Rewrite and translate this title Meet the Real Tommy Richman to Japanese between 50 and 60 characters. Do not include any introductory or extra text; return only the title in Japanese.

Tommy Richman is sitting at a keyboard in the corner of a dimly lit recording studio.

Improvising a chord progression, he makes a mistake that fucks up the recording. As he gets ready to try again, his producer Kavi points out that they can just fix it digitally.

“Nah, let’s do it again,” he responds. “I have to play it with my fingers.”

On the next attempt, he fumbles again, and Kavi reminds him how easy it would be to just correct it on the computer. Richman pushes back again. He’s adamant about doing it the old fashioned way.

“No, I have to feel it!” he says. “Let’s do it again.”

It’s a little past midnight on a Tuesday in West Hollywood, and the 24-year-old Virginia native is surrounded by a few of his closest friends and collaborators. They’ve all been sipping on lemon drop cocktails, and video footage of a crackling fireplace is playing on each of the studio’s monitors.

Richman successfully lays down the chords on his third attempt and pulls out his laptop, grabs a studio microphone, and starts to record his own vocals in the middle of the room. Within seconds, he pulls a melody out of thin air and improvises lyrics on the spot. Recording himself (he never uses engineers), he stacks his own vocals over a bouncy drum break. Forty-five minutes later, he takes his headphones off and plays the song through the studio’s speakers at an ear-splitting volume. It sounds like a hit. Weeks later, the falsetto hook still hasn’t left my head.

Hits have been pouring out of Richman this year. In April, he released his breakout hit “Million Dollar Baby,” which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has already gone three-times Platinum (it has nearly a billion streams on Spotify alone). He followed that up with “Devil Is a Lie,” a funk-infused record that immediately shot up inside the Top 40.

While these songs climbed the charts, turning Richman into one of the year’s biggest breakout stars, he was sitting on an album that he’d already finished. Then he took a big swing, leaving his two biggest songs off the album and avoiding high-profile features, choosing instead to collaborate with his relatively unknown friends. When COYOTE dropped in September, it underperformed, failing to chart on the Billboard 200, and just as quickly as he blew up, momentum slowed and some fans tried to tear him down. But why?

“It’s really interesting being the new guy,” Richman says. “There’s a lot of hate. I think part of it is that the song is super overplayed.” With a laugh, he adds, “Maybe people just don’t like the way my face looks or something. Maybe some people just think I’m annoying looking. It’s a lot of things.”

Because “Million Dollar Baby” blew up so fast, many have assumed that he took some kind of a shortcut to success or sold out for the sake of virality. If you spend any amount of time with Richman, though, those narratives have a way of evaporating. The real story is quite different.

“I feel like the narrative is that I’m just this new guy with this song that’s annoying, but I’m a lot more than that,” he says. “I am not a fucking ringtone. I’m not just a little 15-second snippet.”

Throughout his breakout year, he’s stayed relatively quiet, despite all of the noise. “I’m not saying I’m like ‘misunderstood’ or anything, but like, I’ve got things to say and I don’t think I’ve worded how I want to say it to people yet,” he says. So far, he’s mostly avoided in-depth interviews and remained somewhat mysterious. 

Until now.

Meet the real Tommy Richman.

Richman grew up in the small town of Woodbridge, Virginia. He was raised in a big “rock family” and his first name is proof—he was named after Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. He describes his neighborhood as “a really rough area” and says there was “absolutely nothing going on there,” but music became a fascination at an early age.

His father played drums, but “he was kind of off on his own shit,” as Richman puts it, “so I didn’t really learn much about music from my dad.” Still, he followed the lead of parents, listening to groups like Kiss as a kid, before branching out to other genres and getting into everything from Lou Rawls to Earth, Wind & Fire to Kanye West to Pharrell to Lil Wayne to 50 Cent.

“I listen to everything, man,” he says now, pulling his phone out of his pocket to reveal that his wallpaper is a photo of the famously eccentric, genre-hopping musician Frank Zappa.

Richman took singing lessons at a young age, and even ended up studying opera at New York’s Manhattan School of Music after high school, but his earliest solo recordings took on an entirely different shape. “I started rapping, because I was embarrassed to sing on tracks at first,” he says. “Bro, singing is very vulnerable. Also, I love rapping, too, so I started doing that and got comfortable with my own voice.”

He admits that his music wasn’t great at first, confessing, “It honestly took three years for me to start making good shit. I don’t even know how these people drop a fucking fucking banger at 15. I’m like, ‘How do y’all do that, bro? I was trash starting out.”

