe began his finance degree and collegiate basketball program at NYU, dipping his toe into the music world when he could, but then the pandemic hit. He shifted focus, took a gap year, and then, unlike Troy Bolton, who vowed to chase both his musical and athletic dreams, gave up basketball. “I value education,” he said. “But I’m not doing the finance thing as a backup plan, I think I’m trying to get as much out of it that will help THE plan, which is to keep doing music forever.”  

Hoppe, who is inspired by artists like Ben Folds, Taylor Swift, and Coldplay, has taken advantage of the resurgence of live music in the tri-state area as of late, attending a wide variety of shows including Griff at NYC’s Bowery Ballroom, John Mayer at MSG and Bleachers at Boston’s new Roadrunner venue.

“I soak up a lot of things,” he said. “The way I justify the expense of going to concerts is that I’m learning how people are putting together live shows. Something that I think I already kind of knew, but was important for me to see in person, is that you can’t fake the live show, but you also can’t fake a good song.” He talked about being able to strip all of the production and smoke and mirrors away from a song and convincingly play it stripped down, which is one of the most notable qualities of his new song, “Morphine.”

“Morphine,” an acoustic guitar-led ballad, is Hoppe at his most honest and vulnerable. He wrestles with himself and certain ideas that he has known since childhood, but, as an adult, is choosing to push aside. The opening line, “I can’t help lying to my family about my faith,” sets the tone, and only gets more introspective from there. Hoppe stays in his rich, Leonard Cohen-like bass register for the entirety of the track, which he joked he could still sing after a 24-hour Taylor Swift concert, if need be. 

“’Morphine’ felt like a breakthrough in songwriting for me,” said Hoppe. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I just say something…. I never have to put this out. What do I want to say right now? What do I want to say that scares me?’” The song covers a lot of ground, including Hoppe’s desire to be as good as those who inspired his musical journey. In the first verse he sings, “I can’t listen to my favorite songs anymore. I try to write a song as good but come up short,” which stems from almost a desperation to be able to include one of his own creations in the same sentence as a song by one of his idols. But with “Morphine,” he may have satisfied that lingering ache.

“This song feels worthy,” he said. “If my heroes heard this song, I kind of feel like… maybe they’d like it.” The process also gave him to the opportunity to fully put himself first. “I think who I don’t want to become is someone that is filled with regret,” he said. “I especially don’t want that regret to be resentment to the people that I love because I felt like I cared too much about what they thought I was doing, to actually do what I want. It’s important to realize that the people who really do love you and care about you want you to be the person that you want to be, even if it’s not exactly what they had in mind.” 

The music video for the track is out now. A relatively simple concept that shows Hoppe, alone in a bright white room, struggling with his demons. While there are shots of him in the reflection of a mirror, he never actually looks at himself in it, hinting that he is afraid to see himself in this light. He meticulously cuts lemons into slices and dumps them into a coffee maker, along with some sugar, to make lemonade as a reference to the lyric, “The coffee is out so the nurse brought me lemonade. I’m scared to death because they taste the same.” 

Hoppe, along with many other young independent artists, has chosen TikTok as his go-to promotional tool. The social media platform is informative, ridiculous, a Gen-Z haven, a COVID/political warzone, and more, all at the same time. For musicians, it is the new, most relevant way of attracting a fanbase and, potentially, the attention of record label executives and industry movers and shakers. Hoppe used it to garner hype for his song “Hurts,” released back in January, and again for “Morphine.” However, he has his issues with the platform.

“I don’t know what makes a great TikTok sound or song,” he said. “My fear is that, in the industry, there is more value in making a song to be ‘TikTok viral’. Too much of it right now is ‘Ok, how do you make a line that, within 10 seconds, is going to have a rising and falling action and a punchline that will also grab you in one second?’” He also questions the personal marketability factor of it, from his voice and physical appearance. “I don’t know that my voice is something that is going to capture people that have never seen me before. There’s a ’TikTok look’ and a ‘TikTok sound’ too, and I don’t know that I naturally possess those things.” 

Nevertheless, whether any of that is true or not, he still works hard to try and crack the code. Most of his TikTok’s include a caption along the lines of “If you’re a fan of Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers or Ben Folds, you will like my music.” A bold statement, but his persistence has attracted the Swifties, Taylor Swift’s legions of dedicated fans, to his music. “I know that Taylor’s fans will probably, kind of like the music,” he said with a smile. “If I can find a way to talk about Taylor Swift with them and tell them that I love her too, but that I also have music of my own, that is usually a pretty good first impression. I don’t want to sound super overcalculated about this, but I want to take the opportunities that I can to pitch to people that I think are in my target audience.” 

Hoppe’s informed, modern takes on his career as a musician are impressive. “I don’t want to confuse the word ‘commercial’ with having potential for a lot of people to like it,” he said, on the current state of music. “Commercial is almost like, a genre. I think that there are songs that have great streaming potential on Spotify, that are very ‘playlistable,’ but they don’t have to be commercial to be that.” 

He is working on a new EP, set for release later this year, and is as grounded, focused and realistic about his intentions with the project as he is everything else. “I really, really love this collection of songs,” he said. “I’ve been excited about it since even before we put out the last EP. I’m just trying to create the ‘Cade Hoppe world’. As my discography grows, I just want all of these songs to feel like Cade Hoppe songs. Taylor Swift’s Red is like, the microcosm of her career, and I always look to that record when I’m thinking, ‘Can I do this? Can I write this song?’ I listen to that and I think, ‘Yeah, I can.’ As long as it’s me, it’s a Cade Hoppe record.”  

You can stream “Morphine” via the link below, and follow Cade on social media here: 

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