At just 10 years old, Christopher Brent Wood's transformation into indie disruptor Brent Faiyaz began.
As he collected CDs by D'Angelo, Lauryn Hill and Joe, among other R&B/hip-hop artists, the youngster steadily skimmed over album liner notes, soaking up the behind-the-scenes details of how his favorite albums were made. . By high school, he had set up his first home studio, with a USB microphone and downloaded software—the beginning of his transformation from music lover to music maker.
“I was making money selling beats. that's how I got a lot of my friends when I was younger,” Faiyaz, 28, recalls today of his teenage years in the Baltimore area. “It would be like grown mothers coming to the house to beat me up. My parents said, “Who are these adults coming from home? What happens?' “
Fayaz's parents had once pushed him to go to college. But eventually, that morphed into, “You can graduate [high school]?” Faiyaz recalls with a laugh, “because my grades were so bad. It was like you can do something all day every day, but if it doesn't bring home money, they understood you needed a plan B or C. But music it was all I wanted to do. So I had to prove them wrong.”
Faiyaz did just that. Since he started releasing his own music on SoundCloud a decade ago, he's been upending the modern R&B scene with his raw, honest lyrics and alt-R&B sound with '90s vibes — and becoming a bona fide mainstream producer success in the process.
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