The earliest recording that exists on his YouTube channel is a song called “Ballin Stallin” from 2016. It’s a fairly straightforward hip-hop song in which a 16-year-old Tommy Richman raps over a jazzy beat. “I didn’t how to promote my music, so I was just commenting on type beat YouTube videos, like, ‘Listen to my song!’,” he says. “I was like, ‘Be brutally honest with the last song I posted.’ I probably left like 2,000 comments, because I didn’t know what to do, bro.”

Somehow, the YouTube comment strategy started to work. Richman points to a song called “Melba” as one of the early tracks that actually found an audience, and if you look at the YouTube upload today, you’ll see that one of the top-voted comments was from a user named @hungryjoe1999, who wrote, “Yo this is the first song I’ve seen from a ‘be brutally honest about my last song’ comment that was actually [fire emoji].”

Richman finally gained the confidence to really start singing on tracks in 2020 and experimented by laying down falsetto vocals over funk-infused production. Just like that, the Tommy Richman sound was born. “I sang classical music my whole life, so with that technical training, I can hit those notes,” he says. “I finally started putting it in the music and tried to make it sound cool.”

Then the DMs started rolling in. In early 2022, two of the guys behind clothing brand Absent came across Richman’s work and invited him out to LA. When he showed up, they gave him mushrooms, introduced him to Aphex Twin, and asked him if he wanted to move in for free.

What could possibly go wrong?

“I was so broke it’s not even funny,” he says of those early days in LA. “I didn’t even know if I’m going to get a meal the next day, bro. I was selling features and beats. Like, 10 beats for $150, and all I would do is just walk across the street to go to Carl’s Jr every day.”

Not long after, his roommates had a falling out, so Richman moved back to Virginia, but he wasn’t ready to let the dream die. So he came right back to LA, living out of a hostel in early 2023. That’s when he met his now-manager Darren Xu, who introduced Richman to Brent Faiyaz. They hit it off and Faiyaz took the young artist under his wing, signing Richman to his ISO Supremacy label through a joint venture with PULSE Records.

“It was like a double life,” Richman remembers. “I was linking with Brent, so I’d be going out to clubs and shit with him at night, but then I’d go back home to this hostel, in this rundown dark building.”

In April 2024, Richman was going through it.

Yes, Richman collaborated with his label boss on a song called “Upset,” opened up on the It’s a Wasteland Tour, dropped a five-song EP (The Rush), and picked up some buzz off of “Last Nite.” But things weren’t moving quickly enough for him.

“When we made ‘Last Nite,’ bro, I thought that was the one,” Richman reveals. “We were like, ‘We’re outta here with this one!” And then it came out, and you know…” (The song was well-received by his core fans, but it didn’t get the life-changing response he was hoping for.)

Richman was getting antsy (“I had a chip on my shoulder, man”) and as he remembers it, the label was, too. “Supposedly, that EP was supposed to be my ‘viral moment’ or something, but it wasn’t viral,” he says. “Then I put out another two songs and according to my label, they didn’t do well.” In a mocking tone, Richman does his best impression of a label exec, putting a single finger in the air and chirping, “It’s got to go viral!’”

In a moment of frustration, Richman did something that was very out of character for him: he started to think about virality. “We were literally having a conversation in the studio,” he remembers. “I’m like, ‘Bro, how do we go viral?’” The concept was foreign to him, though, and he realized he had no idea how to manufacture virality. So he gave up on the short-lived quest and did the only thing that’s ever made sense: he picked up a microphone.

“It was a very normal night,” he says. One thing was different, though. “I had quit weed before, and I just got back into it,” he says. “That night, I smoked too much. I greened out.” In an elevated state, with a slight chip on his shoulder, Tommy started roughing out melodies over a bouncy, funky groove.

Out of nowhere, it hit him. The hook that would change his life forever.

“I’m a million dollar babyyyyy.”

“I felt like I was still the underdog,” he says. “I wanted to make it so badly and I was literally saying, like, ‘I’m a million dollar baby.’ Like, people need to stop playing with me. That was really it.”

The feeling had been mounting for a while. “I remember having meetings with people, like, ‘Bro, I want to sign a million dollar deal.’ A&Rs were looking at me like, ‘Oh, that’s good Tommy. Just keep believing in yourself,’” he says, laughing. “And it’s crazy, man, because I really felt it.”

That night, though, he didn’t think the song would be a smash. In the moment, he was actually convinced another song he made that week would be the one to change his life: “Devil Is a Lie.”

