ICONIC April 2016 | Page 10

How was it going into the studio? What brought about the name Voices for this? kishon: Yeah, yeah. Voices, when I was walking on Voices and writing Voices during the time in my life where I was feeling a lot of pressure just from all of my responsibilities. At a certain point in my life, I was trying to work and make this music thing pop. I seen a lot of fruit. There was that. There’s the fact that I’m a husband, I’m a father. I work a full time job. At the moment, I was in grad school. On top of that, my stepfather, who is like a father figure in my life had just passed away the year before. Now, I’m the oldest of 5 brothers and I got all these younger siblings. I got my mom, and everybody’s falling apart. Since a kid, I’ve always been the person looked to to do things. To accomplish things that people would consider to be great. You know what I’m saying? I’m one of my only cousins that even graduated from high school. I was always the good kid, the golden child. All of these other things. I never went to jail. I never got caught up in a lot of the gang violence. I got to do all of these things. I had a kid after I got married, and all of these signs that people said, oh, Kishon’s this and Kishon’s that. I got praised on those levels. It just started to wear me down, feeling like I had to uphold the expectations that everybody held on me. Voices is about all of the voices that I hear speaking into my life, whether it be imposing truths or just imposing their expectations on me. Just the feeling of weight that comes from knowing you can’t hold all of those things up. That’s where the project is sonically, and Golden is just about my attempt to ... going through this process, like going and experiencing this weight is a process. It’s a journey from self dependence to realizing you can only be as good as the strength you allow God to place in you. Just understanding that your fullness lies in the fact that God loves you, and you are in him no matter what. For me, that’s where I was. Golden is kind of like a microscopic look at what it looks like to have a little bit of provider and self dependence. When you look, when you step back and say 10 PAGE | ICONIC MAGAZINE