Today we are continuing with our special music in May Thursday episodes.
Super excited.
My guest is Toronto raised, former elementary school teacher turned rapper, spoken word artist, poet, international best selling author, humble the poet.
Though his former students used to just know him as Mister Singh, he's performed at concerts and festivals around the world, including oh little places like Lollapalooza.
And now pretty much split splits his time between Toronto and Los Angeles.
So in today's conversation, which I would probably describe as fiercely honest, wide ranging, we take a deep dive into not only his journey from teaching to music and rapping video, spoken word, but also how his experience as the child of immigrants, being raised in the Sikh tradition and in his words, kind of not seeing anyone else in the music world who looked like him, how that all really shaped his lens on possibility, on his, his stories and his voice and his values.
And we dive into a series of moments and really honest awakenings, often painful reckonings that woke him up to how he wanted to live his life and devote himself to his craft and his vocation.
In addition to his music, Humble also has a great new book out that distills 101 short and sweet insights for better living called unlearn that you definitely want to check out.
And as with all of our music in May episodes, Humble shares a bit of a musical offering at the end, this time in the form of a spoken word piece, which you don't want to miss.
So be sure to stick around for the whole conversation.
So excited to share this with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is good life project.
I mean, I'm curious when the threads of what you're doing now, it's your earliest recollection of when it started to reveal itself.
I was in the third grade and I wrote a book called Revenge of the Teacher.
And it was a fictional book about my third grade teacher picking each and every one of the students off in a fit of revenge and actually killing them and having a very creative way to kill each of them.
And it was heavily influenced by Freddy Krueger.
You know, he gets in every the movies, he gets in everybody's dreams and he uniquely kills everybody.
So it was kind of inspired by that.
It didn't raise any flags.
I didn't have to see any special doctors or therapists because of it.