I’m from Manatee County, Florida, with roots that reach all the way to Freeport, Bahamas, where my father was from. My mother is from right here in Florida.

Pain entered my life early. When I was only 11 years old, my 18-year-old brother was killed in gang violence. Losing him changed me. I didn’t always know how to talk about what I was carrying, so I started writing. At first, those words were like a journal, a place where I could put the things I couldn’t say out loud.

Then I lost my beloved grandmother. She was one of the people who understood what writing meant to me, and she always told me, “Put all your pain in your music.” I never forgot that.

My journey eventually took me through the federal prison system, where I lost nearly a decade of my life and ultimately served a mandatory six-year sentence on a cocaine-trafficking conviction. Those years became another chapter of pain, reflection, growth, and survival.

But my story didn’t end there.

I came home with something to say.

Now I take everything I’ve lived through—the loss, incarceration, mistakes, wounds, lessons, faith, and survival and put it into my music. I want my story to reach the person who feels down and out, the person carrying wounds nobody knows about, and the person who thinks life has counted them out.

If my pain can become somebody else’s motivation, then none of it was wasted.

This is my story.

This is Paayless.