“We made those songs back to back, two days in a row,” he says. “I remember playing ‘Million Dollar Baby’ for the label and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ And none of us thought it was a hit. None of us. But when we made ‘Devil Is A Lie,’ we were like, ‘Oh nah, this is the one.’ I remember when we made that shit, bro, we ran it back like five times. It was crazy.”

Still, he wanted to capture the energy of “Million Dollar Baby” in the moment, so he filmed himself and his friends dancing along to the song in the studio and posted it on TikTok a few das later. The snippet caught fire, racking up millions of views.

“When it blew up, it was the craziest feeling,” he remembers fondly. “Me and my friends were like, ‘We got hit! We got a hit! We actually did it!’ But when the snippet came out, the song wasn’t done. So we got a bunch of people in the studio, finished it, and just turned up.”

Richman wisely capitalized on the hype and rushed to drop it as soon as possible—something he says would’ve been impossible if he weren’t signed to an indie label like ISO. When “Million Dollar Baby” hit DSPs on April 26, 2024, it exploded on impact. It tallied an incomprehensible 5 million streams in its very first day, went No. 1 on the Apple Music charts, and debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

He’d never had a song on the charts before, and now he was seeing his name sitting right above A-listers like Taylor Swift and Future. “It was a lot,” he says. “In the first week I was like, ‘Oh, this guy I used to look up to just followed me Instagram. Oh, this guy can just DM’d me that I used to look up to. I was literally sending screenshots, like, ‘Oh wow. Everybody. Everybody except Kanye, bro. [Laughs.] Everybody, man. It was insane.”

Just a few weeks after being disillusioned with the music industry and confused about how to “make it,” he had spoken his dreams into existence. “That song has a weird manifestation vibe to it because it literally happened in that song,” he says. “That shit’s a real Cinderella story, bro.”

Mostly, he’s glad how it all happened. Instead of chasing a gimmick or relying on a viral trend, he proved it was still possible for a song to become massively successful on the strength of simply being good.

“We were having that conversation [about how to go viral] the day before we made that song, and then it went viral the next week off of no gimmick,” Richman points out. “I never thought we would go viral just off a song just being hard. I was like, ‘There’s no way. It doesn’t work these days.’ But we did it.”

“I’m not no fuckin TikTok artist,” Tommy Richman tweeted on June 18, 2024.

Yes, the snippet for “Million Dollar Baby” did initially blow up on TikTok. And yes, it did set a record for the longest running No. 1 song on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart. But the idea that Richman makes songs solely for TikTok virality doesn’t sit well with him. His career may have exploded because of a viral single, but he’s always prioritized something else: full-length albums.

“I’m an album guy,” he says. “That’s just the shit that lasts forever. These guys that come out today, they could be a flash in the pan. All these guys can be forgotten, man. There’s nothing wrong with that. They can make cool shit, but it’s not going to stick forever.”

In conversation, he visibly lights up when speaking about the careers of Prince and Kanye West, two artists renowned for world-building (who each happen to have several classic albums under their belts).

“When I’m retired, bro, and I look back in the catalog, I just want to see all these albums and all these different worlds that have been built,” he explains. “I’m so excited to look back at my Spotify and see these, like, seven albums I have. I’ll just be like, ‘Wow. These were just moments of my life that I was just living, and this is the artistic interpretation of it. Shit fucking excites me. Building a catalog, man…”

After “Million Dollar Baby” and “Devil Is a Lie” had accumulated hundreds of millions of streams, two new questions emerged: What would Tommy Richman’s album sound like?

Well, it turns out he already had a full project in the tuck. In December 2023, he had recorded a bunch of songs “in the middle of nowhere”—a small desert town called Beatty, Nevada. And he says “the album was basically done” before he even made his two hit singles. COYOTE, which he describes as “a funk, disco album,” was created with one goal in mind: “I wanted to make an album that you can play front to back, from the first song to the last song, and then you just play it over and over again. This is my real art side. I was trying to make a vinyl record—not trying to make a playlist.”

The issue was, everyone had already heard “Million Dollar Baby” and “Devil Is a Lie” countless times, and he didn’t think they fit the vibe of the rest of the album, so he made a controversial decision. He left his two biggest songs off of his album.

“In my mind, the song blew up, so everybody already knew the song,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking about it from a logistics label standpoint. I’m like, ‘Oh, people already know the song.’ Let me put out the album.’ That’s literally the dumb elementary reasoning. But of course, if you put the song on there, the sales go up, and it looks better numbers-wise. But I just wanted to stand on business with that.”

The decision to leave two streaming juggernauts off the album was a shocking one, and Richman had to fight for it. “With some of my friends, they understood it, and they were like, ‘Fuck yeah,’” he reveals. “But everybody on the other side was just like, ‘What are you doing?!” He slams his fist on the table for effect and laughs, before repeating his favorite phrase, “I just thought it would be cool to stand on business.”

