HyperFM

For a long time, people from where I'm from, or the ones lucky enough to witness my becoming, knew my music sounded very different than it does now.

I started off rapping. I came from a more urban area, the hood, Winburn and Woodhill in Lexington, KY. We lived at 2493 Woodhill Dr from 2005 to 2015. At some point I got away from the distractions and everything that bothered me, and I stopped trying to write perfect songs. I started listening to the life that was already writing them.

The ones I pushed off, the ones I said nobody would get, I realized after I'd compiled so many of them that there was a spooky aesthetic to it. I laughed by myself thinking, hell, life has been a scary roller coaster. But roller coasters can be fun too.

Some stories aren't written. They're lived until they become music. Some days I did nothing. Some days I added things. Some days I erased them. All were forms of becoming.

Everything here began as nothing more than a blank space, symbols, and unknown questions. I let the album grow with me over three or four years, and the words somehow just matched the melody in the beats the universe provided.

Every version of me was left behind, only for me to return to the same nervous system with more grace and understanding than before, for the next generation.

Growing up never meant leaving my childhood behind. It meant learning how to carry it.

Time doesn't ask us to become someone else. It asks us to become more ourselves.

The photo I used to create the album cover was meaningful in itself. It came from a particularly progressive day at LifeStance Health. Special thanks to my mental health mentor, I can't remember if she was a psychologist or a therapist, but thank you,

for being one of the first people to hold some of the weight I was carrying and validate me in life. You helped me grow in ways you may not even know.

for raising me and leaving space for me to develop self ambition.

Memory isn't a place I avoid or visit. It's the place I operate and create from.

Some people think bridges are just for crossing, but bridges are more than that. They are created, crossed, sat on, admired, used as a landmark/guidance, honored, remembered.

From my perspective, every threshold asks us the same question: what are you wanting, or needing, to leave behind? Who are you willing to become next?

By the time you finish this album, I won't be the same person who began it.

And that's ok.