Anderson .Paak

Whether wailing like a funky, gospel preacher, spitting old-school, lyrical raps, or hammering out loose, jazzy drum licks, Anderson .Paak has made his name with a strutting, infectious neo-soul energy, spending years plugging away on California's underground music scene, before being plucked from obscurity by Dr. Dre and becoming a breakout star with 2016 album Malibu. Born Brandon Paak Anderson on February 8, 1986, in the Los Angeles suburbs of Ventura County, his mother was an orphan from the Korean War who was brought to America as a child by an American soldier, but his father was a drug addict who was sent to prison for 14 years after a seven-year-old Anderson witnessed him severely assault his mother. He found solace playing drums in church bands and started rapping in his teens, while his mother went on to run a successful business selling organic strawberries until the El Nino storms wiped out her crops and she developed a gambling habit and was later declared bankrupt. He ended up working on a marijuana farm and was briefly homeless, before becoming an assistant for Shafiq Husayn from alternative hip-hop crew Sa-Ra in the mid-2000s. Throughout his twenties, Anderson performed under the name Breezy Lovejoy, played small live shows across Hollywood with his longtime band The Free Nationals, and worked as a touring drummer for American Idol contestant Haly Reinhart, but his 2012 albums OBE Vol.1 and Lovejoy made little impact. His reputation grew when he turned Neil Young, White Stripes, and Beatles songs into trippy, electro-funk grooves on EP Cover Art, and he started making his way from small R&B clubs onto hip-hop radio with singles “Drugs” and “Miss Right” and 2014 album Venice. His collaborative project NxWorries with producer Knxwledge also created retro, woozy, stoner-soul jams on the cult Link Up & Suede EP before he was called up to the studio to work with Dr. Dre in 2015 and ended up featuring on five of Dr. Dre's tracks on his long-awaited comeback album Compton. He also guest-starred on Mac Miller's hit “Dang!,” before establishing his solo album Malibu, which featured Schoolboy Q, The Game, and Talib Kweli. His spectacular, high energy live shows with The Free Nationals were also acclaimed as a blazing mix of Rick James, Stevie Wonder, The Roots, and Prince, and he appeared on A Tribe Called Quest's album We Got It from Here and released the single "TINTS" with Kendrick Lamar, before returning with new album Oxnard in 2018. In the subsequent years, Anderson .Paak scored his first US Top 10 album with Ventura (2019), which won a Grammy for Best R&B album in 2020, and collaborated with pop juggernaut Bruno Mars on the Silksonic project, whose debut single “Leave the Door Open” (2021) topped the Billboard Hot 100. His 2021 solo single “Fire in the Sky” featured on the soundtrack of the superhero film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, reaching Number 15 on the Hot R&B Songs chart.