He also faced temptations to do a short-sighted “Million Dollar Baby” remix or add a bunch of features from major label artists on his album, but he (you guessed it) stood on business and stuck to the collaborators who were originally on the album: his friends Paco, Trevor Spitta, Zachary Moon, and mynameisntjmack.

When the album dropped on September 27, 2024, it underperformed, moving around 4,300 units in the first week and failing to chart on the Billboard 200.

A few weeks after the release of the album, he sounds somewhat conflicted about his decision to leave his biggest hits off of the album. “I mean, I guess it’s like a mist—I don’t know,” he says, seemingly about to say it was a “mistake” before quickly doubling down. “I don’t regret it,” he says firmly.

First-week sales are an inescapable topic of conversation in the music industry, and he’s wrestling with his own thoughts about it, explaining, “It’s an indicator of where your motion’s at. try not to look too deep into it. Well, I want to not look too deep into it. It’s fine. I try not to let it bother me too much. I know it’s a beautiful piece of art and yeah, it was a little disappointing seeing how it looked and how people made fun of me, but it’s whatever. It’s fine. I’m not going to let a first week number get to me.”

For now, he’s focusing on the people who have resonated with the music in a deep way. He’s happy to play the long game with COYOTE, and he has a plan to release music videos for every single song on the project, because he believes people will appreciate the music over time. “I know this is a timeless project, and the people that understood it, really understood it,” he says. “A lot of people love it and they’re saying it really helped them a lot. Me and my friends think it’s a classic, so we’re going to keep telling people it’s a classic and be annoying and try to just push as much as we can.”

If you spend enough time around Tommy Richman, you’ll inevitably hear the phrase “the art of music.”

Onstage during his Los Angeles COYOTE album listening party in September, he told a crowd of people that he feels like “the art of music is dying,” and in conversation, he’ll frequently throw around phrases like “I live by the art, and I’ll die by the art.”

It’s why he made unconventional choices on his album that may have sacrificed commercial success, and it’s why he’s very skeptical of shortcuts like artificial intelligence in music. “You’d be surprised how many people in the industry use AI for music,” he says. “I’m not for it at all.”

Richman mostly works by himself or with a small group of collaborators, but when he’s ventured out to work with others, he’s come across high-profile producers who are using AI.

“I was in a session with a very well-respected producer who has made a lot of hit records,” he says. “I’m sitting there and he’s at the AI thing, and he’s typing out prompts and shit. He’s like, ‘Hmm, what should I type out?’ I’m just like, ‘What is going on? Bro, make some music! Make a beat or something. I was like, ‘Wow.’ Coming from someone like that, which I still really respect and they’re still a great person, but I was like, ‘Wow, are we losing it?’” 

He is hopeful about some things, however, arguing that the music industry is in a moment of transition right now. “I feel like the industry’s in a 180,” he says. “Like, ‘Why is this guy not selling? He should be selling.’ And then some random shit’s going nuts. And it’s all because the whole mold is done. A lot of media outlets are dying and it’s just a new form of entertainment. I think the real art’s going to win. Realness sells right now, and I think that people gravitate towards relatability.”

Richman stands on his art, even when it leads him to tense situations. This summer, he stopped by Rolling Stone’s office to play COYOTE for staff members. A couple of months prior, the publication had published an article called Who’s Afraid of ‘White Boy Summer? In the piece, a Rolling Stone writer critiqued Richman, comparing him to artists like Ian and drawing parallels to Chet Hanks’ infamous “White Boy Summer.”

The energy was off as soon as Richman entered the building. He noticed that one of the writers avoided eye contact with him, and he says the staff generally dismissed him and his music. “I was just like, ‘Bro, the energy here is so bad. Let me figure out who wrote this,’” he recalls. “So I was like, ‘Who wrote that article about me and Ian?’ He was like, ‘It was me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really? That was you? What’d you think about that?” He was like, ‘I think I made some good points…’ So I was like, ‘Really? I think that was fucking disrespectful.’”

Richman says he understands that the writer has a job to do, but from his perspective, the article was “a smack in the face of everything I do.” As he remembers it, “I told him, ‘I think you’re a piece of shit. That’s exactly what I said. Then the next song played and I was like, ‘Alright, bro, sorry, I’m out.”

Tommy Richman left the building.

That incident in the Rolling Stone office was one of the rare moments where he actually had a chance to stand up for himself in-person, so he took the opportunity, but he generally tries to let negative internet comments roll off his back.

