How a North Topeka musician learned to sing authentically as Fat Dolsk

Ethan Dolsky does not particularly care if his new songs get heard by a hundred, a thousand or even a million people (although more never hurts).

He’s had that. The North Topeka musician, who goes by the artist name Fat Dolsk, has seen what it’s like to be heard by thousands of listeners around the world. His last album, a 2021 hip-hop collaboration with fellow Topeka-based musician Pancho, saw more than 1.1 million streams on Spotify. It even, for a day, became the No. 1 streamed album in New Zealand.

For all the success, though, it just wasn’t genuine.

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“It was exciting, and it was sad all at once,” Dolsky said. “There were moments where I doubted myself because the songs with the high streams were maybe not coming from the most genuine place.”

If that success was inauthentic, though, it also showed him that he at least had the kind of talent that could resonate with audiences, so Dolsky set out to expand on that, and fully tap into the depths of his experience as a Topeka teenager and young musician.

The result was “Midwest Blues,” an album that Dolsky says he’s poured his heart into, with songs diving into relatable themes like depression, anxiety and even alcoholism.

It’s an album that not only reflects him.

It is him.

How Ethan Dolsky turned into Fat Dolsk

Music, for Dolsky, has always been an obsession. Growing up, there were always instruments lying around his family’s house, and his dad bought him his own bass guitar when he was about 8 years old.

“I think I’ve always been drawn to people expressing themselves and their emotions,” Dolsky said. “I’ve always thought of myself as an emotionally intelligent person, and what drew me in about music was that it was a creative way for people to express themselves. I took that and ran with it as far as I could.”

Dolsky began to make a name for himself in high school, mostly playing covers of popular songs on his personal Instagram account. After he graduated and began making his own songs, mostly light-hearted, satirical rap songs, he connected online with k.dunk, a Minneapolis-based hip hop artist, through a shared love of rapper G-Eazy.

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The pair collaborated on “Suicide Pact,” which would become Dolsky’s first album, and released that album in March 2020 — days before the first U.S. lockdowns and reckoning with the pandemic.

“It was like I threw myself into this whole new world of stuff I had no idea about, and I couldn’t navigate it whatsoever because the world wouldn’t allow me to,” Dolsky said.

Still, k.dunk, whose real name is Austin Duncan, said he saw in Dolsky a kind of hustle that helped him endure that time.

“Both of us were lucky to have supporters who pushed us,” Duncan said. “But when you’re a quote-unquote, struggling artist, you do have to push yourself. With Ethan, we were through some ups and downs, and his motivation to keep going motivated me and I motivated him. In that sense, we were a good team.”

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The pandemic gave Dolsky time to grow as an artist. He developed a style he described as a fusion of various genres, but he gave the example of being a mixture of Ed Sheeran and Post Malone, to use a few household names. He said he also draws inspiration from other artists like G-Eazy, Kid Cudi, J. Cole and Logic.

In 2021, he branched out to work with other artists like Pancho Witt, the Topekan musician. The pair in 2021 released “Porsches, Dollas, Chains,” which became incredibly successful for a couple of independent, Midwestern musicians. The album’s melodic rap songs were a hit on social media, and since then, Dolsky has cultivated a following around the world, with the artist regularly receiving messages from fans in India and even Australia.

But Dolsky still wasn’t sure if he was writing songs to make it big, or songs with a heart.

'Midwest Blues' is Fat Dolsk at his most authentic

To be sure, Dolsky is grateful for the success he’s had with his albums and singles so far. He credits them with helping develop emotionally as an artist and giving him the tools to put his own thoughts and feelings into a creative work.

Writing songs for his new album, then, was almost like therapy, as he delved into more personal issues like depression and anxiety.

“Midwest Blues is an album that I think a lot of people can relate to,” he said. “There are a lot of songs that come from the emotions of someone who grew up with a normal life and had normal problems. I talk about experiences of my youth, my teenage years and early adulthood.”

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Braxton Huff, a longtime friend of Dolsky who has helped produce the album, said the album is Dolsky at his most authentic.

“It’s almost a story of himself, and the experiences he’s gone through writing this album and the styles that have flowed into it,” Huff said. “I really do see him embodied in this album.”

Dolsky mixed and mastered his own vocals, as well as any acoustic guitar parts, from a home studio. He wrote the songs in bursts, combing through instrumentals provided by producers he works with and finding the right melody to pour his heart into.

“That’s what makes it very honest,” he said. “There is not a single song on the album where I wrote it for some ulterior motive. It was always very specifically coming from me, where on the earlier albums, I had some of that, but only for moments.”

Dolsky still dreams of being successful as a music, but success has become relative for him. More than anything, he wants to be a full-time musician — whether that’s as a No. 1 artist, or as someone who can eke out just enough to make a living by releasing albums and playing shows.

“Things could always go bigger, but I’m glad that right now, I’m being more genuine,” Dolsky said. “I’ve thought long and hard that if I can get big, what kind of artist do I want to be? Do I want to be someone who is grasping for streams every chance I get and making songs I don’t care about, or do I want to be me?”

 “Midwest Blues” is out now on Spotify and Apple Music. Physical CD copies are also available at fatdolsk.com.

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at ‪785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Fat Dolsk reflects on musical path to "Midwest Blues" album