I’m Donny Glover and this is the story of how I got my dreams to make it in the rap game.
Growing
up
I grew up with both my parents working in the school system, my mom being a teacher and my dad working maintenance. Both of my sisters practically being geniuses and all of us attending a private school that my mother taught at, you could imagine that education was important in my family. I always made good grades and had lots of good friends but I never was interested in the classroom or what it had to offer, so in a way I felt like I didn’t belong.
I was always day dreaming of something else. When I was little it was always sports, being a professional athlete was my dream for a long time and that’s all I thought about. When I have a dream I follow it, and for years and years that was my main focus to become a professional athlete. I think that type of commitment of constantly working towards something even from a young age has carried on throughout the rest of my life. It really has shown now that I am finally following the passion that has been right there with me this whole time, music.
Finding my
love for
music
I am not really sure of where my love for music came from or even where my gift to write songs came from either, but I can tell you that my mother is the most creative person I know and that my dad is the hardest working person I know and I think those two qualities combined must factor into how I turned out. But still I wonder, what convinced me to start writing music of my own? This is why I believe that it is all just a gift from God because as much as I go back through my youth I can never find what made me start writing. I can go back and find where I got my creativity from or my work ethic but all I remember is one day in English class in 7th
grade I wrote my first lyrics, and I have no clue why. It was just a couple lines, of course about money and gold chains, because that’s all my 7th grade mind thought was interesting at the time, but eventually that grew to full songs with real concepts. Eventually the pandemic hit and I was locked in my house for months, no athletics, no school, and all the time in the world.
This was a low point in my life, as my 8th grade self going through my first big “heartbreak” and being stuck in my house was hard. Funny enough I looked to writing music to cope with it, and soon after I had moved on from the so called “heartbreak” but the music stayed with me. Everyday I would go out for a walk and listen to new music I had never heard before then come home and write music of my own based on my inspirations. At the time and obviously still to this day one of my major inspirations was Kanye seeing that his debut album was a critique of the school system and about how he didn’t feel like he belonged in that environment, I identified with him and tried to create a similar sound. I began writing an album at the time, which in all honesty wasn’t very good and would have never released anyways, but as I was finishing it everything started up and I lost all my time that went to music. For about a year I never wrote a song, maybe a couple lyrics here and there but I had lost it, I had lost my coping mechanism and what gave me joy. I blamed it on school for taking up all my time teaching me things I either already knew or believed to be pointless to me. This negative perspective took all my drive away and took music away from me for about a year.
The first week of football in my Sophomore year I thought that all my work had paid off and my
original dreams of being an athlete were going somewhere, but this was cut short when I had an
awful knee injury. I tore my ACL, Meniscus, and damaged my MCL so I was done for the year.
Again I was down in the dumps and thought I had lost yet again another dream of mine. Until one day in class, I was sitting and thinking about how much of a drag life had been recently now with nothing exciting in my life. I woke up at the same time everyday, I went to school, I learned things that I forgot by the end of the class, I went home and I fell asleep, I hated it. I thought about the ups and downs I had been through in my 16 years of life. I decided I wasn’t going to let this beat me and that I could make a decision to make something good out of this, so I began to write. I found my coping mechanism again and it brought me a new found life because I had a focus too this time. My focus was to finally start and finish a full album and release it to the public, not thinking about the fact that only a handful of people knew I even wrote music or that
it is a difficult ask, I accepted the challenge that I gave myself. I started to write an album based on what it was like to be a kid who felt that they didn’t belong in an environment that is all about belonging, the kid who daydreams through all of his classes, an album about the other people in this school who would drag him down if they ever knew about this dream, I began writing an album about my life because if you remember correctly theses themes seemed to have been common throughout it. It took months upon months of writing and finally I was done writing and ready to be performed for 6 of maybe 7 people who knew about my music. I was terrified, I was about to let this dream of mine be heard outside of my bedroom doors for the first time ever, but as usual I took fear on and did it and they loved it and were very supportive of it. This gave me the confidence to actually follow this dream to put this album out to the public, but that meant I had to record, mix, and produce it, which I didn’t know how to do. A couple of friends from the show decided they wanted to help me with this and form a company around my music that we named S.O.U.L music (Sounds Of Us Living), and with them we purchased a nice mic and some other equipment and started recording the album out of a closet all throughout the summer, figuring things out on the fly.
My parents at this point didn’t even know I had written music, they didn’t even suspect it. I always say I am not afraid of anything but at that point in time I was terrified of them finding out and how they would feel about it, so I kept it from them, and I would go hangout at my friends house when really I was working on the album all around the clock. After recording every verse, mixing every song, voice acting in every skit, and fine tuning every track to my specifications the album was completely done and ready to be released. This is when we realized that this is going to be a lot harder than we had thought because little did we know it costs a lot of money to release an album. We thought we had done all this for nothing until we thought of the idea of a concert. Only about 7 people knew I made music, 6 people had heard me perform acouple songs, nobody had heard the finished product, and we decided on a large concert to raise money to release the album. Were we crazy for this? Maybe, but we went for it, we were all in on this. In the next coming months we booked the show and still kept it quiet that it was happening because I was still afraid of what people would say. Slowly, I began to shop the music around a little bit, showing people who were interested in some of my music and building the confidence to put myself out there. Eventually I did it, on October 1st, 2022 I released my first piece of music ever, the album’s single KEEP IT REAL. The next day I overcame my fear of what my parents would think of me and I told them what I had been doing for the past months and had a very emotional moment with my mom when I showed her the song and she told me how proud she was of her son. Tickets for our show began to sell and they sold out quick and next thing you know the show was only a week away. Three kids managed all this, THREE KIDS. From a season ending injury and a little bit of inspiration, to my first ever show in front of 100 people. I was very nervous, but when the night came I felt ready and I put on a great performance and felt like I had finally made it, I had finally achieved my dreams.
That takes us to today where you just met the kid who grew up in a private school where he felt he didn’t belong, the kid who found home in music, the kid who made an amazing album out of a closet, the kid who then built the courage to release this album to the public no matter what anyone said, and now the kid who is finally making it in the rap game. This kid is Donny Glover.
