“Now that I think about it, the whole reason I was so bad in school was probably because I always knew I was going to do music. It would’ve taken me a lot longer to get my foot in the door if I’d continued rapping all the way. But when you say you rap, they just start rolling their eyes at you. “If you tell somebody that you make music they’re all interested. “Everybody raps now,” he said with a shrug. Plus, people are less inclined to take you seriously if you introduce yourself as a rapper, said Faiyaz. I didn’t have to write as much as everybody else.” When you sing you can kind of stretch the words out. I used to make beats and I would start singing to layer my beats and that’s kind of how I realized I could sing.” Before anything, I wanted to be a rapper. “I could always sing just playing around, but I ain’t want to be no singer,” he said. Though he was initially drawn to rap, Faiyaz soon realized he had a knack for singing. In high school, the notoriously bad student found a creative outlet in music. He lived briefly in Baltimore before relocating to Columbia, a city in the Baltimore area where he grew up. The I thought was important to me really wasn’t important no more.”īorn Christopher Brent Wood, he took the name Faiyaz from a “Muslim homie” who told him the word means “artist” in Arabic. “There’s a lot of ideas that I had prior to the trip that I scrapped once I got there. “It kind of affected the whole concept of the album,” he said. The rampant poverty Faiyaz witnessed was a culture shock. And I’m seeing what kind of trip this is going to be.” “But I get there and fresh off the plane we see kids walking around barefoot and people getting around on mopeds. “Prior to me going there, no lie, I thought it was going to be some vacation,” he said. I don’t speak no Spanish, none of that,” he admitted. So it was easy to put together a project so quickly when it’s a record about your whole introduction.”įaiyaz and his team decamped to the Dominican Republic in summer 2017 to work on it.įaiyaz, whose father is part Dominican, chose Puerto Plata in an attempt to get acquainted with his roots. “I mean, we did it fast, but I think it’s because a lot of inspiration for the album was from a long time ago. “It’s one of those albums that take a whole lifetime to write,” he said. Last October, fresh on the heels of the first Sonder tour, Faiyaz released his solo debut: the critically acclaimed “Sonder Son,” a sonic testament to his struggles in school (“Gang Over Luv”), the rat race (“First World Problemz/Nobody Carez”) and aspirations of making it in the industry (“L.A.”). Hence the birth of Sonder, a collective that combines Dpat and Atu’s atmospheric production with Faiyaz’s buttery smooth vocals. Eventually, the lack of a better option would force him to give in.