“I’m a human being, so sometimes there’ll be a comment I see where I’m like, ‘Egh,’” he explains. “But other than that, it’s fine. This is what happens, man. You want to be a popular artist? Alright. There’s going to be people saying things you don’t like.”

He’s also starting to realize that he’ll never be able to please everyone. In July, he performed “Million Dollar Baby” for the first time in front of a live crowd at a Spotify event in New York and posted footage from the show shortly after.

“I knew what I was doing with that show,” he says now. “I knew what I was doing posting that. I posted it myself. I was like, ‘What are people going to say about this? I don’t think I sound that bad. Let me post it.’” He was met with backlash right away, as thousands of people shared comments about how his falsetto vocals in a live setting didn’t live up to the recording.

There were a few factors at play. The performance was outdoors in a suboptimal setting, so the sound wasn’t as good as it would have been in a traditional venue, and it was Richman’s very first time performing the song in front of people, so he hadn’t fully dialed it in yet. The next month, he performed the song again on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and it went much more smoothly, but he noticed that it didn’t stir up nearly the same amount of discussion as the Spotify show did.

“[The Kimmel performance] was perfect and no one said anything about it. Of course!” he says. “That really spoke a lot to what the internet is today.”

Now, he’s come to an understanding about whose opinions really matter. When the internet was giving him shit for low album sales, artists like Tyler, The Creator showed support. In an Instagram comment, Tyler wrote, “‘Green Therapy’ is so nice man. ‘Elephant in the Room’ is incredible!”

Richman says he saw the comment, and he appreciated it: “It was cool. He gets it. I’ve never spoken to him and I’ve never met him, but I really really appreciate that cool little low key co-sign right there. Because I don’t see him commenting like that, so he definitely knew what he was doing with that.”

Just a couple of weeks before, Richman had stood onstage at his album listening event and praised Tyler for being one of the only artists who still cares deeply about the art of music. “He’s so calculated,” he says now. “He’s so particular. He knows exactly what’s coming out and he knows exactly what he’s doing. I appreciate that a lot. And there’s a couple people that are doing it like that. Mk.gee is very good. Yves Tumor, I like how he’s doing it. Playboi Carti, I like how they’re all doing it. I just like people who are very particular with the moment.”

Earlier in the year, Richman met (and made music with) another artist he respects deeply: Virginia’s own Pharrell. “I met him in Paris one time at the Louis Vuitton, his office, and I was playing him the records,” he says. “We got a few ideas together. It’s cool. One of ’em is really cool, which I hope comes out at some point.”

Pharrell also passed along a nugget of wisdom. “One thing he said to me that stuck me was, ‘You’re in your own world, so stay in that.'”

“I just be tweeting how I feel in the moment and it comes out,” Tommy Richman says, which might be the understatement of the year.

If you scroll through Tommy Richman’s X—formerly known as Twitter—profile, you’ll see a peek inside his subconsciousness. One minute, he’s praising Kendrick Lamar. The next, he’s saying he “wants to do a pop song with Freddie Gibbs.” Then he’ll hit you with an observation like, “Do y’all really put sushi as your favorite food? I don’t even be seeing y’all eating it like that.”

They’re his “little fucking manic little tweets,” as Richman describes them, and sometimes they land him in hot water.

On October 2, 2024, he posted, “I am not a hip-hop artist.” This immediately stirred up backlash, as people pointed out that he has incorporated elements of hip-hop in his music. And, of course, it reminded many fans of a long history of white artists who initially used the aesthetics and culture of hip-hop to become successful, only to ditch it and move on to something else once they “made it.”

Richman quickly deleted the post and tried clarifying what he meant. He explained that he makes a lot of different kinds of music so he was simply trying to communicate that he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed into any single genre, including hip-hop. “I meant to say I’m not SOLELY a hip-hop artist,” he wrote in one post. In another, he explained, “I’ll say again, I’m thankful for everything. I’m saying I don’t wanna be boxed in. I grew up on hip-hop. But I’m a singer.”

Looking back on the situation now, he says, “I remember when I tweeted that, I was like, ‘Wow, that didn’t look right. I feel like people are going to take this the wrong way.’ And I deleted it, but it looked even worse deleting it. Honestly, man, I was just seeing discussions about it, and I just wanted to tell people that I was a versatile artist. I don’t want to be boxed in. I could go to many different pockets. And I think I should have just explained it better.”

A few weeks later, the optics of his tweet looked even worse when it was revealed that “Million Dollar Baby” was submitted for Best Rap Song and Best Melodic Rap Performance at the Grammys. Richman says it had been submitted on his behalf long before he sent the tweet and he understands that the whole thing looked “in poor taste.”

