Breland did not expect the responsibility of becoming a public figure in a fraught political moment — especially for a genre-bent audience base. In Rage and Sorrow, Breland takes on the responsibility he feels, and uses his platform to push these questions further.
“I’m a little tired,” Breland — a genre-fluid songwriter and performer — says. “I have what my mom described as ‘racial battle fatigue.’” His voice is the kind of weary that can be discerned over phone speakers. It was the day before Juneteenth, hours before the release of Breland’s Rage and Sorrow EP. That day, the front page of the New York TimesNYT featured a story about an Atlanta police officer shooting Rayshard Brooks. Breland lives in Atlanta.
“The best way to put it is, I feel like I have a responsibility to help tackle this problem, but I also have a responsibility to take care of myself,” Breland says. “Those two things are constantly in contact with one another.”
2020 is not the year America expected, and not the year Breland expected, either. He did not expect music to be a viable career, and studied marketing and management at Georgetown. But in late May, his self-titled EP garnered attention from country fans and hip-hop fans alike, thrusting him into the public sphere. He did not expect his breakout single, “My Truck,” to garner over a million Spotify streams in under a month, and hit Number one on Spotify’s Viral 50 Chart in February. In the nine months since the song’s release, it has remained on the playlist, and Breland has accrued nearly 400,000 followers across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. He did not expect the responsibility of becoming a public figure in a fraught political moment — especially for a genre-bent audience base. He did not expect to market himself to such a diverse cohort of music consumers with diverse opinions on questions of genre, politics and identity.
