A little more than eight months ago, Ryan Carrillo was in a very different place. He had come back to Juneau after living in the Lower 48 and several years in the U.S. Air Force. The increase in Juneau crime last year affected him. Some of those getting arrested, or sucked into drugs, were his friends.
Local crime, he said, is what inspired him to get back into music again — and now, eight months later, he’s been nominated as Alaska Male Rapper of the Year, he’s won a Woosh Kinaadeiyí poetry slam, and he recently traveled to New York City to live audition for one of 12 slots with TeamBackPack, something Carrillo, who raps as Veinglorious, describes as a “national collaborative platform that recognizes artistry and expression of self in hip hop.” Sitka rapper Sid Eubanks, who makes music as Phonetic, competed as well.
“It’s a pretty big deal as far as opportunities go on the national stage for us,” Carrillo said. “When I got that invitation, I cried… I couldn’t believe it.”
Several hundred rappers performed live at the auditions.
Carrillo makes a point of being vulnerable in his music, he said. Even the name he uses for his music, “Veinglorious,” refers to a way he sees himself as having been, and the way he’d rather be.
“If you spell it correctly, (vainglorious) that’s a person — their priority is their vanity,” he said. “Narcissism. Growing up, I just grew up as a really selfish, vain, narcissistic person as an adolescent, as a young adult…. Life just came so easy to me, because my parents provided. We never wanted for anything.”
He chose to pun with the spelling of the veins in the body because all veins lead to the hub of the heart, he said.
Later on in life, especially during his divorce, that vanity “cost me a lot,” he said.
Now, he said, he tries to “give glory” to what he knows are the most important things in life — family and forgiveness. He mentions his four-year-old son often.
“Everyone’s in need of forgiveness, and we close ourselves off to understanding by pretending that we don’t have regrets in life, or that there aren’t people out there that are hurting — people that we wronged or whatever,” he said.
He moved back to Juneau in 2013. “I was just really sad before that, I guess,” he said. “I think I was just pretty messed up for a few years there. There was almost a year where I didn’t even listen to music.”
But in 2015, with “people dying, classmates that I had that passed and just — seeing things get ugly, it just brought me to write,” he said.
Though he stopped for years, Carrillo made music when he was younger as well; he graduated from Juneau-Douglas High School in 2003. He estimates he spent 1,000 hours on music in the first six months he started it up again.
“My music is just — it makes people think about stuff that’s not always the most fun thing, but life is hard for everybody, and I don’t just pretend like it isn’t,” he said.
Encouragement has helped him continue. So has realizing his own skill, he said.
He buys and leases beats, or rhythmic accompaniment, from people that create them, then creates his songs around them.
“I’ll spend hours looking for something,” he said. “When I find it, it becomes an obsession to bond with it and to write to it.”
Beats aren’t cheap, however, and he’s been making his music mostly for free, putting it on YouTube, SoundCloud and Facebook. Soon he’ll be taking steps toward selling his work and getting it to a bigger market, he said.
The videos, which feature personal photos, are “how I like to honor people that are close to me.” Many songs, he dedicates to a friend.
Though Carrillo wasn’t one of the twelve chosen for the 2016 TeamBackPack Draft class, it won’t be long before he performs again — he’s one of five featured poets for Woosh Kinaadeiyí’s Summer Showcase fundraiser on June 25 in Juneau. “It feels like I failed but I know that’s not how it is. You helped carry me to this moment, and a man must be willing to go forward alone. I’ll be here again.” he wrote on Facebook, congratulating the 12 rappers chosen and calling them “the cream of the crop.”
Whether he’s here in Juneau or auditioning in New York, one thing stays the same, he said.
“I used to have stage fright just like everybody else,” he said. “What really empowered me is just realizing that when you stand under the light of judgment and you speak the trueness that you know, when … you speak from the heart, they’re always going to believe you. That’s what’s let me know this is what I should be doing with my life. You don’t always have to show everybody that you’re strong and everything, because other people can make you strong also by encouragement and forgiveness and healing, and a lot of my music is about those things. Courage and going into the unknown, as long as you have a little bit of hope.”
“A person’s destiny is their only real obligation,” he added, referencing the book “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. “Just (following) the path that you’re supposed to follow — I feel like that’s what success is to me.”
Carrillo’s instagram account is @veinglorious.
• Contact Capital City Weekly managing editor Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.
* This article has been edited to clarify the description of Team BackPack and Carrillo’s reasons for getting back into music.
