Today we’d like to introduce you to Brandon Caldwell.
Brandon, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Oh, wow.
I started out with this passion to write when I was a kid. I used to go to daycare with the sports page from the Houston Chronicle and a bag of donut holes from Shipley’s every morning. As I grew up, I leaned into it more than anything else. You grow, you evolve. Your thoughts and desires switch up. When I was eight, I said I wanted to go to Harvard and get married in the Harvard Church and be a financial big shot – then I figured, I love words and music a little too much to want to have to move to cold-ass Boston when Houston always kept me warm, in so many ways.
I met a few teachers of mine in high school who inspired me to take it seriously. Ms. Malvo, Mr. Willard, and Mr. McCreary. Three totally different personalities and all of them worked with me in their own ways. Willard dared us to look beyond a simple question or concept, Malvo dared us to feel what we were writing and who was reading it. McCreary challenged us to always keep it tight, to not let any sentence feel loose and out of place. So those were some of my initial inspirations. The others came alive in the pages of VIBE Magazine, XXL and more.
So, I knew then that my passion and my purpose in this world – was to be a conduit. A connector of stories and people and ideologies. Growing up, I always was surrounded by music, sitting in my dad’s office playing different records or riding with him on car rides or listening to my mom have her own bar in her house. It was always a party in my world, it never shifted except for when it went from R&B to soul and the occasional moment of funk. James Brown, Leon Russell, Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, Stevie Wonder, the list goes on. It’s probably why in high school I picked up the habit of burning playlists for people and earning money that way. Again, helping people tell their stories.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Oh no. Nothing is ever smooth because life is going to live at every single turn. I went to college at the University of Houston and for a moment, the only thing I cared about was interacting with my friends. School and life didn’t exactly mix and with that, I wound up on academic probation and eventually suspended. Nihilism crept in about learning because I’d always been “the smartest,” that learning came “natural and easy”. The years between school made me foster a different kind of relationship – the one with my passion.
I started the blog while on probation for what I can simply say is the stupidest decision I ever made in 2008. I had people who couldn’t truly get why I glued myself to my laptop for hours on end or at the houses of my friends updating articles and stories.
It was that zeroed in style of determination that at first seemed like an obsession. I had to hit a number. I had to prove something to somebody. It wasn’t exactly great in the beginning because even as you begin to write about people and others, you’ll run into the difficulties of wanting to do literally anything else. Eventually, they got it.
Writing about people, their lifestyles, you’ll get backlash and DMs and smart comments. You may get verified on social media or be able to be pulled up with a Google search and everything you’ve ever said in a public space will be held up against you. It isn’t a weird life, but you gotta find a way to take time for yourself mentally.
When you experience things, all of it feels like it comes in a rush. You don’t truly pay attention until you sit down and look like, I made it to these points because of my talents, sure. But also because I was welcomed into a community and fostered by individuals who loved me.
When I lost my biggest supporter, my dad in 2018 – I felt lost. I had taken a job with 97.9 The Box and Radio One, which is my now day job a month before he passed and all I could think about was, what now? I’d taken on my dad’s limo service while writing and now … I don’t have him to encourage or even bug me. Right when I’m thinking to myself, “We’re about to be the most financially set we’ve ever been as a writer and entrepreneur.”
I got back into school around 2014 and was on the verge of finally having a senior year before I found out he had kidney cancer. So it was an odyssey just writing about life and traveling all over the place while his health was up and down for four years. I saw him last in a hospital room in March of 2018, his body and mind tired from dialysis and wear and tear from various ailments. I told him I loved him and he responded the same and told a complete stranger how proud of me he was. Two days later, he was gone.
But I had my community. It pushed me to learn more behind the scenes, learning more about filming and editing video. It pushed me to say, “Why not?” to so many different opportunities that in 2019, I joined The Recording Academy and found myself walking the red carpet at The Grammys.
