![]() Pitchfork: What was your earliest musical memory?ĪP: Riding in my mom’s truck, listening to stuff like Frankie Beverly and Maze, Stevie Wonder. You don't have to be an asshole.Īnderson. Don’t talk to anyone like they're lower than you, because you never know when you need help. It’s just important to treat everybody the same, even when you're having a bad time. Pitchfork: Did that experience teach you anything about your approach to music?ĪP: A little bit. They would always call Triple AAA and help me out. My car was this shitty little ‘89 Honda that would never start. ![]() The lady was really cool I'd be coming in late and she wouldn't snitch on me. When I was first working for them, I couldn't understand anything that they were saying, but after a couple months we had full conversations. They were in their 50s, so not even that old. Everything was completely fine with their mental capacity, but their body and muscle functions were not right. There was one couple who had been married for 30 or 40 years they were both paraplegic and suffered from multiple sclerosis. You find out the subtle little things you can relate to, like having conversations without words. It taught me to really appreciate the things you take for granted: You have all your limbs, y ou can see and breathe. That was an interesting time, very humbling. Sometimes they'd have seizures, and we'd have to rush them to the hospital. I was working like 16 hour night shifts, having to distribute meds and go capture people who would break out of the house. Paak: I used to work with mentally disabled people when I was 18 or 19, changing diapers and catheters. Dre-were there any especially memorable ones?Īnderson. Pitchfork: You worked odd jobs for years before you were picked up by Dr. ![]() “ I wanted to be a part of a #1 album, to get record and publishing deals, a car, health insurance, a new place to stay. Years ago, he made a vision board laying out his future accomplishments. Years of eking out an existence on the margins seems to have steadied him internally. She just said to watch out for the drugs, because it’s in my blood-my grandfather had the same situation.” “Even with my pops, she never talked down to me. ![]() “My mom has all the reason to be bitter, but she's not,” he says. Dre enlisted him to work on his 2015 comeback album Compton, seems preternaturally gifted at extracting positivity from pain. (His mother ran a produce business after his father went to jail she also spent some time in prison for tax-related issues.) Paak, who plugged away quietly for years as a solo artist before Dr. “Mama was a farmer/ Papa was a goner,” he sings. This story is harrowing, but Paak alludes to it on “The Bird,” from his breakout album Malibu, in the gentlest and most forgiving language possible. “My mom says he was an amazing dad, but once the drugs got ahold, he went haywire.” Before we knew it, he felt some type of way about my mom, and eventually decided he wanted to kill her.” He pauses. The next time I saw him, he was being buried.” His father was a Navy man who was honorably discharged for marijuana and spiraled downward upon his return home: “My mom tried to get into him to rehab, but that didn't work out. “The last time I saw him he was on top of her, blood in the streets. “My dad went to prison for drug abuse and domestic abuse for beating my mom,” he says, casually, slipping an Alka-Seltzer into his water glass. When he shows up to breakfast in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, hungover after performing on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” he relates a horrifying story about his upbringing, the kind that might engulf another person’s life in darkness entirely, but there is no self-pity or rancor in his voice whatsoever. This belief seems to still be central to the 30-year-old’s character now that he’s Anderson. The moniker speaks to the basic philosophy that music should heal, that it is rooted in kindness. Paak, Brandon Anderson Paak was Breezy Lovejoy-a ridiculous name, particularly for a modern-day singer and rapper, but there’s also something beautifully old-fashioned to it.
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