“I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I’m just trying to make my music and stay out the way,” he says. “I’ll definitely try to just explain myself better or just not tweet.”

Richman tends to wear his heart on his sleeve and he has an impulsive side to him that jumps to the surface from time to time. During a September 18 show at The Roxy in Los Angeles, he performed in front of an audience that had lackluster energy, at least compared to the other crowds that showed up to his mini tour this fall. Throughout the show, he tried hyping up the crowd to bring more energy, eventually telling them, “Y’all be too cool, man.”

“I’m like, bro, I can’t get out of here with a mid Roxy show,” he remembers. “I’ve got to make this a little entertaining. I was like, ‘Man, you guys are the worst crowd of the tour. I’m sorry.” And I left.” He dropped the mic and walked offstage.

After the crowd chanted for him to return, Richman came back out and finished the show, confessing that he can be an “erratic guy” sometimes. A couple of months later, he reflects, “Honest to God, man, I really felt that when I said that. Bro, I just be so intense on stage. I just want everything to be like this crazy movie. That’s not the first time that’s happened with these shows, man. I just try to unleash the rage and it’s like when I feel like people aren’t with it.”

Live shows are very important to Richman. “I’m really inspired by Travis Scott,” he says. “I loved how he did his shows, so I kind of wanted to recreate that to my own thing.” Early in his career, he used to throw high-energy concerts that he called “Everything Is Punk” shows in small, sweaty rooms. “We were doing some of the shows and we were just so angry, man, but the people in the crowd, they’re like rabid animals. It was insane,” he says.

As he prepares to head out on the road again on his upcoming 29-show COYOTE show across North America and Europe, he promises that he’ll be bringing back that raw, explosive energy. And he’s excited to translate all of his new songs to the stage.

Of course, “Million Dollar Baby” will always be a fan favorite at each show. Asked how he feels about his big hit roughly six months after it dropped, he gives an answer that reveals he’s still wrestling with his own feelings about it.

“It’s a great song,” he begins. “I don’t got a problem with it. I try not to put myself tied down. Like, ‘I hate this song!’ Because you know, artists with their biggest songs are like, ‘I can’t stand this song.” So it’s cool. Performing it is super fun. I’m going to have to perform it for the rest of my entire life, so I have to like it. I have to at least be okay with it.”

Later in the conversation, he adds, “My life changed, and all my friends’ lives changed off of one song. I wouldn’t take anything back. I don’t regret how it all went down. But that song doesn’t define me. And I’m really proud of this album, and this shows the real me. I hope people see it eventually.”

Now, Richman is ready to move forward. In the studio, he’s been making a lot of high-energy music lately, and he’s already settled on his next sound. Asked to describe it, he offers: “outside music.”

With the last album, I was like, ‘Oh, hopefully people will appreciate the art,’” he explains. “Now this next one is going to be some ‘outside’ shit, so that one’s going to go up, and I hope when that one goes up, people see the last one and appreciate that one. But the next one’s going to be great. I wanted to make a swagged out sound. It’s going to be better than COYOTE for sure.”

With a massive hit already under his belt, he’s relaxed, and taking things as they come. “I know we got a few more of those in us, but it’s like, I don’t want to chase that hit,” he says. “You’ve just got to just keep making music and it’ll happen organically. That’s why I’m not really worried, man. That’s why I want to stand on business with the album. I’m an artist. I don’t care about this viral shit. We’re going to get there off of me. Don’t need no virality.”

Leaning back in his chair and looking back on everything that’s happened in his life since March, Richman lets out a deep exhale and acknowledges it’s been one hell of a year.

“I feel like this is a growing year,” he says. “The universe has taught me a lot of things about how to move and how to respond to anything. And I’ve learned a lot, not only about myself, but about the people around me. I feel like my energy is a lot more protected.”

So now that he’s had many of his dreams come true, faced backlash, met his idols, and as he likes to put it, “stood on business” in the face of immense pressure, what has he learned about the world? How does he feel about his place in the universe? What does it all mean?

“Life’s very beautiful. Life’s very cruel,” is the way he puts it. “Honestly, man, I’m very thankful I get to wake up and make fucking music every day. I could be doing some fucking construction job. So I’m chilling.”

Tommy Richman is sitting at a keyboard in the corner of a dimly lit recording studio.

Improvising a chord progression, he makes a mistake that fucks up the recording. As he gets ready to try again, his producer Kavi points out that they can just fix it digitally.

