Revival: My Life's Work
And How Album Sales Won't Define It's Success
My life has been a pretty difficult one. I was born in Jackson, MS. I was raised in a city called Clinton which is in the same county as Jackson, Hinds County. People that live in Jackson love to make a distinction between the two because Clinton is a suburb of Jackson and the perception is that the dynamics are different for families, financially. I can assure you that growing up, it was not. My mother worked at Jackson State University as an Administrative Assistant and my father was a Pianist that exhibited more effort in disciplining his children than he did any desire to be part of any corporate structure. Between his discipline tactic and being bullied in school, I had no safe spaces. I didn’t have any friends. I was amazing at basketball and some of my most memorable moments in my childhood come from basketball because I poured so much of my time into it but I was scared to fully express myself because my relationships to male figures were horrible and I felt that the coach would just be another version of my dad.
Around this time, music just found me. Sounds strange considering that I grew up in a house with a Pianist whom was also a choir director but he didn’t attempt to pass his skillset onto us. Even so, I started writing A LOT. Hip Hop was a savior because it offered me a level of expression in which I couldn’t be judged. And just like basketball, I poured into it. I was often oblivious to anything and everything in class because my head was buried in a notebook…writing. This lead to countless hours teaching myself how to write verses. How to write songs. In college, I taught myself how to produce and was far more interested in Music than why I was actually there(which was to appease my parents). After college, I further delved into music. When I moved home, I produced a beat a day for months which eventually lead to making a full song, every day, for months. I worked on a mixtape and then demos that I sent out to every record label that I could find. I eventually moved to Los Angeles shortly after. Life got harder.
I moved to Los Angeles and didn’t know anyone. Because I’m assertive, I found myself around Glen Ballard and working on a song with Mick Jagger. I remember thinking to myself, “Oh…this is easy!!” Boy was I wrong. I struggled mightily with relationships. I’ve never had friends and I found myself really wanting them. Other creatives, artists, musicians, videographers didn’t care one iota about trying to develop friendships. I learned hard lessons about power dynamics. I spent a lot of time around Dave Stewart. One day I’ll expound on this relationship but it wasn’t favorable at all. And financially…I drowned. Constant eviction notices. Shopping at the ¢.99 store on very modest budgets for groceries. Carrying empty jugs to my day job at a gaming company to fill up with juices and sodas to keep from spending money on that at Ralph’s. And if all of that wasn’t enough, chasing being taken seriously by record labels, managers, publishers, and more. It was the hustle but it was just hard. I cried a lot of nights. I prayed a lot of nights…tear-laden prayers. I kept going.
I questioned a lot. Whether I was good at this. Whether or not this was meant for me. Why I wasn’t seeing progression. Circumstances really took their toll on me. The eviction notices didn’t stop. I moved to Atlanta, worked for Turner Broadcasting, while juggling working in music with Chaka Zulu and Jeff Dixon, and the eviction notices didn’t stop. Neither did struggling to be taken seriously as a producer. I’d fly to back to Los Angeles to have meetings to try and spur interest I abandoned pursuing music as an artist and focused on production. I made big records that just ended up in the hands of the wrong people and nothing would come of them. Potential big wins turned into absolutely nothing. I kept going.
I kept going because I just believe that I’m really good at what I do. And all of the time put in, respect of the craft, relentlessness would eventually pay off. All of this has culminated into a project entitled Revival. I’ve been working incredibly hard on this album. I’ve spent a lot of time with this album. And I’ve learned a lot about myself through the process of working on this album. I’ve produced and written the entire project. Every drum choice, every chord progression, every word written and expressed, carefully chosen, to represent my entire journey up until this point.
So much of my life has been atypical to any norms so I’ve asked myself what success would look like. How do I define success after being on the completely other end of the spectrum for so much of my career? Don’t get me wrong, I believe anything is possible. I’ve envisioned myself walking across the Grammy stage, accepting my award from Beyoncè for Album Of The Year, a thousand times. Performing at the Billboard Awards. I believe that my album could…and will….sell millions of albums and that confidence comes from the work that I’ve put into it. And while all of that is glamorous, the biggest success is that a kid from Mississippi worked his way through hardship and finished the project he set out to make when he moved to Los Angeles and even though the road was paved with potholes, broken bridges, obstructions, and more…my album will get a chance to live. That is success.
Cheers to success.
