Everyone is talking about Louisville, Kentucky vocalist Bryson Tiller right now – even if he doesn’t know it. Once he got to a certain point of notoriety someone said something “crazy” about his daughter and he took that as his queue to hand over the logins to management. His debut T R A P S O U L is tape of the moment – the one you throw on to impress your friends, with the confidence that he’s about to blow up and make you look good. Like “What? You’ve never heard of Bryson Tiller?” Drake and Timbaland are both fans and his songs are being covered and remixed all over YouTube and Soundcloud. Yet the man himself remains completely level-headed and even underwhelmed when talking about it – “I heard it was pretty good man,” he tells us of the reception to his tape.
Despite its impressive cohesion, T R A P S O U L was actually compiled of music that he’s had lying around for the past few years. And while it counts as the first LP of his deal with RCA Records he doesn’t view it as his debut album. “I’ve never made an album before,” he admits. “But I plan on starting, so this next project will be what I think is my first album. I think a dope album has dope features.” T R A P S O U L was one of the few R&B releases of 2015 to be free of guest vocalists. It’s an achievement he’s pleased with, although he wasn’t sure at first. “It was really my team and management telling me they thought I could do it on my own,” he explains. “I did want a lot of features on there, but they said ‘Do it yourself the first time around and then next time we’ll do it with features.” It would no doubt be effortless to fill the tape with a bevy of big-name appearances when your call log looks like Tiller‘s, but the restraint from doing so has paid off, allowing listeners to get to know Bryson first.
A fan of Chris Brown from his ‘Run It’ days, Bryson believes that one of the most exciting aspects of being a music fan is witnessing the growth of an artist. “To watch [Chris] grow into a new artist – I think that’s the best part of it,” he says. “I hope people can listen to T R A P S O U L and know that I’m a growing artist. If you go back to my mixtape from 2011, I was a completely different artist back then. Two years from now I want to be evolved, I’m not going to do the same thing over and over.” The old tape, which was called Killer Instinct and can be excavated via a Google search, comes up several times in our conversation. It’s important to Tiller as a reminder of how far he’s come. “I had this skit, that was like I call myself from the future telling myself that I should keep working hard,” he remembers. “I think that’s cool because now I am, and that’s crazy. I stopped doing music for a little bit because I had a daughter, and I wanted to get a real job and just focus. But then I realised that that wasn’t enough.” Refocusing on music proved to be a good decision, soon after getting back in the studio he wrote his breakthrough single ‘Don’t’, which would be a turning point in his career: “I would say the struggle made me want to take music seriously again.”
‘Don’t’ was the first he wrote following his hiatus, and the instrumental came from music-based social media site, Soundclick, on which he would trawl through thousands of user-uploaded beats – a platform he thankfully no longer requires. “I did that song and it took off,” he says. “A lot of dope producers started giving me dope beats and it was just easy.” It was from here that he began to craft his sound, a marriage of slow burning 808 heavy production with his soulful vocal delivery, which a fan would coin “Trap Soul” when describing ‘Let Em Know’ in a comment on SoundCloud. “They said ‘This is the trap soul movement.’ And that’s how I even heard the title,” Tiller remembers. “I was just like ‘Oh that’s dope’. I just wanted to know what that was, I typed it into google, looking to see if any other artists had did it. And I didn’t see anyone doing it, so I was like you know what I’m just going to call this project T R A P S O U L because that’s what my music sounds like.”
There has been lot of debate around the necessity of co-signs lately (Earl Sweatshirt recently referred to Drake as “a bit of a vulture”) but Tillerdescribes them as having been “super important” for his own come up. It was while he was grinding hard at Papa Johns that he received a call from Timbaland who urged him to quit his day job. “No telling where the song ‘Don’t’ would be, even if it still got 15 million plays… I wouldn’t have had as much time to focus on music. All those songs ‘Let Em Know’, ‘Been That Way’ and ‘Sorry Not Sorry’ – those songs wouldn’t have been there if Timbaland didn’t hit me up.” And when he found himself questioning his decision to do music he received a call from Drake: “That was like ‘I really got to keep going now! This is real. My favourite artist/rapper loves my music. That’s crazy. I just gotta keep going.’” The shine and confidence passed onto him through Drizzy is something he hopes to be in the position to do for others in the future. “I want to shine some light on the dope artists who are in the shadows,” he says. “So shout out to Drake for always doing that.”
For now, Bryson is grinding hard, having spent the majority of his time living on the road since ‘Don’t’ dropped. And while the success of T R A P S O U L continues to grow on an industry level, it’s the impact on his own life that really matters to Tiller. “It changed things drastically,” he reflects. “Now my daughter is going to be able to go to private school, like that was the whole reason I wanted to do this again. Now my dreams are my realities. I don’t have to worry about things, the struggle is over man.” Now the goal is to ensure longevity moving forward, as he navigates a road of infinite choices and possibilities. “I think about that all the time,” he says, as our conversation comes to a close. “What’s going to happen, if I made the right decision, if everything is on course…” He pauses before offering up a final thought: “Somebody told me that if you have deja vu a lot then you’re on the right path. I’ve had a lot of deja vu lately…”
This interview first appeared in rwdmag.com Upcoming100.com
