By Gboko Stewart, gboko90@gmail.com

IPNEWS: Monrovia-US-based Liberian artiste G-Rize may be well known for his artistry, but music wasn’t always his first love.

“I was first into dancing, and then I went into soccer”,he said.

The Bado crooner said, music came as a respite for him after losing his mother in 2007. “[I] played for a few years then I lost my mother in 2007 and found myself doing music.  I never left.”

He said he could no longer express his internal pain via football. “Because right after I lost my mother, football wasn’t allowing me to express all the emotions I had built in me.”

“For some people, it does. But for me, no. It was music that helped me deal with it. So music was my savior and still is.”

But, he revealed, it began with a nervousness which he had to overcome. For the first couple of months,” he added. “But I started to motivate myself and speak positive things into my life. That’s what kept me going and still, to this day, keeps me going.”

Despite his initial nervousness, he kept singing which led to the recording of his first single. “I was nervous at first for my first session, but as I kept singing, I felt myself opening up in the booth.”

“My first song was called ‘A-Yoo’ – a friend of mine helped me write it. We were in his house playing beats and he picked one beat for us to work on—that’s how my first record came about.”

And with that, he revealed, his nervousness slowly faded.

The artists would go on to successfully brand himself without a managerial team and has dropped chart topping hits such as LIB Ladies, Show me that, Tumba and more others..

Now a household name in the diaspora and the local music scene, the artiste says there is no stopping for him.