To Her - Live at SPUTNIK - Brooklyn, NY

They say the test of a true artist is the willingness to show their deepest vulnerabilities, subjecting themselves to possible ridicule, or judgments by outsiders. The footage above is of me performing at a spot in Brooklyn called SPUTNIK. The record I'm doing is another one from my debut album, GEORGETOWN. It's called "To Her" (You Don't Love Me). The concept of this record came from Chapter 4 in my brother's book Gunshots in my Cook-Up,
which bares the same name. In the chapter my brother touches on two very serious topics. One was about my mother's battle with breast cancer. I reserve sharing details or information on that topic as of now. The other topic he speaks about is how sometimes as a youg black male we allow ourselves to get consumed by anger and pain and do not always know the best methods of coping or dealing with issues at hand. In the case of my brother, his relationship pushed him to a breaking point one night. At the time, I never knew what was going on with the situation. I was in Miami back then, and I just remember my mother coming to me one night and saying she had to go to New York but never told me why. It wasn't until years later when I was reading this book that I realized what had happened to my brother. I was shocked reading his words. He had always been the epitome of "cool" to me; unfaseable. In hos book he mentions how we wished he had the power to reverse all that had happened in such a short instance; reform the glasses he smashed, send the vulgarities he cursed out back down his throat, his girl gliding backwards into the apartment as if in a slow motion rewind, to the point where they were back in the living room staring at each other. So to push the envelope of my own creativity, I took that situation and created this record from the perspective of me being Selwyn. I took it a step further and wrote the record in reverse. In two minutes and 37 seconds "To HER" takes you on a journey that begins in a hospital bed and ends in an apartment in Brooklyn Heights 24 hours prior. At the end of the footage I begin to break down and cry on stage because as I was performing the record, my mind journeyed to a place where I imagined what my life would have been like had the household liquids my brother consumed that night took him away from me and my family. I couldn't hold it in anymore.