G-Eazy opens up on personal new album

(Reuters)
(Reuters)

Listen to any Top 40 radio station and chances are you'll hear rapper G-Eazy.

And while the hiphop industry is characterised by some of the hardest artists in music, when the 26-year-old sat down with Newshub ahead of his New Zealand shows he spoke mostly about his mum.

It's hard to tell but thanks to his mum, G-Eazy's first musical influence was the Beatles.

"My parents split up when I was really little so my mum would drive every other weekend to see my dad, and my mum would have the Beatles playing," he says.

"Music transcends time and genre and culture and space. Music is music."

G- Eazy, real name Gerald Gillum, grew up in California with dreams of making it big.

But his wallet was anything but -- he wondered if he needed to be realistic and quit, but decided against that.

"When I started making music, I fell in love like fast and hard and crazy," he says. "I was like, 'if I'm going to do this, I'm going to fully do it'. I want to aim for the stars, I want to chase greatness."

That meant a lot of DIY music making, couch surfing, and parting ways with 40 pairs of his sneakers. He says when he moved out of his place in New Oreleans, he sold all of them and lived out of a suitcase for a year.

It paid off -- his single 'Me, Myself and I' is currently number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.

But he's still, as he puts it, chasing greatness.

"If you stay hungry and don't view it that way, you always have somewhere to grow to, to keep aspiring to be," G-Eazy says. "That's the truth."

And the truth features heavily in his latest album, When It's Dark Out.

In the song 'Everything Will Be Okay', G-Eazy talks about his parents breaking up, accepting his mother's relationship with a woman called Melissa, and then later, finding Melissa dead of a drug overdose.

He says it was therapeutic, but it's a song he says he can't always perform.

"Some nights I couldn't go there," he says. "There's a time and place. That song -- it's a song you have to perform. It's not a song you can just recite."

G-Eazy says it's a hugely personal album, but he wants to share his life journey with his fans -- and that includes an imminent accomplishment he's particularly excited about.

"I'm about to help my mum buy a house," he says. "She's never owned a house. That puts the biggest smile on my face."

He's giving back to the woman who gave him his first taste of music.

Newshub.