The VOODOO BABY story

Before the stages and the streams, there was a boy on the water's edge in Haiti — tap-taps roaring behind him, kompa and rara drifting out of every doorway, the 509 in his blood.

Music was never a career plan there. It was how the whole island talked: at funerals, at parties, in the market, in the church. He grew up hearing it and answering back.

America came with a silence. He knew what he wanted to say and had no English to say it with. Classrooms he could not follow. Jokes that landed a beat too late.

So he wrote. English words on one page, Kreyòl on the other, rhymes in the margins until the two languages started to move together. Learning to speak and learning to rap became the same lesson.

Late nights alone with a mic, candles burning, he'd feel the room fill up — the ancestors, the spirits his grandmother prayed to, the whole 509 standing behind him.

They gave him the cadence. They gave him the hook. He wrote it down almost as fast as he heard it, and by morning VOODOO BABY existed.

VOODOO BABY carried him out of the bedroom and onto international playlists. Then came pardon me, then ZAM.

He never traded the accent for the audience. He brought Haiti with him — and that's what STRAIGHT FROM HAITI 509 music was built on.