ON THE RISE
A lot of kids grow up watching sports stars and decide they want to be a professional athlete when they get older.
But Chicago native Trey P grew up on music videos and decided he wanted to be a recording artist.
That pursuit of a music career helped him overcome the struggle of growing up without a mother or father, getting adopted through the Department of Children and Family Services and growing up on the streets.
“You’ve got it bad at home and you’re going to the streets and learning from the wrong influences sometimes,” he says. “It was definitely a struggle.”
Influenced by artists like Hot Boys and Lil Wayne, Drake and Chris Brown, Trey P has left those troubles behind him and now is making a name for himself in the music industry as one of Chicago’s rising underground artists, and a member of the Gravity Music label.
Trey P garnered more attention this year when he reworked Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 smash hit “Time After Time,” making the song more relevant to today and offering some lessons from his own experiences.
“It doesn’t matter if you’ve got money or you don’t, it doesn’t matter if you’re at the peak of your life or at the lowest of your life, you always seem to go through things time after time until you learn from your mistakes and you learn from the things you’ve got going on,” he says. “I’ve been doing a lot of things and I’ve had a lot of things happen to me until I figured out how to change my mind and change the people around me. ‘Time After Time’ definitely stems from that.”
Trey P’s take on the classic didn’t take long to catch on. An unofficial video for the song has been played tens of thousands of times in recent months and is earning Trey P a broad fan base.
“I get DMs and messages from people all over the country and they tell me it’s a good song and want to know when I’m doing a full video,” he says. “I had an older lady tell me it helped her through the situation she was going through, it helps her when she listens to it every morning. It really caught me by surprise.”
Trey P tapped into a different culture for another recent single, “Belong to Me,” which was inspired by his uncle, a former pimp who used to give his nephew “some game and throw me nice little player quotes.”
“When I made the beat, all I could hear is him saying his slick little words so I’m like, you know what, I’m going to make a pimp song,” he says.
His next single and video is “EZ,” an homage to the Kanye West and The Game track “Eazy,” which in turn was a tribute to Eazy-E. Trey P’s song features the same Eazy-E sample but used in a different way.
“It really stands out because in this song it helps you connect with who I am, where I’m from, what I’m about and what I do,” he says.,
Trey P will perform three of his singles at Luxe Lounge in Kansas City on Oct. 15 and has several more on the way after that.
“I’ve got a lot loaded up in the chamber,” he says. “We’re just aiming so that we can get the perfect time to shoot.”
Make sure to stay connected to Trey P on all platforms for new music, videos and social posts.
Upcoming 100: How do you balance experimenting with new sounds and styles while still maintaining your unique artistic identity?
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