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 daddy.
“Since he got here, that’s the star of the show,” Hitchcock said. “Whatever he wants. If he wants to play at any point in time, anything I’m doing stops.”
The road to making Once Upon A Time started in late 2020 when the clever wordsmith started making songs with no concept in mind. Hitchcock hadn’t toured since 2019 when he hit the road with rapper Wale and multi-talented performer Jidenna but was determined to keep his stride. Despite the coronavirus pandemic forcing the world to shut down and shelter in place in March
2020, he dropped his full-length major label debut, BETTER, two months later.
Hitchcock put out Live from Quarantine at the top of 2021, immediately followed by the raunchy, Valentine’s Day-themed EP Everyday the 14th in February 2022. “I was just trying to stay in folks’ faces,” the rapper said. “If I had to perform from somebody else’s couch in their living room, I was gonna lose my shit. I was so tired of quarantine in general. To be able to get a stage even though there was no crowd, still feeling like a show is amazing.”
Hitchcock thought about all of the women in his life – his girlfriend, mother, grandmother, and his best friend, coincidentally all Cancers - and wanted Once Upon A Time, especially the tracks “Helluva Woman” and “Royal (feat. DRAM & The Riverdale Love Choir)” to act as the counter-narrative to the toxic masculinity found throughout popular music. He recently launched The Mother God Project as a platform to help and support women from his community in starting their own businesses. The rapper partnered with the Atlanta-based nonprofit Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs (ACE’s) Women’s Business Center to offer LLC registration and training for women entrepreneurs. So far, Hitchcock’s efforts have helped 70 women go through the program. It’s a way for Hitchcock, a child of divorce by age seven who was raised around two aunts and a slew of his mother’s female friends, to acknowledge the women similar to his relatives who deserve a chance.
“Most of the time I spent growing up was around women,” he said. “My mom, who is a nurse, had some shit she wanted to do when I was 15, and she just couldn’t do it because she didn’t have money for it and had two kids to raise. I’ve had some very important people in my life, and
I pulled from them a lot.
Born a Grady Baby on the westside of Atlanta on March 10, 1993 but raised on the southside in Riverdale, Georgia, Hitchcock started rapping when he was 12 years old after learning how to spit rhymes from one of his uncles. The Pisces man briefly attended Georgia Southern University, majoring in pre-med/biology but realized music was his calling. The aspiring artist purchased a camera and started dropping weekly freestyles, New Atlanta Tuesdays, with one of his classmates. Those videos shot from his dorm room started going viral: forcing Hitchcock to drop out of college to pursue his music full-time.
Releasing his first mixtape, 19 Summers, in September 2012, Hitchcock consistently dropped freestyles on Twitter. In 2015, he released a follow-up mixtape, Wishful Thinking, another one, Good, in 2016, and came back with So Much for Good Luck in 2017. Hitchcock teamed up with rapper Childish Major for an EP, Just a Sample 2, in 2019. It wasn’t long before the rapper started getting cosigns from hip-hop personalities like Charlamagne tha God, Wale, and ByStorm Entertainment founder Mark Pitts in his Instagram direct messages.
The stars kept aligning for Hitchcock. His feature on “PTSD” with Omen, Mereba, and St. Beauty from the Dreamville Records compilation Revenge of the Dreamers III in 2019 earned the charismatic talent his first-ever Grammy nomination. His buzz and talents led to Hitchcock becoming the opener on tour for JID, Rapsody, Mikayla 47, 6LACK, Wale, and Jidenna well before he even released his own album.
Hitchcock prides himself on bringing versatility and vulnerability to his music. Reshifting his energy and subject matter to make Once Upon A Time doesn’t even feel like a two-year process. The artist is proud of making a collection of songs that can act as both a cautionary tale for his son’s future relationships as an adult and an opportunity for him to evolve as an artist musically.
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