What’s It Like Being a DJ With OCD? Spencer Brown on the Diagnosis That Helped Him Understand Himself & His Art

Since entering the dance scene nearly a decade back, Spencer Brown has made his name on progressive house music that’s lush, emotive and pristinely produced.

That last part is not a coincidence. Brown, 29, has always been a hyper-perfectionist, and in the last few years he’s gotten a better understanding about why.

“There’s been symptoms and signs since I was a kid,” Brown tells Billboard over Zoom. “It got really intense five or six years ago, but I didn’t know what was going on.”

What was going on was obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which Brown was formally diagnosed with during the pandemic but had always been a part of his life. The American Psychiatry Association defines OCD as “a disorder in which people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas or sensations (obsessions). To get rid of the thoughts, they feel driven to do something repetitively (compulsions).”

For Brown, OCD manifests as an extreme discomfort with uncertainty, with his obsessive thought loops being the compulsion attempting to mitigate it. Since childhood, Brown would find six different ways to ask his parents the same question. As an adult, he’d barrage his team with texts about how tickets to his shows were selling and ask 40 different people which of two mixes they thought sounded better.

“The thing is with with OCD, a lot of people think it means you have to like clean everything,” Brown says. “But in reality, it can come out in so many different ways and for me, it’s almost purely a mental thing. The ritual, so to speak, of milling over things that are uncertain.”

Certainty can be hard to come by for most people, and can be especially elusive for someone in a profession that relies on ticket sales, streams and consistent artistic inspiration. But after starting work with a therapist, Brown says he’s “learned how to sit with being uncertain about something better than I used to.”

It thus follows that his latest album is called Equanimity, a word Merriam-Webster defines as “evenness of mind especially under stress.” Out this past Friday (Sept. 29) via diviine, the album — Brown’s third studio LP — took him four years to make and found him spending 12-18 hours in the study every day during the last three months of production. He says that when he listens to it, he’s certain it’s his best work to date.

“The theme of this album is personal growth, not letting things out of your control affect your mental state,” he says. “That was a lesson I learned that I tried to capture into this music.”

Here, Brown talks about his diagnosis.

Tell me about how your OCD manifests.

With music, OCD for me comes out in perfectionism. I think that’s the blessing of this thing, because I’m so dialed in on what I’m doing. If it’s not a perfect mix, I’m gonna just keep on working on it and testing it out. I have an issue that I’ll finish it and turn it into mastering, then they’ll send the master back, I’ll sit with it and be like, “is this messed up?” I’ll sit with those thoughts, then maybe a couple of weeks later I’ll have to go back and redo the whole thing.

It sometimes drives people who work with me nuts, but we’ve learned to work in a productive way, where my team is fully aware of how my brain works, and I’m fully aware of how my brain works. They understand that sometimes I have this thing, and they totally accept that.

Are there are other aspects?

I’ve had to make a conscious effort to not bother my team too much. I used to really worry all the time about ticket sales. For a big show, let’s say a couple days before we only have 200 tickets sold, and we need to sell 1,500 tickets. I would be freaking out like, “Is this going to be bad? Are people going to show up?”

I’d be blowing up my team like, “Do you think there’s gonna be walk ups?” But I get to the show and maybe 1,000 people buy a ticket the day of the show, and it’s a packed show. And I’m like, “Why did I spend days having so much anxiety about how this is going to be, when really all I can do is just promote the show?” So now we have a thing on my team. I don’t get ticket sales number counts. No one gives me any of that stuff anymore. It’s really, really helpful for me.

When did that boundary get put in place?

I would say post-COVID. I really started to understand how OCD affects my life about a year into COVID, which is a funny thing, because there’s so much uncertainty with COVID. That was a true test of not letting [OCD] run my life. Basically I learned practicing equanimity, which is which is what my album is called. That means all these things can be happening around you, but you have to ground yourself and understand it’s okay that you don’t know… You have to be okay with uncertainty.

What was the response within your peer group, when you shared the diagnosis?

I do have friends who deal with similar things. But obviously everyone’s very supportive. It’s like, this is my personality. This is how I have been my whole life. All that’s changed is putting a label on how my brain works and realizing it’s slightly different than how other people’s brains work.

Everyone is totally understanding, especially my team, my peers, my collaborators. Everyone knows that this is how I am.

What other adjustments have you made?

Pre-COVID, before I learned how OCD manifests in my life, all I would do is cause myself anxiety. It was this anxiety cycle of uncertainty causing anxiety, then I would do things to try to get certainty, like texting 40 different people sending them two mixes saying “which mix is better?”

Half the people would like mix B, and half the people would like mix A, so then I would go into this loop of like, “oh my gosh, which one is right?” Then I would go to my car and test it. I would go to the club and test it. I would test it in my studio and on my headphones and on my air pod, over and over and over and over. At some point, you just need to decide like, “This is what it is. I’m done.” The past is the past, and I need to move on instead of dwelling.

And both versions are probably good.

They’re different. That’s it’s art is something I had to also had to learn. Some of these creative decisions, there is no right or wrong.

What other tools have you used to work with your OCD?

I was going into this therapist who’s incredible. And I was talking through all these things that were going in my head that I couldn’t explain. I would say things like “I don’t know if this, or I don’t know if that and it’s giving me anxiety.”

He’d say, “You’re looking for certainty on this, and I can’t give it to you.” All the sessions turned into me basically speaking to a wall. I love the guy, but that was the whole point of the therapy. I learned the same feeling I’m having with my therapist, where he won’t give me certainty on what I have uncertainty for, I need to apply this to my life and music and everything. The lesson is that that there’s no certainty in a lot of things in life, and you just need to be okay with sitting with that.

Have you developed any particular methods of sitting with that, so to speak?

I had a really powerful experience at Burning Man [this year.] I boiled down my career to four principles that, if I do them, it’s all I need to focus on. One is to be a good person to everyone around me — team, venues, promoters, anyone around me. First and foremost, just be kind to everybody.

Number two is to love the music that I’m making. If I’m in the studio feeling like I’m making music for somebody else, or for some other reason other than the love of what I’m making, that’s not the right reason to make it.

Number three, when I’m playing shows, play the music I love, don’t cater to anyone; don’t pander to anyone. If it comes out of the speakers, it must come from the heart for me.

Number four is creating authentic content that is aligned with my values. It doesn’t matter what’s trending or what people think I should do. It must be authentic. These four things are what I’m focusing on in my career. The rest of the stuff like the ticket sales, the numbers, that’s all stuff I need to not focus on. Or comparing myself to others. There’s a lot of uncertainty in that of “Why did they get that?” None of that stuff is relevant.

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