How The Fuji Brothers Became The Hottest DJ’s in Los Angeles

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This spring at The Daily’s Fashion Los Angeles Awards at The Beverly Hills Hotel, the event kicked off with cocktails and a memorable DJ set from Danny Fujikawa and Michael Fujikawa aka The Fuji Brothers. Talk about a party trick! The brothers brought the event to a new level with their mix of classics and contagious good energy. The Daily recently rung them up to talk about their history as artists, where they found their love of music, and how they get a crowd going. 

Tell us a little bit about your background growing up in California.

Michael:  We are from sunny Santa Monica, California, and we grew up in a kind of progressive, mixed-race, parents were from the sixties, hard-working folks who raised us with a love of love and a lot of encouragement to pursue our various passions. Would you agree, Dan? 

Danny: I absolutely agree, and we currently reside back on the West Side as well. Michael’s in Santa Monica and I’m in the Palisades, so we’re West Side LA boys at heart, born and raised, and we found our way back to raise our own families. 

What were your musical influences growing up? How did you guys find your passion for music?

Michael:  Our mom was more of a child of the 70’s because she was born in 55’. Our Dad was definitely a 60’s guy. He went to the Dodgers stadium to see The Beatles, and our Grandmother, Dad’s mom, was a musician. She played the piano. Not the type of musician that would entertain or even want to talk about music, but she had skills. Our Dad did not train as a musician, but he loved to sing. Our parents got divorced when we were young, and so he would pick us up, and we spent some time in the car, and the six CD changer in the trunk, was both the bane of our existence, and that was literally the treasure trove. We had to determine which six CD’s were in that trunk before we started driving somewhere because you couldn’t go into the trunk while you already started driving. We would listen to Steely Dan, The Beatles, Alanis Morisette had just dropped, Jagged Little Pill, and that was something my Dad had wanted to listen to a lot. Phil Collins was a big one, so he would play music like that and we would sing along. We would sing with him, and there’s other places too. I remember Danny when we found Dad’s record collection. 

Danny:  It was the record collection that we grew up with in our house. In our front entry in this bench, there was a storage kind of container that was filled with records from the sixties. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Beatles, Moody Blues, Simon and Garfunkel, your quintessential sixties collection. Our Dad went to Stanford in the sixties, so he was in the Bay Area. Although he practiced studying law, and was kind of on the straight narrow super highly academic, also a world-class athlete as well, but he liked to party, and he liked to hangout .Our musical ability and taste mainly comes from our Dad’s side. 

Michael: And from Mom, too.  We grew up playing the piano. I didn’t like the piano teacher. I wasn’t a child prodigy. Danny was prodigious when it came to the piano and all things technical, but I always played the drums. I have very vivid memories of being really young, like almost pre-verbal and there are photos to prove it, but setting up pots and pans and things to intentionally play drums. I’ve actually never had a proper drum lesson. It’s self-taught, but I didn’t start playing the drums until I was in college.  Danny was more musical than I am.  

How did you guys become professional musicians? How did that really start?

Danny: Michael said I kind of took the reins because we started playing music with a friend of ours, and that was kind of the initial iteration of the band Chief. It was just the three of us, and then we brought in another friend, and then the original friend left. There were these different iterations of us just playing music together and having fun. I was so obsessed with making music, so in that sense, I guess I did kind of take over the reins. I was just fueling this love for music and wanting to pursue it. It just happened pretty organically. We started playing shows in New York just like any other new band, and it took off pretty quickly. For whatever reason, people were feeling connected to whatever vibe we had.

What was the next big move?

Danny: We signed to Domino Recording Company, which was a dream come true because they were the biggest indie label at the time. We took off from there. We got to play Glastonbury a couple of times which was amazing, and huge festivals over there, and we gained a following overseas. Which in my opinion, is a much more thriving culture where they really appreciate the artist and are much more passionate. We still have fans over there and we haven’t been a band for fifteen years. Unfortunately, as quickly as we started to take off, we just kind of imploded for various reasons. Some are more cliché than others. Artistic differences and competitive stuff. We ended up breaking up as a band, and that coincided with a lot of other kinds of horrible, tragic things, like our father passing away. At a certain point, I got sober afterward because I just went to a pretty dark place. Then, I switched careers. I went into editing, and now I am back into music full-time again thanks to my partner Kate Hudson, because she brought me into working on her record, and I thought I was going back to doing my digital content and editing and film and videography and all that, and that opened the floodgates, and here I am two years later. It’s so great and full circle because it’s as pure as it’s ever been. Making music again for me feels like being in high school again, and that is the most beautiful thing. It’s as pure as it’s ever been, and I feel so lucky that I get to be doing it again. It feels like a hack almost because we get to just hangout and do what we love the most, which is DJing together and that is another full circle thing. It’s like we’ve been preparing for this our whole lives, so that’s why it feels like it’s almost too easy, but it’s so natural and organic for us to be doing this now. 

Michael: There is a musical renaissance taking place for us on multiple levels. It is really exciting. 

How did you guys agree to start DJing again, and become the The Fuji Brothers?

Michael:  It’s a new name. The name might evolve and shift. For one thing, we want this project, that’s what we are calling it, this DJing Fuji Bro’s project to be weird, and meaningful to us. We want it to be meaningful to the audience. We don’t want to DJ music that we are not fond of, or that doesn’t mean something to us.

We’re such fans of what you do! Have you guys had a minute to think about what your goals are for this new chapter?

Michael:  It’s kind of tricky. You get older, and you’re not living in the night. When we were younger, we were full-on night people, and now we are much more day people. For me its like the DJs and the culture that I respect and admire the most is kind of dark nighttime stuff where the kids are really pushing the envelope in terms of what music they’re listening to, how they’re dressing, who they’re hanging out with, how they’re talking, and what they’re thinking about. I am really interested in that space, but it is tough, because I have a one-year-old daughter and a day job 

Danny: Cade had a dinner party, which was kind of our first entry into actually making this a reality.  It was so wonderful, and the energy. The vibe was so great, and we DJ’d for like five hours, and in the last hour when people started winding down a bit it became a performance of sorts. I had guitar pedals and some microphones and we were enhancing the DJ set with some of our own performance and lights. It was awesome, and that is so much fun, and I think that’s the ultimate goal. It’s to access that spiritual connection that is greater, and music can just tap into that. 

What songs do you find really get people going?

Michael: Part of me wants to spin like Blonde Red Head, and Television, and Joy Division, and kind of like post-punk New York and London stuff. And there’s another part of me that wants to DJ Whitney Houston and Robyn.

Danny: Also hip hop. We like a lot of old school nineties hip hop. Naughty by Nature really gets people going, usually.  The fun thing is finding the obscure songs that get people going, which is also a goal. 

Michael: We can DJ for anybody, but if Q Lazzarus, “Goodbye Horses,” or like Bronski Beat is not going to get your ass shaking a little bit,  I feel like I have a problem with you just a little bit. [Laughs] 

Danny:  We played some Stone Roses. LCD Soundsystem, which we love, is nostalgic and dear to us from back in the day. There are thousands of songs.

Do you plan your sets or do you see how it feels when in the room?

Danny: We DJ’d the CAA Oscar party, but had planned to spend a whole day taking handwritten notes and figuring out all of the transitions between songs. We were dialed in and were thinking, “This is it, this is going to be great.” We got there, and the DJ before us started playing some of the songs on our list, and we realized we had to pivot. It was a great learning experience, because afterward, Michael and I realized that’s what we do best- DJing on the fly and reading and feeling the crowd.