“Nah, let’s do it again,” he responds. “I have to play it with my fingers.”

On the next attempt, he fumbles again, and Kavi reminds him how easy it would be to just correct it on the computer. Richman pushes back again. He’s adamant about doing it the old fashioned way.

“No, I have to feel it!” he says. “Let’s do it again.”

It’s a little past midnight on a Tuesday in West Hollywood, and the 24-year-old Virginia native is surrounded by a few of his closest friends and collaborators. They’ve all been sipping on lemon drop cocktails, and video footage of a crackling fireplace is playing on each of the studio’s monitors.

Richman successfully lays down the chords on his third attempt and pulls out his laptop, grabs a studio microphone, and starts to record his own vocals in the middle of the room. Within seconds, he pulls a melody out of thin air and improvises lyrics on the spot. Recording himself (he never uses engineers), he stacks his own vocals over a bouncy drum break. Forty-five minutes later, he takes his headphones off and plays the song through the studio’s speakers at an ear-splitting volume. It sounds like a hit. Weeks later, the falsetto hook still hasn’t left my head.

Hits have been pouring out of Richman this year. In April, he released his breakout hit “Million Dollar Baby,” which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has already gone three-times Platinum (it has nearly a billion streams on Spotify alone). He followed that up with “Devil Is a Lie,” a funk-infused record that immediately shot up inside the Top 40.

While these songs climbed the charts, turning Richman into one of the year’s biggest breakout stars, he was sitting on an album that he’d already finished. Then he took a big swing, leaving his two biggest songs off the album and avoiding high-profile features, choosing instead to collaborate with his relatively unknown friends. When COYOTE dropped in September, it underperformed, failing to chart on the Billboard 200, and just as quickly as he blew up, momentum slowed and some fans tried to tear him down. But why?

“It’s really interesting being the new guy,” Richman says. “There’s a lot of hate. I think part of it is that the song is super overplayed.” With a laugh, he adds, “Maybe people just don’t like the way my face looks or something. Maybe some people just think I’m annoying looking. It’s a lot of things.”

Because “Million Dollar Baby” blew up so fast, many have assumed that he took some kind of a shortcut to success or sold out for the sake of virality. If you spend any amount of time with Richman, though, those narratives have a way of evaporating. The real story is quite different.

“I feel like the narrative is that I’m just this new guy with this song that’s annoying, but I’m a lot more than that,” he says. “I am not a fucking ringtone. I’m not just a little 15-second snippet.”

Throughout his breakout year, he’s stayed relatively quiet, despite all of the noise. “I’m not saying I’m like ‘misunderstood’ or anything, but like, I’ve got things to say and I don’t think I’ve worded how I want to say it to people yet,” he says. So far, he’s mostly avoided in-depth interviews and remained somewhat mysterious. 

Until now.

Meet the real Tommy Richman.

Richman grew up in the small town of Woodbridge, Virginia. He was raised in a big “rock family” and his first name is proof—he was named after Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. He describes his neighborhood as “a really rough area” and says there was “absolutely nothing going on there,” but music became a fascination at an early age.

His father played drums, but “he was kind of off on his own shit,” as Richman puts it, “so I didn’t really learn much about music from my dad.” Still, he followed the lead of parents, listening to groups like Kiss as a kid, before branching out to other genres and getting into everything from Lou Rawls to Earth, Wind & Fire to Kanye West to Pharrell to Lil Wayne to 50 Cent.

“I listen to everything, man,” he says now, pulling his phone out of his pocket to reveal that his wallpaper is a photo of the famously eccentric, genre-hopping musician Frank Zappa.

Richman took singing lessons at a young age, and even ended up studying opera at New York’s Manhattan School of Music after high school, but his earliest solo recordings took on an entirely different shape. “I started rapping, because I was embarrassed to sing on tracks at first,” he says. “Bro, singing is very vulnerable. Also, I love rapping, too, so I started doing that and got comfortable with my own voice.”

He admits that his music wasn’t great at first, confessing, “It honestly took three years for me to start making good shit. I don’t even know how these people drop a fucking fucking banger at 15. I’m like, ‘How do y’all do that, bro? I was trash starting out.”

The earliest recording that exists on his YouTube channel is a song called “Ballin Stallin” from 2016. It’s a fairly straightforward hip-hop song in which a 16-year-old Tommy Richman raps over a jazzy beat. “I didn’t how to promote my music, so I was just commenting on type beat YouTube videos, like, ‘Listen to my song!’,” he says. “I was like, ‘Be brutally honest with the last song I posted.’ I probably left like 2,000 comments, because I didn’t know what to do, bro.”

