Mix Tape Pick:

Across The Traxx(Classic.)
Street Report Magazine: After reading your bio and discography, your story depicts struggle and success in the utmost extremes. How has your parents’ journey leading up to your upbringing contributed to your drive and determination to make something out of nothing?

CLASSIC.: They are role models to me and are THE truest representation of what success is, without the accolades. I credit a lot of how I am to my first trip to Vietnam back in 1993 with my father. When we landed at the Ho Chi Minh City airport it looked like a hospital…NO lie...we went to my Grandfather's house in Da Nang and it was pretty bad. They didn't have any glass windows, just the windscreens with the shutters, no real doors. No real beds, just hard, wooden surfaces the size of a bed that they slept on. You had to throw a bucket down a well and bring it back up to bathe yourself. Bathroom-wise, there was an Outhouse with a water hole in the ground. No A/C, the power is controlled by the government…people living in alleys with just a tarp to cover their heads, loose tile sitting on top of the ground, buying a bowl of soup for five cents and you can’t afford it…it’s a lot to take in as a kid. It single-handedly changed my life. Being a young knucklehead I never realized how easy it is for me and all Americans until that trip.

So for my folks to have never graduated from school, living through the Vietnam War, coming over to America and not having any money, to becoming business owners today, it means and feels like I can do ANYTHING, only if I tried and put my mind to it.

Street Report Magazine: How long have you been producing music and when did you realize that it was what you wanted to spend your life doing?

CLASSIC.: I've been playing Classical piano since I was 4 and guitar since I was 7, hence the name CLASSIC. I really hated practicing....but it was I guess a natural gift that I had. I never brag because I believe if you're really good at something, then people will speak for you. I've played with Orchestras and have been to the Tanglewood Institute in Boston, where all of the most talented kids around the world came to better their craft during the summertime.
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