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Three-time Grammy winner Fantastic Negrito excavates his life story and owns its truth on his 2024 album, Son of a Broken Man. Born Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, the singer-songwriter became a distinguished music producer in 2023 by launching his Storefront Records label, remarkably ushering in a new era in his work.
Having achieved instant notice as winner of the first-ever NPR Tiny Desk Contest in 2015, he stacked up awards, recorded acclaimed albums, and performed around the world, often sharing stages or collaborating with the likes of Sturgill Simpson, Chris Cornell, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, E-40, and Tank, among others.
After so much success, Broken Man’s soulful, wrenching, exquisitely expressive and impeccably performed 14-tracks could easily have retread area covered by prior hits. Instead, the new album braves Fantastic Negrito’s family history and lays bare wounds that were cut so deep they are only now, decades later, healing and establishing scars. The trauma began even before the artist’s father kicked him out of the family home at age 12. His pain was intensified by living without love while bouncing through three foster homes before landing on the street, along. Misguidedly, he decided for a time to pursue a life of anger, resentment, isolation, and self-inflicted harm.
Eventually, questions arose about his Bahamian father, a man he never truly knew other than assorted bizarre facts—that he had a fake Somali accent, a made-up last name, and presented a false ancestral history. His father’s intelligence, paired with horrid negligence, was like a stone in Fantastic Negrito’s shoe, something that if left unresolved would forever cause him to limp. With scorching guitar riffs, searing ballads, gritty lyrics, mid-tempo grooves, funky explosions, shades of Latin and East Indian music, vestiges of Prince and Otis Redding, and even the gospel standard “This Little Light of Mine,” Broken Man calls on all the talents in his mighty toolkit on this album.
Now on a world tour with the new album, in a recent interview Fantastic Negrito said he will always love performing in the greater Bay Area and in Oakland, his hometown since he was 12 years old, best. Having suffered a destructive childhood and risen as a man broken but not destroyed, having fought back on his home turf from a near-fatal car crash that permanently damaged his guitar playing hand years ago, performing onstage is reward, validation, victory, a path to future healing, and a monumental testimony to recovery, forgiveness, and truth.
