From Autumn Issue 59
GLASS Man speaks to multi-hyphenate Anderson .Paak on breaking boundaries to become one of America’s most inventive musicians.
It started with Earth, Wind and Fire, the Delfonics and Stevie Wonder. New Edition, Jodeci and Nas came next. And in the days when MTV dominated television, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z were added to the list. By the sixth grade, Brandon Paak Anderson had grown into a middle-schooler with an encyclopaedic knowledge of music thanks to his mother and two older sisters.
Recreating dances turned into reciting lyrics and it was there in his living room in Oxnard, California, performing for his family, that he realised he wanted to turn that glow inside into a permanent marker of how he defined himself.

Photographer: Damien Fry
Fast forward to today and the 38-year-old is better known as Anderson .Paak, a eight-time Grammy award-winner whose ability to transcend genre, instrument and medium has earned him an imitable seat at a table with the greats. Those looking in from the outside might assume that our interview will begin with him telling me about an incident that sparked his overnight success, or a feature on a song that landed him in the spotlight. That just simply wasn’t the case for .Paak. It began back in that sitting room in sixth grade with the drums.
“I had my mind set on playing the saxophone because I wanted to serenade girls outside of their windows,” recalls .Paak, who had decided he wanted to join the school orchestra. But after arriving late, the only instrument left was a bass drum, which now became his newfound hobby. After a matter of weeks, the pre-teen called it quits. But it just so happened that evening his step-dad brought out his old drum kit and began playing classic Prince records. After eagerly observing him, the youngster heard the words “you try”.

Photographer: Damien Fry
“Nothing else had come natural to me like that,” pinpoints the musician. His mother couldn’t quite process how, within a matter of hours, her son was able to translate hits with the five-piece instrument. “She gave me the Archie Bell & The Drells Tighten Up record and I learned how to play that. After that I didn’t care about anything else except getting better at the drums.”
Advised to go to church as that’s where “all the best musicians are”, he uncovered the gospel genre where ethereally raspy voices were blended together with organs and drums, adding a whole new subsection to his already vast sonic landscape.

Photographer: Damien Fry
“I sat in the front every day until they asked me to play,” he says. When they did, they recognised the milestones he was yet to reach musically but offered him the chance to learn from them, exposing him to the sounds of gospel greats like Fred Hammond and Kirk Franklin. “It was my schooling,” observes .Paak. “It was when I started playing there that I realised, okay, this is what I want to do.”
Hyper-aware of the amalgamation of sounds that bounced around his brain, he began DJing until he reached the inevitable conclusion of wanting to create his own music. Struck by the songs that laced the parties he danced at, from the Neptunes to Timbaland, he agreed to save up for an MPC, splitting the cost with his mother. “And that’s what I did.” It marked the beginning of a new chapter in his development.
“I began writing and emulating the people whose sounds I liked in the hope of finding my own sound. I was pretty dead set that I was going to be signed to Roc-A-Fella Records. I was going to be the youngest person signed to Jay-Z’s label and I was going to be like a mini Kanye,” recalls .Paak, adamant on following the lead of culture-shifting American rappers who’d come before him. But then his world turned upside down.

Photographer: Damien Fry
“When I was in senior year, both my parents got put in prison for seven and a half years,” he says, alluding to their prosecution for fraud. “After that, I was like, forget it, I’m not even signed and I will just get a job. So I stopped doing music, sold all my equipment and got a job taking care of mentally disabled people.”
For two years .Paak distanced himself from the dream he once chased. But love has a way of reigniting old flames. “I met someone and that really got me motivated again and I took a chance.” That someone, like .Paak’s mother, was South Korean-born.

Photographer: Damien Fry
This newfound motivation led the couple south to Los Angeles, lured by the promise of endless possibilities, or so he hoped. As he juggled college at the Musicians Institute, small drumming gigs and the occasional odd job, the pair welcomed their first son, Soul, into the world. But the financial strain hit hard and they ended up homeless. “I tried my hand at selling weed but I was a terrible dealer – I kept on being robbed!”
They say the third time’s the charm and, for him, it was. His relentless ambition finally aligned with the future he’d always envisioned. “I was just going to try to put everything into the music,” he says. Couch-surfing saw him cross paths with rapper Dumbfoundead, which led to touring with his band and, eventually, to saving enough to move his family from the streets into an apartment. In 2012, he released his first mixtape, O.B.E Vol. 1, under the name Breezy Lovejoy.
And then, everything snowballed – fast. First, it was producer Knxwledge. Then Dr Dre came calling. “The rest was history.” Somehow .Paak, against all the odds, had managed to alchemise his misfortune into an art that gained the coveted nod from the industry’s elite. His energy is palpable, even over the phone. You can just tell that his success was never in question. It was always just a matter of time.

Photographer: Damien Fry
“I don’t know if I ever actually quit,” pauses the musician. “Even when I was working those jobs, I would always go back and do something creative in music. I had to do something, even if it was just recording my friend’s punk-rock band in the garage I was living in. It’s something I would do, regardless if I was making money or not. It’s kind of like reading, I have to have that outlet. It’s my therapy.”
It was a remarkable arrival for an unknown musician. And though his introduction into the mainstream turned heads, he was acutely aware of the years of silence beforehand. And so Breezy Lovejoy turned into Anderson .Paak, an artist you have to pay attention to otherwise you’ll miss the point. Literally.
“In the beginning, it was about detail. It was more about reminding people that slept on you, that they now have to pay attention. If they don’t pay attention to the dot, then I don’t have to pay attention to them,” he explains. “It was my little fuck you.” Four studio albums later, collaborations with the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and André 3000, and a reputation worth its weight in gold, the meaning behind Anderson .Paak has changed.

