Caleb Brown, an up-and-coming emcee from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, just graduated high school in May, but he’s already making waves in his local music scene and has big plans for the future. He released an EP, All Dawgs Go To Heaven, in 2016 and just followed it up the sequel and his official debut project, All Dawgs Go To Heaven 2. The album is gaining traction, with its flagship single, “W$GT$,” getting hundreds of thousands of listens on SoundCloud. Recently, Caleb stopped by rolling out to talk about his life and the approach that he’s decided to take with his music.
Caleb, 18, first dove deep into making music after his freshman year of high school when plans changed once he got cut from his high school basketball team. “I really wanted to play basketball, and once that didn’t work out, I saw music as a form of therapy for me,” he said. Playing basketball had been Caleb’s ultimate goal for high school and beyond, but after experiencing personal successes with the rap projects he released in high school, he decided to stick with it.
However, he had already been making music and experimenting with hip-hop prior to that time. Since elementary school Caleb has been experimenting with rapping and making music, saying that one of his friends put him on to it all the way back in elementary school; “you rap because all of your friends rap, so that was just kind of the thing to do.” During high school, his talent simply shifted from a side project to his main focus of attention and growing up, his main musical inspirations were Kanye West, Yolanda Adams, Tupac, and Lil Wayne, who Caleb considers “the best rapper alive.”
As far as the personal occurrences and events that left Caleb with impressions he might try to include in his music, he says he just tries to include “everything,” and that “trying to make sense of it all as a teenager” is his main goal when making music. So far, he has put out 4 projects – Fear, Empathy, All Dawgs Go to Heaven, and All Dawgs Go to Heaven 2 – and states that out of all of them, Empathy has been his favorite project thus far. “It was a strange place. I had just come home [from staying in Atlanta]. There were just a lot of things that had happened. It was crazy.”
While staying in Atlanta for a year, Caleb attended Campbell High School in a county just north of Atlanta, saying that it was where he “had the real high school experience.” But when he first arrived, he didn’t enjoy Atlanta at all. He said, “I didn’t like nothing about Atlanta; I wanted to go back home. But you know, it soon started to grow on me. I met some really great people who I have great relationships with today, and I wouldn’t be able to talk about a lot of the things that I can talk about today if it wasn’t for me coming here, so I wouldn’t change any of it.”
Wheezy, an up-and-coming producer best known for his extensive work with Young Thug, is from Atlanta and produced many of the beats on Brown’s All Dawgs Go to Heaven 2.
When asked what one thing Caleb would want to make known about his music, he said, “Don’t put me in the conscious rap box. Because that’s not what this is, man; we’re just making music.”
