Tone Smith is the Grammy Award-winning writer behind H.E.R.’s I Used to Know Her and Chris Brown’s Indigo and Royalty. But before these albums, he was a writer and independent artist just trying to please those in the music industry. As a young and impressionable college-aged artist, he based his career on the goals of the music execs around him, compromising his vision for the wants and needs of others. But now, he has started living by his own rules, which were shaped by those he met along the way.
On the latest episode of Won of One: A PLLRS Podcast, Stith sits down with host Reg Calixte for one of the most candid interviews of his career. Here, he opens up about his journey from a writer to an independent artist on MNRK Music Group.
Stith shares,
“What I’m doing now is kind of the vision I had for myself then. But at the time, of course, Bryson Tiller dropped ‘TRAPSOUL,’ and it changed everything in the R&B space. So I suppressed [California 70, the album Stith was creating at the time] and just kind of did everything else that everyone was telling me to do. I tried to go more of the ‘TRAPSOUL’ lane.”
This shift reshaped the next eight years of his career. It’s evident that reinvention is essential in the music business, or in any business, for that matter. Drake once told Stith,
“He was one of the first people to tell me, ‘You have to reinvent yourself every time you put an album out or put some music out. The Weeknd did it. I do it. Chris [Brown] does it. Bruno [Mars] does it.’ I get it now. That advice is now helping me.”
Stith’s latest project, The Edge, is an experimental trek that highlights the various influences of his sound, including Prince. But if we’re going to name drop, why stop with Prince? Stevie Wonder recently co-signed Stith’s “Fly,” which is one of Stith’s proudest moments.
“That, to me, is better than any award, any plaque. Stevie Wonder, one of the many greats that I looked up to in my household, who was getting played all of the time, is telling me ‘Fly’ is one of his favorite songs. [My mom] was the first person I was like, ‘Ma, Stevie Wonder! We made it. We made it. It paid off.’”
You can check out the full episode below.
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