ON THE RISE
VICTORIA, BC — Mr. Esq grew up in a small port town on Canada’s southwest coast named Esquimalt, and that community gave him his stage name.
Now he’s working to help young people avoid the problems he had and mistakes he made while as a youngster in Esquimalt with his latest album, ‘Esquire’ coming out July 14.
“This is my first album with the label Predominate Studios, this will be my 18th album in the last three and a half years,” Mr. Esq said. “This album, 20 tracks for the label, it’s my reintroduction to the hip hop scene with this label backing me and I wanted to do something a little more creative and different.
“The topics of this, there’s a bunch. It goes from ‘Rich Problems,’ I wrote a song about my mother, ‘A Mother’s Day.’ There are songs about abusive relationships, COVID, Black Lives Matter, the indigenous people and the babies that were found, and there’s a whole spectrum about content songs. Songs about the youth and the direction they’re going. I’ve got something for everybody. Then there are some clubby, banging songs, songs for the ladies, I talk about sexual abuse, I talk about all kinds of things.”
Mr. Esq said his time in prison and a child he lost more than 20 years ago are helping feed his music today and helping him mold his message.
“I spent 10 years in prison,” he said. “I was 18 years old, I was part of an escort agency, selling drugs for certain people. I got a girl pregnant, she moved away and I went with her, then she lost all the amniotic fluid six and a half or seven months into the pregnancy and it forced her to go into labor. My son passed away at birth. That sent me down an even darker path at that point, just drinking more and being more violent, hurting people. It’s ultimately what led to my incarceration.”
After he got out of prison, he worked hard to change his life and a happy coincidence helped along the way.
“I met a girl and I had a daughter with her,” Mr. Esq said. “The doctor told me the due date and it was the exact same date my son passed away. Ten years to the day my daughter was born on the same day my son died 10 years apart. So we celebrate both their birthdays on the same day, she wears his ashes and she knows all about her big brother. The worst day of my life was changed and now it’s the best day of my life
“It’s crazy how the universe works because what kind of father would I have been at 18 years old selling drugs and being a knuckle head, as opposed to now, my daughter is my world, she means everything to me and everything I do every day is to provide her with a life that I never had and make sure she never walks the path that I lived when I was growing up.”
Mr. Esq said his latest single, ‘Rich Problems’ was the result of a fun collaboration with a friend, the rapper and artist Madchild.
“So a buddy of mine Madchild, he's a really really good artist and he’s made some huge new moves in the community of hip hop,” Mr. Esq said. “So I grew up listening to his music and we became good friends and he pulled up to my house in a G-Wagon (a Mercedes G-class SUV) and I said, oh, you’ve got Rich Problems. We Kind of laughed about it and then we ended up going to the studio and that beat came on and I started going through the beat in my head and seeing what comes and Anything you really got is a Rich Problem. That’s the first thing that came to my head and we started writing and we just made magic from there.”
Mr. Esq said “Rich Problems” is about having complaints that really aren’t that serious in the wider scheme of things.
“A lot of people have complaints about their relationships or girls or the pandemic or gas prices, shit like that, it’s like I want to have Rich Problems,” Mr. Esq said. “I’ve got too much money, I need to figure out what to do with it. That’s kind of what the song is about, when you have rich problems, you have no more problems, everything’s just taken care of. Maybe one day I’ll have those kinds of problems, but really it was just a fun song to make with my buddy Madchild, and it turned out to be pretty good. I like how it came together.”
To listen to Mr. Esq’s music, or to follow him on social media, please visit the following links:
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ON THE RISE
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NETHERLANDS — August 26, 2026 — Brook Lynn is stepping into a new chapter with “Love Your Enemy,” an atmospheric alternative pop song that turns an intensely personal battle with anxiety into a message of self-acceptance. Written after her America’s Got Talent auditions, the song captures the internal conflict of facing the person who can be hardest to silence: yourself.
Built around cinematic production and emotionally restrained vocals, “Love Your Enemy” explores the disconnect between appearing fine in public and confronting difficult thoughts in private. The song’s central message is reflected in its chorus, where Brook Lynn sings about being “my own worst company” before arriving at its most hopeful realization: “They say, ‘Love your enemy,’ / So I’m learning how to love me.”
For Brook Lynn, that “enemy” is anxiety. Rather than presenting it as something that simply disappears, the song examines what it means to live with those thoughts while refusing to let them dictate what comes next.
“I always want to give a hopeful message in every song,” Brook Lynn explains. “I always first want to explain what is happening in your head and what you feel, and then, at the end, give a message that you can get out of this, and that anxiety doesn’t have to hold you back from all the things you want to achieve in your life.”
That message became especially significant when Brook Lynn made the decision to perform “Love Your Enemy” on America’s Got Talent. Known by many viewers for her stripped-back cover performances, she recognized that performing an original song on one of television’s biggest stages carried a different kind of risk. But she also knew she could not continue forward without showing audiences the artist behind the covers.
“I just thought it was really important to also show the world that I’m not just a cover singer,” she says. “I do want people to know that I write songs and I want to be an artist and put that out there.”
Brook Lynn performed “Love Your Enemy” during the America’s Got Talent quarterfinals, bringing the song’s story of anxiety and self-doubt directly to a massive live audience. Her journey on the show ended there, but the response made one thing clear: listeners wanted to hear more. Fans connected not only with her voice, but with the honesty behind the performance and the willingness to speak openly about emotions many people struggle to acknowledge themselves.
“I do want to be that person with my music as well for other people,” Brook Lynn says, describing her desire to write about real experiences and feelings. “I always want to be really real with everyone, like talk about deeper stuff, not surface level.”
“Love Your Enemy” arrives as Brook Lynn looks ahead to Tales From The Woods, an upcoming EP intended to introduce listeners to a broader picture of who she is as an artist. With only two original songs currently released, she says she is excited to share more music and continue developing the sound and emotional world introduced through “Love Your Enemy.”
The song is not a conclusion to Brook Lynn’s story. It is the beginning of a more open one—one where anxiety can be acknowledged without being allowed to take control, and where the feelings people are often afraid to say out loud can finally have a voice.
Listen to “Love Your Enemy,” which received promotional support from Starlight PR.
Brook Lynn creates music that feels intimate yet powerful, cinematic yet emotionally exposed. Blending atmospheric alternative pop with minimalist visual storytelling, her work explores vulnerability, isolation, emotional tension and human connection through a distinctly modern lens.
Raised in Wilp, a small town in the Netherlands, Brook Lynn grew up surrounded by silence, nature and isolation. Music became a private emotional outlet and a way to process feelings that were difficult to explain out loud. What began through stripped-back online performances evolved into a growing global audience drawn to her honesty and emotional depth.
For Brook Lynn, music is never just about being heard. It is about being understood.
thisisbrooklynn.com
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