Tell us about your work – what should we know?
At the crux of it, I’m a writer. If I wanted to narrow down all the hyphenated things I do, I’d say I’m a conduit. I love history and I love storytelling. I guess the company, the “brand” if you will is me through and through. I only have to put myself in a space, find my footing and be as honest about what I feel.
I started a blog in 2009, right at the apex of blog culture. I called it dayandadream because everybody wants one day to live out their dream. From there, people noticed, people began reading my words and what I decided to lean and focus on. Others bought in. Two years after I started the blog, I answered a writer’s call for the Houston Press and for seven years, I wrote about pop culture and hip-hop there. An article about Drake’s Nothing Was The Same album I wrote landed in the Village Voice and two years after joining the Houston Press, I had already began getting bylines in places like DJBooth, About and more. I don’t think I truly found myself at a point of, “Bruh, you’re a writer for real” until … 2014. Five years after starting a blog centralized on myself then eventually Houston hip-hop and beyond, I was writing for Billboard and VIBE. A year later, Complex and VICE writing about Big K.R.I.T. and Z-Ro’s career.
I think what I’m most proud of isn’t exactly the work I’ve done because I’m always trying to top myself. What I pride myself on is fostering a space where some great creatives across the city and country could get bylines to help springboard them to other places.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
I know blog culture is pretty much on its last legs if you don’t have some major third-party investor or hedge fund making things pop but I know those people like Brad Gilmore, Peachez, Bradford Howard, Cecilia Austin, Monica Jones, WIll Pharoah, the late, amazing and inspirational Hope Carter, Kelsey McDaniel, Jonathan Scroggins … they had a space to let their thoughts be free. All of them have done incredible things, with or without the blog. But that’s my tribe.
My Radio One family, both in Houston and across the country. From Avery Green to Kiotti, Keisha Nicole, Terri Thomas and more. Bilal Morris, Sam Stiers, J.R. Bang, AC, Victoria McGraw and so on. Everybody pushes me in that space to be greater – every day.
There’s my brothers, Lemarian, Ian, Brandon and Kirk who have been my boys in some form or fashion since I was nine years old. I’m an only child but those guys? We’ve been in each others weddings, been there for the kids they’re now raising. It’s wild to see. There’s Leslie, one of my best friends in the planet since ninth grade at Thurgood Marshall High School when I figured athletic training was the faster way to getting a letterman jacket than playing football. There’s Kendra Greene, my best friend since college at UH and is amazing in her own right as a writer and educator. Hannah Conde’s grown to be one of my biggest friends and supporters, same with Lisa Valadez – it’s kind of an endless list of people whom I’ve interacted with and befriended.
I have people like Shea Serrano and Henry “Rizoh” Adaso to thank for inspiring me to go further locally. In Houston, when I first came into writing publicly in 2009, those were the guys. Shea’s exploded into becoming one of the biggest writer’s and community organizers in the country with The FOH Army helping people out in downtimes. Rizoh gave me my first byline in About.
But my two favorite editors since I started this? Chris Gray and Erika Ramirez. Chris was my main editor at HP and for seven years, he saw tiny things I wrote, he saw cover stories I wrote and all in all, he taught me so much about writing for public consumption. How to discover my voice as I grew.
Erika … we met by chance at Essence Fest in 2013 but I’d known of her since her days working at VIBE and then when she became the hip-hop editor at Billboard. We’ve been close for seven years and when she started editing my work, it wasn’t about music, it was about bringing honest, human emotion out and how we’re challenging one another every day just to be human and determine that we aren’t too much for one particular thing or space, we feel our voice and bodies need us. We’re enough – and I can’t thank Erika enough for all she’s helped me with.
Contact Info:
- Phone: 281-520-7847
- Email: brandoncaldwell2@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brandoc
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brandoc06
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/_brandoc
Image Credit:
Odiwams (B/W), Radio One, Brandon Caldwell
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