SAN FRANCISCO — There may be an alternate reality where producer and artist Yung Bae ends up, permanently, as a cart pusher at Costco or an engineer, but it’s not ours. Oregon native Dallas Cotton traded in an engineering education after one term at Oregon State. The 18-year-old had no backup plan and ended up collecting shopping carts at Costco, where his dad is an executive. But that didn’t last long, either, once Cotton discovered electronic soul music.

“I just called my mom one day and said, ‘Yo, sorry. I withdrew. I’m coming home.’ This was pre-music or having anything to do in life, like any game plan,” Yung Bae said ahead of his recent performance at Outside Lands.

When the first project he posted on Bandcamp took off, he was willing to take another risk. Even that is revelatory with the added context that growing up in Eugene, Oregon, he had no understanding of how music was even made.

Cotton (now 27) and his brother fell in love with the music of Madlib. When he heard 2004 album Madvillainy (a collaboration with MF Doom), he didn’t grasp the concept of sampling and thought Madlib was playing all the instruments. His brother explained how Madlib was sampling the work of others, which was widely available, for cheap, at record shops.

“That’s when it unfolded,” Yung Bae said. “I love taking the artifacts of these old records and giving them a fresh spin.”

Now, he’s starting to move away from using other artists’ samples and is creating his own samples from scratch. His forthcoming new album is his first big step in that direction.

Cotton lived in Eugene until his family moved to Portland when he was a junior in high school. He loved music, but it wasn’t yet a big part of his life. He loved playing lacrosse, though. His stint at Oregon State lasted just four months. He began to study engineering, for which the university is well known (along with forestry and pharmacy)—”You really do stumble into those three”—before coming back home.

That’s when he stumbled into something else: the forefront of the future funk scene. The subgenre of vaporwave, which became popular in the last decade, uses samples predominantly from the ‘70s and ‘80s, blending R&B, funk, city pop, house music, jazz, hip-hop and disco. The last one is key. Disco has had a bad rap for decades, but artists have been sampling it for nearly as long, and it’s a genre Yung Bae leans into heavily.

“Everybody, I think, realizes they love the elements of disco, but they look at disco … as trashy and corny and dumb,” he said. “And I think everything about disco is fucking incredible. It’s the greatest thing on the planet. I love disco so much. That’s why I love this brand of resurgence we’re having. Thank goodness for it, too. It’s one of those things where people are like, ‘I did like funky bass lines. Oh wait, I do like strings. I do like these weird, chanty like ‘YMCA’-type vocals.’”

But when it’s called “future funk,” people have a completely different and more positive opinion of it.

“I really appreciate the funk revival and the resurgence of the mainstream radio take on it, even if it’s the bare minimum,” he said. “That’s why the Silk Sonic stuff is like an anomaly to me. I hear it everywhere. I’ll go to a party and it’ll go from a Lil Durk track into Silk Sonic.”

Yung Bae released his first mixtape, Bae, in 2014. He made it in his parents’ basement. Bandcamp kids loved it.

“I wasn’t making crazy money, but I was like, ‘You know what, I can live off it. Cool. I don’t have to push carts. … Win. I will live off the bare minimum. This is the dream,’” he said.

He was still making music by himself, but after moving to L.A. in 2018, his label and managers introduced him to the wide world of collaborators. Through five additional albums, he’s worked with the likes of Mike Posner, GoldLink, Channel Tres, Marc E. Bassy, Ricky Reed, AWOLNATION, Capital Cities, COIN, Electric Guest, Snakehips, Jungle and many more.

He struck gold in 2019 with “Bad Boy,” featuring bbno$ and Billy Marchiafava, which has over 100 million streams. An updated version of the track has appearances by Wiz Khalifa and MAX.

While finishing up his new album, he has been just as busy as ever.

“It seems like everything is 24/7. I usually try to be in a session or at home working on something every minute I can. It’s been non-stop. It’s been fun,” he said. “Now I feel like quarantine made me more organized. I actually sit there and name things properly. I’m like, ‘This will probably pay off later.’ And then I’m like, ‘Nah, I’ll name it Swag123.’ It’s fun having all this stuff going on and trying to balance everything, especially with touring coming back now. We lose so much time just traveling.

His new single is “Straight Up Relaxin,” a collaboration with Cosmo’s Midnight, friends who remotely added their parts. Cotton’s friend M-Phazes helped with the production, while a version to be released later will include HONNE.

The breezy bop was written around a concept of joy.

“We were looking for something fun and summery, something to just relax to,” Yung Bae said. “I’m really excited for it, too, because it’s a fun contrast, putting it out in winter here. Cosmo’s is in Australia, so it’s their summer. I’m like, ‘Hopefully, they get the joke.’”

After that, and perhaps the last single leading up to the new album, is “Clap Your Hands,” with hip-hop duo EarthGang and soul artist Jon Batiste, as well as Sherwyn of production duo Two Fresh. The duo and Batiste contributed their parts in the couple of weeks leading up to Outside Lands, and Yung Bae flew to Atlanta to work our out EarthGang’s parts. They cut it within 30 minutes together.

“It’s been a race to the finish line,” he said. “Most of these track beds and tracks I already had done and produced for a year, and the real challenge so far in producing this, [was] locking in the features and figuring who works. Then I have to go back and rearrange to [the featured artist]. I love it. I think my engineers hate me because they get 40 versions of each track. I’m like, ‘One more change. One more.’ …

It’s a great test for me on how to work well with others.”

The next album also includes already-released single “Silver and Gold,” which doesn’t include samples by any other artists. For the song, a collaboration with Pink Sweat$ and Sam Fischer, he more or less wrote a separate original song that he then chopped up for the finished product. The aim was to stand on his own as an original artist, and it’s high priority going forward, he said. It also avoids sticky song credit and clearance issues. When he’s asked which artists he samples, he takes pride in answering, “no one.”

Yung Bae wrote and recorded a song using tech platforms like Ableton, playing guitar and bass, and singing, then sent it to an arranger with access to an orchestra, which recorded live strings and brass.

“After that, we mix it like a sample and I just start chopping it from there, and resample my own sample in that sense,” he said. “The original ‘Silver and Gold’ was originally an 80 bpm slow, sad Motown track. We liked the horns. Then we just cut out the entire track. We pitched it up and chopped it from there.

“It challenges me a lot more to see what I can do on my own,” he said.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.