Written by: Oliver Heffron
PG County native Reggie Becton has a cinematic musical vision to share. While his naturally smooth vocal talents draw comparisons to crooners like Tank, Avant, or Miguel, Becton’s atmospheric production and conceptual approach create a distinct perspective. His sound blends classic R&B, hip-hop, funk, and new-wave soul with melodic storytelling that guides the listener through a moonlit world of pain, pleasure, and passion.
Inspired by The Dark Knight-era Batman films, Reggie describes his sound as “music for the people of Gotham City.” On his new mixtape, Sadboy, Vol. 1, Becton manifests this vision with his most mesmerizing portrait of his sound to date, exploring a diverse palette of sounds while presenting a compelling sketch of a conflicted romantic within a surreal world of shadows and neon lights.
Wanting to emphasize the project’s cinematic qualities, Becton’s has been rolling out a series of music videos that manifests the mixtape’s sonic world through sleek imagery and compelling narratives. His most recent visual for “SadBoy” introduces the narrative concept in a gripping trailer-like journey through a neon night as the delivery of a mystery briefcase goes awry, setting up the story that will continue later this summer.
With its distinct sound and ambitious concept, Sadboy, Vol. 1 proves that Reggie Becton is not your run-of-the-mill R&B crooner but a unique artist with a vision he’s ready to realize.
Reggie Becton sat down with Nuance for a virtual interview to discuss how he fell in love with music growing up, the cinematic inspiration for his new mixtape, and where he sees the vision going from here:
Photo Courtesy of Andres Sanchez
Reggie Becton describes his home of PG County, Maryland, by its physical proximity to the culturally different Capitol City: “You can be in PG, and you step across the street, and you’ll be in DC, so it’s like one of those things where you have this dichotomy of two different worlds kind at play in the same place.” Growing up as the youngest of three in a musical household, Becton credits his observation of his brother and sister’s paths in life for his chosen route–a route paved by the soulful music playing around him as a kid.
With his mom playing gospel like Kurt Franklin and Trin-i-tee 5:7, his father enjoying his Anita Baker, Keith Sweat, and Scarface, his older sister putting him onto R&B like Destiny’s Child and Brandy, and his grandparent’s jukebox playing classic soul and Marvin Gaye around the holidays, Becton was introduced to a love for music at a young age.
While Becton always remembers singing, it was an eventful middle school camp that was the moment he realized the path he’d try to make through music: “I went to this camp, and it was my first time being able to have access to a MacBook and they taught us about music production on GarageBand and things like that….”
“…I was always singing. As long as I can remember being here on this earth I remember singing, but like it was that middle school summer camp that kind of really inspired my love for songwriting and recording music and even production. It just opened my world to the possibilities that could be with music, and it gave me that full rein to start creating on my own.”
While crediting R&b as the “foundation” for his sound, Becton cites his love for guitar, rock, neo-soul, and the production of classic hip-hop albums like MBDTW and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill for the “experimental nature going on.” For the first volume of his opus Sadboy mixtape series, Becton explains he was inspired by the descriptive world of the Dark Knight trilogy: “One of the things we kept saying was like, Oh, we’re trying to make music r&b Music for the people of Gotham City… I want to make music that would fit in one of these worlds…
“…I think something that stood out to me with The Dark Knight trilogy was the vibe and emotion of it. To me, how The Dark Knight looks is to me how I want SadBoy to sound. When I was crafting this project, it felt like the villain origin story of myself and this guy SadBoy–this internal Alter Ego and his sense of what sadness is. I wanted to create something that was dark and moody and had that Christopher Nolan feel. so I think that was like a big inspiration for the world and sonic identity of SadBoy.”
Wanting to emphasize rhythmic production more than on previous projects, Sadboy, Vol. 1 draws from 90s R&B production to create what Becton calls “R&B Bounce–music that knocks like similar to the 90s when you think of Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins–some of my favorite producers—all of it had this driving bouncing and we really wanted to get a bit more rhythmic this time around.”
For the mixtape’s visual accompaniment, Becton worked with longtime collaborators Chris Felix and Sir Thurston to create a cinematic world that would tie the SadBoy universe together: “we just wanted to create a solid world beyond concept and beyond narrative. We wanted to create these videos that felt good together. So when you see ‘Sway,’ ‘Life,’ and ‘SadBoy’ those three videos, the visuals that we have thus far, they all feel like the same universe; they feel like the same world…We wanted to create things that show the development of our artistry.”
Becton explains that each video played a different role in the development of the idea: “Sway” being the aesthetic tone setter emphasizing a cool factor, “Life” demonstrating Becton and Felix’s artistic development with its dance movements, and “Sadboy” being the introduction to the short narrative series that will roll out later this summer:
“We wanted to do something that almost felt like a trailer or a prequel to The SadBoy series, and I think with the “SadBoy” video that’s why it’s so cinematic…it just matches the song going back to that Christopher Nolan feel. We wanted to do something that felt like we’re getting a new villain in Batman and we’re learning about this character to not give away too much but to excite people about what’s to come.”
With the rest of the series coming later this summer, Becton is already working on a second volume to the SadBoy mixtape series–creating an R&B bounce worthy of a late Gotham City night.