Earlier this year, Danny Brown entered rehab. “My aunt had died, and my family was asking me for the money to put on a funeral,” he says. “But I didn’t have the money, and I didn’t know how to tell them. They knew I’d had the money. But I’d just pissed through it, getting fucked up and sniffing it up. I felt like a failure.”
This was not even the rapper’s lowest moment. In 2020, living in his native Detroit, he was well aware that he could overdose on drugs contaminated with fentanyl – a powerful synthetic opioid – but he didn’t seem to care. “I got to the point where I was pretty much suicidal,” he says.
This year should have been straightforwardly successful for Brown, one of the US’s most distinctive rap voices: a career-galvanising sixth solo album, Quaranta, comes out this month, and Scaring the Hoes, an album made with fellow rap tearaway Jpegmafia and released in March, is a shoo-in for end-of-year “best of” lists. But the 42-year-old has also been navigating a new relationship with fame, creativity and the swirl of drugs, alcohol and wild behaviour that have defined his public image for the past 10 years.
Brown, real name Daniel Dewan Sewell, is telling this story from his new home in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, a diagonal leap down from the frostier climes of his Detroit home town. I walk in to find a picture of pristine domesticity: scented candles, a spread of delicate orchids and leathery anthuriums perched tidily on slatted plant stands, a huge L-shaped sofa and two chihuahuas, Ditto and Samson. When a delivery of barbecue brisket and sausage arrives for us, Brown feeds most of his share to Ditto.
He moved here in 2021 to be with his partner, with whom he had previously been in a long-distance relationship, as well as to be closer to the studio where he records his weekly comedy call-in podcast, The Danny Brown Show. Perhaps just as important, though, was getting out of Detroit.
Born to teenage parents, Brown spent his childhood playing video games with a tight-knit family. His dad, a house DJ, passed on an obsession with music, and his mum read him Dr Seuss books and got him hooked on rhyme. But as he grew up, and after his parents split up, his life became less sheltered.
He told Complex magazine in 2012 that he started selling drugs because his friends were doing it, and he thought it might give him something to rap about. But then he got caught – and caught again – and spent eight months in prison. He emerged more determined than ever to be a rapper, carving a career out of debauched tracks that doubled as what he has described as “trauma dumps” sketched from life at the fringes of society. His brand of nihilistic hedonism was an antidote to the financial meltdown and “forever wars” of the late 00s, and the bling-rap that felt so incongruous in the face of it all.
The title of his breakout album, 2011’s XXX, referenced the Xs stamped on Xanax tablets and his age, 30 – a figure Brown highlighted knowingly, aware that he was ageing in a young man’s game. His voice stood out a mile: nasal, scratchy, stinging like a burst blister.
“What I did was embrace all the negative shit that was keeping me from getting a record deal,” he says – his age, his skinny limbs, missing teeth, backcombed hair. Brown helped usher in a wave of woozy, harebrained and wildly experimental prescription-drug-addled rap, along with the Awful Records crew in Atlanta, emo-rap interlopers such as Lil Peep (who died of an accidental overdose of Xanax and fentanyl in 2017) and Billboard megastars Future and Lil Uzi Vert.
By 2019, Brown was at the peak of his creative powers with fifth album uknowhatimsayin¿. Q-Tip, one of his musical heroes, executive-produced it – a rarity – and Brown planted a foot firmly on each side of the divide between weirdo insurgent and hip-hop classicist, which he had been seesawing between for close to a decade.
Then, in the months that followed, as Brown arrived at the brink of 40, he split up with his long-term partner and had a victory-lap tour torpedoed by the pandemic. He was broke, and broken. “It was rough. But the only thing I could do to get over it was, like, fuck it, I gotta make more music, I just gotta get back in the studio because when shit cracks back open I gotta be able to be ready,” he says, now able to recognise that he was running on fumes – and away from his problems. He moved out of the home he had shared with his ex and their cats (she kept the cats) to a flashy downtown penthouse nearer to his studio space.
