So I sang in the church choir, and my parents would come and watch me, and they were really proud—the whole town was—and that was pretty tight, to be honest. My mom would come to our Friday Night Praises after a long week of working with the dentist, and my singing would just put the color back into her face. And my dad—he immediately understood the potential of what I had. He was like, immediately saying that I couldn’t just save it for the church. He had a context for understanding that, you know, because he worked at the radio. Whenever a big pop star would come through town to play a concert in Minneapolis, they would go on the morning show to promote it, and my dad would get to like, meet all these people and their managers and whatever, and so he was like: My son could be one of these people. My son could be killing it one day if he plays his cards right.

And so he started talking like he was my manager. Before any of this shit even happened, you know, before anyone knew who I was, my dad was like: We’re gonna build this thing together. And I was cool with that. I mean, I was twelve, you know, so he was just like, my daddy to me—I would’ve been cool with anything he wanted—but I think even at that age, I realized that we might make good business partners. We both had that fire in us, you know? We both just wanted to crush it.

And there was definitely a time before I was born, or like, early in my childhood, when my dad wanted to crush it himself. No question about it. He was in a band before he started working at the radio, and he’d still play in some bands every once in a while, and for a second it looked like his grunge band was gonna have a moment, but by the time that was happening, the grunge thing was already kinda done, and so my dad’s band just got left behind, and he transferred all his hopes of killing it onto me. And I was fine with that, honestly. I mean, I liked that he was so invested.

He started having me make these recordings: just like, little CDs of me singing whatever was number one on the radio that week. He’d get the instrumental tracks from the station—’cause sometimes they’d play the instrumentals from a song while they were doing an advertisement or an intro or something—and he’d bring me to the station after hours, and we’d mix a version where I was singing it instead of whoever the artist was, and then when a big-time artist or a big-time manager came into town, he’d try to pass off the CDs to them at the radio station and be like: Yo man, you gotta listen to my boy. You gotta listen to my son.

And those tracks are fucking DOPE. I mean, seriously, I still listen to them sometimes. They’re like, actually kinda next-level. I talked to my manager—my new manager—about maybe releasing them as a covers album, you know, just like, this crazy thing that no one knows exists that I made before I was famous, but she told me it’s gonna get complicated with the rights and the licensing and whatever, and so I’ve put it on the back burner for now.