Before anyone called him RodneyRetro he was a kid in Kingsland, Georgia, hunched over a light up keyboard in his grandma’s living room, pecking out Für Elise and The Nutcracker like they were secret codes. Music arrived early and refused to leave. By fifth grade the saxophone had a home on his shoulder. By ninth grade he was building beats, chasing that first loop that makes your head nod before your mind can catch up.
Life moved him north to Des Moines, Iowa, a state capital with more quiet than most music cities, which is exactly why the grind got loud. Out there the distractions are thinner and the sound carries farther. He learned to do everything because he had to. Mix and engineer in Pro Tools. Rap with pocket and presence. Compose and arrange. Write until the rhythm took the pen back. He did not wait for a studio or a budget. He became both.
The lineage is easy to trace when he names names. Jackie McLean for edge and honesty. Prince for fearless reinvention and the courage to play every part. Devin The Dude for ease and humor and the way a story can feel like a conversation with a cousin. Those threads show up in his catalog without imitation. He is not trying on outfits. He is building his own.
Scroll his links and you will see the world he is shaping. The Linktree is a map to what is current. The Instagram is a living journal from studio to stage. The comments feel like a neighborhood. He has a handful of aliases and each one is true. BigRod, GotMeAGrape, Mr True N Legendary. They are not masks. They are angles on the same person, a reminder that the best artists contain multitudes and invite you to meet all of them.
He still carries the south with him. #DSGB is not a tag for attention. It is a compass. It points back to family tables and front porches and the first songs that taught him how to feel. It also points forward to the rooms he plans to fill. He can already hear where the horn line belongs on the next record, where the drums should tuck, where the ad lib should lean back, where the silence needs to stay.
Ask him who he wants to work with and he grins. Kasher Quon would be fun. You can hear how that energy might spark. But the bigger truth is that RodneyRetro could walk into almost any session and find the pocket. That is what happens when you build the craft from the ground up, when you learn the rules well enough to bend them, when you let rhythm lead and let life sharpen the rest.
Des Moines gave him discipline. Kingsland gave him roots. Loss gave him urgency. Music gave him everything else. And he gives it right back, one punch in at a time.
Listen to more here: linktr.ee/rodneyretro
Follow him on IG: https://www.instagram.com/rodneyretro/