Making music had become an excuse to treat himself by getting wasted. He looks down into his lap as he takes a pull on his vape and arranges his thoughts. “I’m in this nice-ass apartment, it was like four bedrooms, but I’m lonely as fuck. It got to the point I was just getting fucked up, every day, by myself.” He would get through a bottle of spirits a day, topped up with a smörgåsbord of cocaine, pills, mushrooms, weed or whatever else was on offer.
In the Jonah Hill-directed video for 2017’s Ain’t It Funny, Brown plays a sitcom character hooked on a crack pipe and begging for help while a canned-laughter crowd chuckles. Watching the clip now feels awfully prescient. “It was seven days a week,” he says, listing the daily routine of his time in that Detroit penthouse, where bender rolled into hangover, headache into house party. “I was in pain all the time. Throwing up and shit, you know? It was my rock bottom, that’s how it was.”
Rock bottom is where Quaranta was made. It’s an album that serves, in its unguarded, pockmarked account of life at the bottom of a bottle, as a detox and a spiritual successor of sorts to XXX. Quaranta means 40 in Italian, but the title also points to Covid quarantines and the sad isolation of Brown unravelling in his penthouse. “This rap shit done saved my life, and fucked it up at the same time,” the title track begins, a lolloping confessional backed with pining spaghetti western guitars. Brown’s voice is staid and measured, far from the high-pitched squall that typified his breakout years, the one that means he is “having fun”, he told the Guardian in 2013. “And then when the low voice comes, it’s drama.” Quaranta is, to borrow Brown’s own parlance, a low-voice album. “So much fentanyl was going around at the time, so you were risking it every time you got a bag [of drugs],” he says. “So I was making it with that in my head, too, like: ‘Maybe this might be my last album’ kinda shit, you know?” In that sense, the album flips between the sound of Brown signing out and sending warning shots to himself.
Quaranta has been done for the best part of three years. For a while, Brown thought he was being shelved by his label, the experimental stable Warp, and sabotaged by his management. He said as much in drunken rants on his podcast and directed his fans to harass his manager and spam social media with the hashtag #FreeDannyBrown (this was another prompt to get himself to rehab). In the meantime, he hooked up with Jpegmafia and made Scaring the Hoes, an abrasive, claustrophobic tangle of blown-out drums, synths and chemical excess.
“When we were making it, it was really hard to work with me,” says Brown. “I was at my drunkest at that time. There would be times when he’d come down here and I’d get blacked-out drunk and we wouldn’t do shit for a weekend, but then there’d be times when he’d come and I’d do five songs in a day. I would love to make another album, but I would understand if he never wanted to work with me again.”
By the time the pair were touring the record this summer, Brown was sober and travelling in a separate car behind the tour bus – for his own health, as opposed to any personal animosity. Simple experiences, such as watching fans sing his words back to him, hit him differently. “I actually started to have fun being on stage again,” he says. “Doing the shows sober almost became like a therapeutic thing, to just see the people in the crowd smiling and being happy and having a good time. That energy translated to me, so it was like I was getting my fix every day with that.” Day-to-day, that feedback comes in simpler forms: he lifts his phone to show off the app on which he has logged more than 200 days without a drink, a streak he doesn’t want to break.
He is not beating himself up over his creative limitations, either. Music-making, he says, “is like a hard level on a video game. Before, I would stay up all night trying to beat it. But now, I know I can just leave it, go to bed, and then I’ll probably do it on the first go the next morning.”
Brown still feels as though Quaranta is a make-or-break moment, and he has worried about how his recent mellowing might affect his creative output. “I’ve seen so many artists get sober and then their music sucks,” he says. But in sobriety he has gained a newfound patience and perspective: “I feel like with this album coming out, and seeing how much depression and shit I was going through with making that album, you get like a happy ending at the end of the movie, seeing where I’m at in my life right now.”
• Quaranta is released by Warp Records on 17 November.
• In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the Opioid Treatment Line is at 1800 642 428 or call the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015.
