Reaching Amherst rapper Gabriel “Gabe” Carter-Weidenfeld’s recording studio requires a steep climb. It starts with three sets of outdoor stairs to his apartment, then another two flights inside. The final stretch requires a visitor to squeeze into a cramped corner to scale a ladder at a near-vertical incline. At the top is Carter-Weidenfeld, surrounded by his recording equipment.
Here, in the apartment he shares with eight other students, Carter-Weidenfeld — who is known on stage as Dome Lettuce — has found a space for himself to do his thing: to write, to record, to make beats and to mix and master tracks. It’s here that Carter-Weidenfeld has finished his newest album, “CHOPSZN,” which was released on March 13, with 20 tracks.
The loft is an unlikely origin point for a rap album, but Carter-Weidenfeld, a 22-year-old white Hampshire College student who grew up in Northampton, is an unlikely rapper. He has yet to climb the heights of rap stardom, but with 13 albums under his belt, he’s just getting started.
Carter-Weidenfeld chose his stage name when he was 16 years old, based on a particular predilection: “dome” is a synonym for “head,” and “lettuce” is a slang term for “pot” — therefore, “Dome Lettuce” equals “pothead.”
“I was almost worried that it was a little too on-the-nose,” he said, “but at this point, it seems like it’s a good joke, where people don’t assume that’s what it means. And I like that now it’s just its own thing.”
Carter-Weidenfeld began producing house and electronic music on GarageBand software at age 10, but pivoted to hip-hop in high school. Influenced by a wide range of artists — from the Wu-Tang Clan to the Beastie Boys — he found his creative blueprint in the experimental sounds of MF DOOM and Madlib’s album,“Madvillainy,” and the raw, personal transparency of Earl Sweatshirt.
Moved by the “candor” and “raw emotion” of Earl Sweatshirt’s record, Carter-Weidenfeld realized he didn’t have to put on an act to be a rapper. Instead, he saw that hip-hop could function as a collection of “rap poems” about his own experiences.
For Carter-Weidenfeld, rapping was a casual interest until two weeks before his 17th birthday, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. He suddenly had a lot of time on his hands, and he was dealing with personal stresses at the time, so writing raps became a coping mechanism.
Throughout much of his work, Carter-Weidenfeld makes no secret of his struggles with substance abuse and mental health. On “Dome Iz Dead,” he warns listeners that he’s “gon’ wallow, I know that I ain’t no role model” and talks about leaving a treatment program “fly as hell, fresh out the rehab / Walkin’ right in the NA meeting like, ‘Where the weed at?’”
“Obviously, there’s some embellishment,” Carter-Weidenfeld said, noting that his songs are almost entirely autobiographical. “I might spice things up a little bit, but I’m not ever just making something up.”
Though he admits happiness is “difficult to capture in a pure way artistically,” Carter-Weidenfeld doesn’t want to be defined solely by his struggles. Ultimately, he hopes his more vulnerable tracks offer the same sense of recognition to struggling listeners that his own favorite rappers provided for him.
“Hopefully, it happens more than once,” he said. “Hopefully, it happens a lot of times.”
Carter-Weidenfeld’s rap voice has a dry, mellow affect, influenced by some of his favorite rappers. For example, on the 2025 track “Ya Dead!,” which is partly an indictment of the military-industrial complex, each refrain of “Ya dead!” speaks to a nonchalant gunshot — a casual casualty.
“Baby kissin’ lead, what the mission said / Ya dead! / Off with the figureheads / Ya dead! / Boss made a bigger bed / Ya dead!”
“Sometimes, people have an idea that the more hyped-up and the more energetic your performance is, the more emotional it is, but I don’t agree with that. … You can also achieve a lot of emotional poignance through a much more laid-back subdued delivery,” he said. “If I’m rapping about something that’s sad, it wouldn’t make sense for me to come at it like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’”
Just as much, Carter-Weidenfeld also doesn’t want to sound like somebody he isn’t — namely, he’s very conscious of being a white artist in a historically Black genre and speaks passionately about privilege, commercialization and the impact of Black artistry on music history.
“It all comes from a struggle. It comes from people that have had to overcome so much. I also think that’s why I gravitate so much towards hip-hop, because it is inherently a framework for overcoming,” he said.
“I’m not gonna do it better than Tupac and Nas and Biggie. I’m not gonna do what they did better than what they did, and I couldn’t, because I’m not them,” he continued. “I can only do me.”
After two years working in Northampton to fund his music, Carter-Weidenfeld enrolled at Hampshire College in 2023, where he studies digital media and music history. The school gave him a new audience and renewed motivation to create, and he had his first billed show on campus in early 2024.
Now, he’s looking ahead to an upcoming show in Queens, New York, on Saturday, March 28.
As he continues on with his career, though, he expects that he’ll have to go to cities with bigger rap scenes, like New York City or Atlanta, to keep making connections and growing his career, though he’s not looking to sell out arenas or become mega-famous. He wants to build enough of a fanbase that he can make a living from music without being too much in the limelight.
He has thought about what might happen if he got past that, though — about what he’d do if he had overnight success that “shot [him] up into the stratosphere.” For now, he knows he has to continue making and performing music in the Valley first.
“Sometimes I wonder if this is too early on in my career, as it were, to even be worrying about this, but I’m like, ‘Am I digging myself into something that, one day, I won’t feel comfortable with?’ But I can’t worry about that,” he said, “because right now, I have to get to the point I want to see myself get to.”
For more information about Dome Lettuce or to listen to his music, visit hyperfollow.com/d0melettuce.