You mention on your website “your
humble beginnings”. Can you tell us how
you got your start?
“I didn’t grow up in a musical household
at all. My siblings and I would do talent
shows and lip sync contests for fun, but in
our home, it was mainly sports, God and
education, though not in that particular order.
I first started playing the guitar in my early
twenties and I still barely consider myself
a guitar player. If I weren’t doing music, I
would probably be a teacher, social worker,
theologian or a nomad [laughs]. Music was
not on the agenda. In high school, I started
burying myself in hip hop. I was relatively
good at rapping, but I realized pretty quickly
that being a forty-year-old rapper wasn’t
the most glamorous future. If you knew me
growing up, you knew that I’d always had
a passion for singing. During school, I was
always running through the hallways singing
out loud. I wasn’t any good, but I had a lot
of heart [laughs]. And one day I just had
this epiphany: there wasn’t any current music
that made me feel the way people like Bob
Marley made me feel. I felt there was this
void that needed to be filled and since no
one was doing it, I figured — why not teach
myself how to sing and play and fill that
void myself? If I had felt there was someone
out there making the music I wanted to hear
– better yet, that I needed to hear – then I
wouldn’t be making music right now.”
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How do you train your voice, and have
your methods evolved over time?
“I never used to train my voice at all. I thought
training would take away from the rawness of
it, so what you got was what you got – which
was a total deadbeat mentality. I’ve never taken
any vocal lessons, but I did learn the power of
listening to myself. A lot of singing competitions
are filled with people who don’t actually listen to
themselves sing. They’re only listening to what
singing feels like to them. I used to be one of
those people who thought, ‘If it feels good it must
sound good’, but I eventually created my own
methods and techniques for training my voice.
I’m not a music nerd and I don’t know theory
all that well, but just realizing that I needed to
focus on doing specific things to improve my
voice was a huge step in the right direction.”
How did you develop your singing and
musical style?
“Honesty. I believe everyone can sing if they
find their honest voice. Finding the natural
timbre of your singing voice might take you
down a bizarre and uncomfortable path, but
once you find your voice, you instantly become
one of a kind. You can learn how to imitate
someone and still go pretty far in your career
but I think the singers who stand the test of
time are the ones who find their unique voice
and refine it to the point of greatness. It’s rare,
but it should be the norm because we’re all
pretty unique.”