With the release of his debut LP, Brvndon P has already crossed off two of his dream collaborations. Both E-40 and Lecrae appear on the Sacramento, California rapper-producer’s BrvndonP album, which was released earlier this month. Brvndon P, who used to go by the name Black Knight, more on that in a second, writes down his goals on a sort of vision board.
“My whole thing is, speak what you want and speak it into existence,” he says in an exclusive interview with HipHopDX at King Taco hours before hitting the stage at Low End Theory. “That principle is really the foundation of everything. There are millionaires using that principle. That’s a biblical principle.”
He almost got Ty Dolla $ign for the E-40-assisted “No Fakery,” which would have made for a dope West Coast anthem, but BrvndonP said it will just have to wait for the next album, which he is already working on. Who are the other people he has on his list of career objectives to work with? J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and Justin Bieber.
Even though BrvndonP has some stellar features (the project also has appearances from Dream Junkies‘ Beleaf and John Givez), according to BrvndonP, the project is noteworthy because it is extremely personal.
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On the album, the artist born Brandon Peavy tells his story of how he was conceived out of wedlock and his mother’s friends told her to have an abortion, but she didn’t. He says his mother tried to commit suicide in front of him when he was two years old, but, looking down on her son, didn’t know who was going to take care of him, “so I would say I’m kind of the one who saved her life.”
When he was born, his dad was a crackhead, but has since gotten clean and his parents are married, he continues. Peavy lives at his parents’ house and is thankful for their journey together. It was his dad’s idea to get E-40 on “No Fakery” after hearing his son play the track and remembering BrvndonP’s cousin, Brian Hooks, knew the Bay Area legend through their work together on the 2000 film 3 Strikes. E-40 was down to do the collab, and Peavy’s dad wanted to tag along.
“He said nobody hardly goes to his house,” BrvndonP says of E-40, “like he doesn’t let anybody in his house. So my dad wanted to come, and he was like, ‘No your dad can’t come. Only you.’ But it was dope. You get to know a lot about somebody just by spending hours with them. I was there for seven, eight hours. I was in his home so he was comfortable.”
Working with Lecrae was somewhat a family affair, too. BrvndonP was Andy Mineo’s drummer when he toured with the Anomaly rapper. BrvndonP, as Black Knight, has done production for seemingly all of the Reach Records artists. He says he pegged Lecrae down to do his verse for “What You Get” at the same Oakland show where NBA MVP Stephen Curry took the stage to dance with Lecrae.
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“It was just dope!” he says of the evening.
BrvndonP started producing and rapping as a teenager just for fun. He sold mixtapes in high school for five dollars for “a little extra change every week.” He really started to take his craft seriously when he attended Ex’pression College for Digital Arts and he did more and more production under the name Black Knight. He released the Black Knight’s Worldmixtape in 2012 followed by the #ItsTheBlackKnight beat tape a year later, which featured remixes of some of the popular Reach Records songs at the time.
The artist says he had been working on BrvndonP for two to three years as he was multitasking between touring and producing for other artists. It was during this creative process that he recognized a need to move on from Black Knight and there he found inspiration for the LP’s title.
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“My mom always tells me, ‘Your name is the only thing that you own. So live up to it, be proud of it and don’t hide behind anything,'” he says. “So with the stage name that I had, it was me hiding behind that stage name. And so writing the new music, I realized the new music couldn’t fit under the old name. So I was like what better way to do it then to just change and go by my own name? And in the album, I put so much of my life experiences in the album, and I was like I don’t have another name for it so let’s just name it BrvndonP.”
As he continues to work on new music, BrvndonP is also fostering his Rock, Paper, Scissors Music Group, which consists of his homies from Sacramento including JG, X-Ellentz, K. Agee and Mission, who is on BrvndonP.
“It’s basically an idea that I came up with of just having a group of talented dudes come together and just make music together,” he says of RSPMG. “That’s it. There tends to be a lot of competition. People you know not showing love to people, being like yo, I got to do this on my own, I don’t need no help from nobody. No, but coming together as a collective and build each other up. When you build each other up, everybody wins.”
Besides using RSPMG to build up his friends, BrvndonP is realizing how his music inspires others. That is the reason this album was so personal. Looking back on his musical journey, he is happy that he has allowed himself to mature and challenge himself in a new way.
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“I think I’ve grown a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot,” he says. “I was so scared to put myself in the music, like be relatable and share life experiences and I felt like ‘Oh I can’t share that, I don’t want people to talk about me. I don’t want people to think that I’m in my feelings.’ I kind of became confident due to the fact that I can help somebody else get through what they’re going through if I share my story. There’s plenty of people out there that has gone through, or is going through, the same thing that I went through. My story of overcoming and getting through these situations could potentially help them. Also, not just the lyricism, but the production to as well. The more you do something, the better you get at it. A lot of people tend to stop at like the starting stages because it’s not going anywhere, or it’s like I’m not getting better, but it’s like practice on your craft, perfect your craft, invest in your craft. Over the years, you get older and mature and do different things and stuff like that. From The Black Knight and those projects to this album, I think just hearing it, it’s like night and day.”
Purchase BrvndonP at iTunes.