Photographer: Damien Fry
“It’s evolved into dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s. The dot symbolises versatility and exploring in telling as many stories through as many mediums as I can. The dot has evolved into more than just music. I’m now dipping into film and entrepreneurship. I’ve got a charity and I’m giving back to my family and other people’s families. The dot has turned into the world, like a little planet, if you will.”
Before 2020 .Paak was anchored in creating music. If he wasn’t in the studio, he was on stage. He was on one of those relentless cycles of career-defining back-to-back tours that doesn’t only shape an artist, it elevates them into stardom. Then the world hit pause and the unstoppable force that was .Paak suddenly found itself grounded by lockdown. At home with his, now, two kids, he dived headfirst into their world – YouTube and K-Pop.
“My eldest son was obsessed with YouTube and wanted to be a YouTuber. I had no clue what that was,” he remembers, laughing at his naivety. Determined to use the time they now had together, he suggested making skits for the channel. “We started bonding over all these skits that we were doing and I started getting obsessed with editing and filming them. I would stay up ‘til the wee hours of the morning trying to edit them so he could post them at noon to get the most views and subscribers.”

Photographer: Damien Fry
While .Paak was getting a masterclass in internet culture, he wanted to offer one in music. “It got me thinking, like my whole house is obsessed with BTS. But what do they know about BET? I’m like, okay, you’re Korean, but you’re also Black. This is Tupac, this is Snoop – you should know this, too,” he says.
“I thought the whole idea and this dynamic was funny. I never knew much about my Korean side until I met my sons’ mother so I wanted to delve into me being the odd man out, learning about my culture through them and them learning about their other culture through me.” The result is K-Pops!, .Paak’s debut feature film, co-written, directed and starring himself and Soul, and set to premiere at Toronto International Film Festival in September.
The process was stringent. It took three years before anyone walked onto a set. For .Paak this was personal, not only because his son was involved but because he’s meticulous in his craft. Khaila Amazan aided in developing the script, Greg Silverman was hired as the producer and Yvette Nicole Brown was called to co-star.
“Thank God I had an incredible team who were very patient and took care of me. I was able to do the movie how I wanted to do it and I learned a lot,” he says reflectively, not shy of admitting that he “fell on his face” a few times in the process. “There’s definitely some things that could have been better, but the movie is one of my proudest efforts and one of my best showcases of what I can do artistically.”

Photographer: Damien Fry
Although the film has remnants of his life intertwined within the storyline, his aim was to convey a certain emotion: “I wanted to give people the feeling I got when I was hanging out with my son in quarantine, being able to bond with him, actually feeling like I was getting to know him. Before that I had been on the road non-stop and his mum was being a mum full-time. My kids were damn near grown. You leave and they’re crawling. You come back and they’re walking and talking.”
.Paak’s time on set eclipsed what went before. He was next to his son every step of the way as the two of them embarked on a new adventure outside the realms of what either of them knew. “You don’t know what’s going to happen when the cameras come on,” he observes before breaking into an expansive smile. “He’s a chip off the old block.” You can sense .Paak’s pride as he tells me about Soul. “Man, me and his mom really raised a real gentleman. It was really cool to see it, you’re like blowing with pride of your offspring.”
Creating K-Pops! marked a pivotal shift in .Paak’s artistic journey. When I ask him about the possibility of crafting a visual album à la Beyoncé’s Lemonade, his eyes light up. “Visuals are so important and storytelling is so important,” he replies. “I almost want to use it as a vehicle to showcase my music. So the next project I do will probably be paired with a movie or something of that sort. After doing this whole thing, I can’t see myself doing a regular album.”

Photographer: Damien Fry
And while he’s busy transforming his music into visual art, .Paak is also gearing up for a return to the stage this November for .Paak House, the concert born from his arts and education charity, The Brandon Anderson Foundation. Calling on his peers to make up the line-up, the musician is aware that change begins with the youth.
“I want to be able to show other artists like it’s dope that you have a lot going on and I know it’s a hustle, but don’t forget to donate your time to people. That’s all you’ve got to do,” he says passionately. “You don’t have to give a bunch of money. It’s just about you being on stage and performing for these people that might not ever be able to see you or even know who you are. It’ll change your life. It could be that one spark that does wonders and changes everything.”
As he outlines the purpose of his foundation, I’m reminded of his childhood. If it wasn’t for the opportunity of being taught how to play the drums by his local pastors, he would still just be Brandon Paak Anderson. “Sometimes you can put your energy into negative things – I saw that happen with a lot of people around me. I saw that they didn’t have outlets. They didn’t have something to be passionate about. But now I have a platform and that’s what I want to do. The least I can do is to give back and continue the cycle. You get what you give out, it’s not just take, take, take,” he says earnestly. “At the end of the day, all this material stuff is going to be gone. You’ve only got what you built, and that’s the music and the community. That’s what will last forever.”
by Imogen Clark
Photographer: Damien Fry
Stylist: Donna Lisa
Grooming: Jenn Hanching
Barber: DC
Producer: Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photography assistant: Mike Lopez
Stylist assistant: Alex Levey
Location Honor Hamilton, LA
All clothing, accessories and leather goods: LOUIS VUITTON