About the Artist: Deante Hitchcock doesn’t just want to make good and timeless hip-hop music. He wants to use it as a vehicle to capture the purest and most honest emotion that most rappers won’t: love. The exceptional emcee’s upcoming sophomore LP, Once Upon A Time (ByStorm Entertainment/RCA Records),” departs from his knack for delivering introspective, witty lyrical gymnastics on past cuts like “Wide Open,” “How TF” and “I Got Money Now” in favor of a more melodic, harmonic collection of songs that puts love front and center. Inspired primarily by his relationship with his girlfriend, Once Upon A Time is a 16-song journey into the emotional rollercoaster that he experienced with his romantic partner and the birth of their infant son, Otto Saint Hitchcock. “This is the season in life that I’m trying to figure out how to balance everything,” Hitchcock said. “Between music, a relationship, even beyond just a child, me and shawty still matter. Our relationship matters and us apart from our relationship as individuals. We’re parents now, so we can’t get lost in parenthood. That can’t be our only identity.” For inspiration, Hitchcock was determined to create a concept project in the same vein as Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, M.A.A.D. city or The Game’s The Documentary, themed like T.I.’s King or Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia, Ultra, but using similar vocal stylings as Smino and The Weeknd. He tapped in with producers like Arsenio Archer (Summer Walker, Mary J. Blige, Trey Songz) and SlimWav (Diddy, 6LACK) along with his chief collaborator Brandon Phillips-Taylor to create an arc that’s transparent yet complex about the uncertainties that men like Hitchcock face but haven’t expressed those emotions to the women in their lives. Once Upon A Time’s dreamy opener, “Time of Their Lives,” pilots Hitchcock’s coming-of-age story with its haunting, psychedelic vocals. With its bouncing beat, “Whoa!” chronicles the joys of bachelorhood before being caught by surprise by feelings beyond physical attraction, while the rapper talks about getting to know one another on “Zodiac (feat. Shamba).” “We’ve seen different seasons in each other’s lives, and we’ve been able to learn each other,” Hitchcock said. “This is what I put down because I’ve lived this shit. That first ‘I love you’ was scary as hell. The feelings are a little bit more intense than I thought they were, but I wasn’t ready to put that out there yet. A lot of times, people aren’t ready to jump ship. It’s tough, but commitment is tough.” Hitchcock starts to get vulnerable and resists the temptation of commitment on Once Upon A Time with the acoustic guitar-driven “Alone” before he comes to terms with those feelings on “2 Special (feat. David Fuller),” “U Were Right I Was Wrong” and “Callin’ (feat. Big K.R.I.T. and Westside Boogie)”. “May 26 (feat. Samoht),” the album’s gut-punching closer written in Hitchcock’s home studio, revisits the moment he got confirmation that he was going to become a dad...
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