About Dara X

I’m Dara X – a vocalist, songwriter and self-taught producer from West Yorkshire. I’ve been writing music for over 15 years, blending rock, reggae, rap, indie and pop, and slowly building a world where I can create, record and release everything from my own studio in Halifax.

I started publicly performing around age 13 when I plucked up the courage to ask a busker if I could play a song on his setup in Leeds city centre when shopping at a weekend with my mum which kickstarted it all off. I actually used to see this busker out and about here and there up until just a couple years ago! I had started learning some songs when I got my first guitar age 7, in a music shop with my mum and dad. Unbeknownst to me my dad had been given a 50/50 chance in a battle against cancer and there I was sat twiddling away a little riff I had picked up from somewhere. My mum had gone ahead back to the car to meet us there and a short while later my mum recalls the wave of emotion she felt when she saw me appear with my dad, unplanned purchased guitar in-hand walking back. My dad had played and sang when he was younger and it felt like he took the opportunity to encourage me to explore the same whilst he could. It was not long until I was busking on the streets with just me, my guitar and not even a speaker!

Since then I’ve played at all sorts of events, DJ’d, wrote countless songs and my passion for music has always stuck with me throughout life.

My biggest strengths are vocals and songwriting. I play guitar well enough to accompany myself, and I can get around on a piano and drums, but where I really come alive is in topline writing and lyrics. I write quickly and I’ve got well over a hundred songs and projects in various stages of completion. The thing that’s held me back historically hasn’t been ideas – it’s been perfectionism, especially around production and mixing.

For a long time my knowledge on how to mix was far greater than my actual ability to mix after watching countless hours of tutorials and not truly putting the techniques and teachings into practice - that is a gap I have only been truly filling this past year or so! I’d write an idea I loved which filled me with excitement and hit a tedious wall of mixing tasks and ‘boring bits’ which I’ve often put off and moved on to new songs….a very bad habit!! At one point I listened to about 100 engineers portfolios and considered outsourcing everything, and even tried handing a couple songs over to other people but I disliked losing the creative ability to really shape things in my vision and found one of the songs strayed away from what I loved about it. In the end I committed to learning it myself. I’ve invested well over £25,000 over the years into equipment, education and my setup, and the tracks I’ve released so far are written, produced, mixed and mastered by me. They mark a shift from hoarding ideas to actually releasing them.

Genre-wise, I’m not in one lane. I’ve taken inspiration from Johnny Cash, Michael Jackson, Rival Sons, John Legend, Ben Howard, Russ, and a lot of rock, reggae, afrobeats, rap and even country music along the way. I’ve written everything from acoustic indie rock to reggae tunes, heavier rock songs and a full rap EP. A big chunk of the rock material has been written with one of my closest friends, Liam Bingley (an awesome guitarist). We’ve been working together for around eight years, and after a long time keeping it to ourselves, we’ve started sharing demos with credible producers and getting encouraging feedback. That side of things is coming.

Life outside the music has been intense at times. In 2020 I passed out whilst holding my breath under-water in a swimming pool, drowned and ended up in an induced coma. I woke up in hospital with no family or friends allowed in the room because of Covid rules. That experience changed how I look at time, risk and what I’m waiting for. Out of it came a rap EP called “Kingdom Coma” that I’m still finishing but really excited about.

In 2024 I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, which pushed me even deeper into health, fitness and taking responsibility for my own wellbeing. Away from music I work professionally as an Improvement Manager, using continuous improvement / Lean Six Sigma principles to make systems and processes better. It might sound miles apart from songwriting, but it actually fits: I’m obsessed with finding small ways to improve – my mixes, my live setup, my writing process, my performances, myself.

Right now, my priority is releasing the backlog: taking the rock songs, the reggae ideas, the rap EP and the more intimate tracks that have lived quietly on my hard drive, and letting them out into the world. I’m still growing as a producer and mixer, but I’m finally willing to share the journey instead of waiting for everything to be “perfect”.

If you’ve found this page because you’ve seen me busking, heard a track online or someone sent you my music, thanks for being here. If something in my story or my songs resonates with you, I’d love you to listen, follow and stay connected – and if you’d like to book me, work on music together or collaborate, you can find everything you need on the Events & Services page.