“pov: you are in a BAND from new jersey. i’m looking for an opener for my show in Asbury Park nj at the asbury park brewery on june 20th. comment! tag your band friends!!!”

Somehow, TikTok’s algorithm sensed my proximity to the beachfront city and even the frequency with which I’ve visited over the last couple of years. I also like music, which I suppose is a given.

The TikTok’s point of view was slightly off, though; I’m not in a band and really have no intentions of joining one. The algorithm inherently knows many things, but I doubt it’d understand that. Nevertheless, I commented. I didn’t recommend a band, but rather requested something a bit bolder: an interview.

“For the first six hours, one person commented,” Scotty Buksbaum recalled as we sat on Zoom about a week later. The commenter had also shared the video to their Instagram story, telling their followers to comment, as well, despite there being little competition. “For the whole day, it was just nine people’s comments saying this one person. So obviously, I was like, they’re putting in the extra work, so I reached out to her and she said she’d do it. And then right after that happened, it just started going crazy. It was really cool because I feel like everybody in New Jersey got tagged.”

The video, which now has over a hundred thousand views, has garnered 900 comments ranging from people jokingly suggesting the famed Jersey band the Jonas Brothers to even the Towns of New Jersey account giving their input.

But Scotty’s ambition in music began long before TikTok views mattered. “I started playing music when I was, like, eleven, twelve?” he began, questioning the definitive start. “Sometime when I was real young,” he settled on, “I started playing bass guitar. My first show I saw was All Time Low when I was a freshman in high school, and seeing them live, I was like, ‘Yo. I want to do this.’”

And do it he has. In undergrad at Monmouth University, the solo act played with a band before breaking up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, with nineteen songs out—the most recent being “Good Time” on June 4—under the solitary stage name scxtty, Scotty has barely slowed since his first release over four years ago.

“I want to do an EP,” he said. “It’s definitely in the works. Right now, I’m releasing one song and then instantly going back to the studio to do another one. I’m just doing a trickle down of singles, and I think soon I will be really trying to hammer out that EP. I kind of just want to build a bit more of a base for my own music before I release an EP.”

His discography boasts an eclectic mix. While “Good Time” is an easy track to dance to, “Heartbreak Tattoos” slows it down, and “GUTCHECK” kicks it back up about twelve notches with punchy guitars.

“With my own music, I’ve changed genres like four different times,” he explained. “But I’m really settling into this one now.” He cited Del Water Gap, Alexander 23, Jeremy Zucker, and Chelsea Cutler as genre neighbors, a sort of mix between pop and indie. “That’s something I’ve been very happy making music like.” He continued that in high school, musical influences contained emo pop-punk classics like Mayday Parade, All Time Low, and As It Is, which is evident in his more rock-heavy tracks.

Lyrics, though, are at the forefront of Scotty’s creative process; they’re what he considers to be the windows of his music and the chance for listeners to connect with him. “When I’m writing, I do just the lyrics and melody first before I add instruments because I think lyrics are so important to storytelling and connecting,” he said. “It really depends on whether I’m in a situation with something. All of my songs are about breakups, and people can relate to that, hopefully. So it’s a form of therapy to me, expressing how I’m feeling on paper, finding a melody to sing about it, and the chords come eventually. I think of it as a body that I’m building the skeleton of, and the rest of the body is chords, time changes, yadda, yadda.”

Scotty knows more about music being therapy than most, especially with an M.A. in Music Therapy from Montclair State University. In his opinion, it helps him understand his own lyrics better. “For a long time, I just wrote music,” he said. “I was just writing it. I was getting my master’s, and we did a lot of analyzing song lyrics. I started really diving into my own stuff, like, ‘Why did I write that?’ and how I was feeling. Now, going further, when I do write something, I definitely do look back on it and double-check that this sort of emotion came from there, which is a cool thing to have that degree in. Now I know more about how to connect and what people might be going through.”

For Scotty, that’s the point of it all: using his music as a means of connecting with others. “Music has connected with me when I was not in a good headspace, so to sort of try and give that feeling to other listeners, if they can connect with what I’m putting out, that brings value to my life, and I feel like I’m doing good,” he said. “All of these songs that I am writing come from a genuine place in my heart and are something that I deal with personally,” he continued. “I want to actually be able to connect with someone.”

In the end, it’s not a matter of creating the next TikTok viral sound or dance trend to his songs, no matter how many streams that might create. Instead, it’s making sure that people know Scotty is one thing that’s hard to find on social media: real.

Scotty’s music can be streamed on Apple Music, Spotify, and SoundCloud. You can also catch him at New York City’s Bitter End on July 25.

Image taken from Facebook/Scxtty | Interviewed on June 11, 2025