Music and Me

My name is Brandon Leevy and this is my blog. I have several previous posts that cover a wide range of topics, but this post is going to be more personal than the others. I am currently a student at HPU studying Strategic Communications and Sales. My path to becoming an HPU student was a long and winding road, and in this blog post you’ll get a better idea as to why that is. I am going to tell you a story about myself, and the thing that excites me, engages me, and challenges me the most. Music. I’d like to give a fair warning that this post is going to be entirely too long, but I hope that you gain some value from reading it, and maybe even relate it to your own life in some way.

Ever since I can remember, music has played a significant role in my life. Some of my earliest memories come from watching my brother compose instrumentals on a beat machine that would be considered “old school” in 2021. But at the time it was new and was full of buttons that I had no clue how to control, but I loved watching him work. With this machine he would create beautiful instrumentals. My favorite part would come after the instrumental was finished. Once my brother completed an instrumentals he would freestyle over it. Freestyling is when you rap (or sing) over an instrumental extemporaneously, without using any lyrics that were written before hand. When freestyling, you are literally creating a song on the spot. My brother was highly skilled at freestyling. The fact that he could come up with clever, catchy lyrics on the spot with no premeditation left me in awe. He would always encourage me to try, but I was hesitant and extremely nervous to rap any lyrics out of fear of sounding terrible. I was around six or seven years old at the time, and the whole process was daunting and confusing to me. All I knew was that one day I wanted to be as good as he was. 

I practiced freestyling in my room whenever I could, and started writing little songs in a notebook. But I was still far too insecure to show anyone. Over the years I continued to practice and find my sound more. I was now not only rapping, but singing as well. My brother noticed my improvements, as we would still freestyle together often. As I got older we started to make a competition out of it but he would always win. Until one day we were in our basement listening to some instrumentals and we started freestyling over one of them, going back and forth. When the instrumental finished we just looked at each other and laughed because he realized I had finally surpassed him. It was a great, full circle moment that I’m sure neither of us will ever forget. After that night, I gained a new sense of confidence when it came to my musical ability. I think I was about thirteen at the time. I would go to school and my friends would ask me to freestyle at the lunch table. Music was beginning to become a part of my identity, and I liked that. Like many adolescent children, I was still searching for my identity and I felt like I had finally found a piece of it. 

Over the next few years I began to record music, but would never release the songs. I was still nervous about what my friends and family might think, and in hindsight a part of me just didn’t want to let the world and it’s opinions in on something that meant so much to me. Eventually, in my Junior year of high school. I decided it was time to come out of the shadows. I didn’t release a song, but instead, posted a video that a friend had taken of me freestyling in the car. I was feeling really anxious about relinquishing any control over something so personal to me, but I finally worked up the courage to post the video on my Instagram account. Now the real anxiety began. 

I had to fight the urge to take the video down every minute, but I decided to let it stay. I had to put my phone in my room and walk away from it because the anxiety was killing me. When I went back to check my phone an hour or two later I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My notifications were going off every second. I checked and saw that a page had reposted my video. A very large page with over 1 million followers. In fact, the pages name was “RAP”. Many other popular pages followed after them. After that day, everything changed. I went from 300 followers to 10,000 in just a few days. Before I knew it, I had a manager, a marketing team, hundreds of thousands of streams and views behind my music, and an ego that was unfortunately growing in unison with all of it. 

Fast forward to a year later, I now had over 60,000 followers on Instagram and decided to postpone attending college so that I could focus on my career. After many talks with my manager and I, my parents were on board. But then, things went south. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but just a month after the decision to not attend school I had fired my manager, lost thousands of dollars, and was on the brink of some sort of breakdown. I even went full “2007 Britney Spears” and cut all my hair off… myself of course. Yikes. After this breakdown, I blamed music. I wasn’t healthy and I felt I had no choice but to detach myself from it and everything that surrounded it. I left my Instagram account up, but stopped posting entirely. Leaving my supporters clueless, which lead to rumors that I had died. I know this sounds crazy, but I assure you all of this really happened. Some of them even started commenting RIP under my old posts. But I just couldn’t bring myself to react. I treated music and social media like poison. 

I ended up coming to HPU to study, partially in efforts to get as far away from my old life and music as possible. I pursued different entrepreneurial ventures and eventually landed on real estate; my second love. But as much as I enjoy real estate, the music kept calling me back, and I hated the pull it had on me. It took a long time, but this year I finally decided to stop fighting. After a lot of healing and reflecting, I realized that it wasn’t the “what” it was the “why”. Music wasn’t to blame for what happened, it was the decisions I made that eventually led me to self-destruct. Slowly, I have began to fall back in love with music, and I’ve decided to continue my music journey under the condition that I do it the right way this time, and along the way help other young artists navigate the industry and avoid making some of the same mistakes that I did. For me, this is like a road to redemption. And I can’t wait to see wait to see where it takes me.