There are actually a few layers to it, and I’m kinda proud of how they all fit together, even if it was sort of unintentional.

Okay, so don’t laugh, but the apple part of the name originally came from the Among Us boom of 2020. The screen name I’d been using until then didn’t fit the ten-character limit, so I had to come up with something else. I liked wearing the plant hat, so I decided I would be Apple Man and only choose red, yellow, green, or pink. I never really got the chance to play with any irl friends, so it was my first ever foray into Discord voice chats. Maybe that seems odd to some, but I was a very obedient kid growing up, so when my parents said “don’t talk to strangers online”, I did as I was told. I think, in a way, it may have led to lonelier teenage years, but that’s besides the point. The point is that Apple Man was really my first time interacting with people online, period. (Outside of maybe Club Penguin, but I played in the lobbies where you couldn’t type out full chat messages, and had to resort to using preset phrases.)

So that’s the first iteration, but a while after that, I retroactively discovered another layer to the apple name that had to do with a story my family always liked to tell about me. I have a cousin who’s four-ish years older than me, so she was around four when I was born, and the story goes that when she found out my parents were having a baby, she wrote down a list of baby name ideas for me, and they were all ridiculous. Most of the names and the list itself have been lost to time, unfortunately, but the very first name on it was Apple Dan.

I really liked this accidental connection, so when it came time to decide on a name for this project, I wanted it to involve apples in some way. I found a old document brainstorming some names for it, so here are some of my favorites from that:

• Apple Man
• Apple Dew
• Apple Dawn
• Apple Dusk (apparently this was the name of a Warrior Cat)
• Dawn of Apples
• Fruit Basket
• Mr. Fruit (I later found out this name was already taken by a YouTuber)

On this list, the name Dawn of Apples stood out mainly for not just being a version of Apple [noun], but it also had an air about it that I liked. It’s a play on phrases like dawn of a new age, dawn of the dead, and dawn of the planet of the apes, which are all kind of imposing. Contrasting that with apples, essentially the most basic of fruit, gave it a more playful vibe that I felt was important, especially looking at the EDM scene, where people tend to have really intense-sounding names like Skrillex, Virtual Riot, Barely Alive, Excision, Xilent, and so on.

I thought that the dichotomy of being grandiose yet simple, or dramatic yet playful, was a really good way of describing the breadth of music I wanted to write. I didn’t want to constrain myself to just one genre, even outside of EDM, so I liked that the name could fit with almost any style of music I might end up writing.

So that’s how I came up with it! For some reason, when I chose this name, I expected people to call me Apple for short, like how they did when I was Apple Man, but I forgot that Dawn is also just a common English name, so Dawn was what stuck. I don’t mind it at all, it’s just funny to me.

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