Somehow, the YouTube comment strategy started to work. Richman points to a song called “Melba” as one of the early tracks that actually found an audience, and if you look at the YouTube upload today, you’ll see that one of the top-voted comments was from a user named @hungryjoe1999, who wrote, “Yo this is the first song I’ve seen from a ‘be brutally honest about my last song’ comment that was actually [fire emoji].”

Richman finally gained the confidence to really start singing on tracks in 2020 and experimented by laying down falsetto vocals over funk-infused production. Just like that, the Tommy Richman sound was born. “I sang classical music my whole life, so with that technical training, I can hit those notes,” he says. “I finally started putting it in the music and tried to make it sound cool.”

Then the DMs started rolling in. In early 2022, two of the guys behind clothing brand Absent came across Richman’s work and invited him out to LA. When he showed up, they gave him mushrooms, introduced him to Aphex Twin, and asked him if he wanted to move in for free.

What could possibly go wrong?

“I was so broke it’s not even funny,” he says of those early days in LA. “I didn’t even know if I’m going to get a meal the next day, bro. I was selling features and beats. Like, 10 beats for $150, and all I would do is just walk across the street to go to Carl’s Jr every day.”

Not long after, his roommates had a falling out, so Richman moved back to Virginia, but he wasn’t ready to let the dream die. So he came right back to LA, living out of a hostel in early 2023. That’s when he met his now-manager Darren Xu, who introduced Richman to Brent Faiyaz. They hit it off and Faiyaz took the young artist under his wing, signing Richman to his ISO Supremacy label through a joint venture with PULSE Records.

“It was like a double life,” Richman remembers. “I was linking with Brent, so I’d be going out to clubs and shit with him at night, but then I’d go back home to this hostel, in this rundown dark building.”

In April 2024, Richman was going through it.

Yes, Richman collaborated with his label boss on a song called “Upset,” opened up on the It’s a Wasteland Tour, dropped a five-song EP (The Rush), and picked up some buzz off of “Last Nite.” But things weren’t moving quickly enough for him.

“When we made ‘Last Nite,’ bro, I thought that was the one,” Richman reveals. “We were like, ‘We’re outta here with this one!” And then it came out, and you know…” (The song was well-received by his core fans, but it didn’t get the life-changing response he was hoping for.)

Richman was getting antsy (“I had a chip on my shoulder, man”) and as he remembers it, the label was, too. “Supposedly, that EP was supposed to be my ‘viral moment’ or something, but it wasn’t viral,” he says. “Then I put out another two songs and according to my label, they didn’t do well.” In a mocking tone, Richman does his best impression of a label exec, putting a single finger in the air and chirping, “It’s got to go viral!’”

In a moment of frustration, Richman did something that was very out of character for him: he started to think about virality. “We were literally having a conversation in the studio,” he remembers. “I’m like, ‘Bro, how do we go viral?’” The concept was foreign to him, though, and he realized he had no idea how to manufacture virality. So he gave up on the short-lived quest and did the only thing that’s ever made sense: he picked up a microphone.

“It was a very normal night,” he says. One thing was different, though. “I had quit weed before, and I just got back into it,” he says. “That night, I smoked too much. I greened out.” In an elevated state, with a slight chip on his shoulder, Tommy started roughing out melodies over a bouncy, funky groove.

Out of nowhere, it hit him. The hook that would change his life forever.

“I’m a million dollar babyyyyy.”

“I felt like I was still the underdog,” he says. “I wanted to make it so badly and I was literally saying, like, ‘I’m a million dollar baby.’ Like, people need to stop playing with me. That was really it.”

The feeling had been mounting for a while. “I remember having meetings with people, like, ‘Bro, I want to sign a million dollar deal.’ A&Rs were looking at me like, ‘Oh, that’s good Tommy. Just keep believing in yourself,’” he says, laughing. “And it’s crazy, man, because I really felt it.”

That night, though, he didn’t think the song would be a smash. In the moment, he was actually convinced another song he made that week would be the one to change his life: “Devil Is a Lie.”

“We made those songs back to back, two days in a row,” he says. “I remember playing ‘Million Dollar Baby’ for the label and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ And none of us thought it was a hit. None of us. But when we made ‘Devil Is A Lie,’ we were like, ‘Oh nah, this is the one.’ I remember when we made that shit, bro, we ran it back like five times. It was crazy.”

Still, he wanted to capture the energy of “Million Dollar Baby” in the moment, so he filmed himself and his friends dancing along to the song in the studio and posted it on TikTok a few das later. The snippet caught fire, racking up millions of views.

“When it blew up, it was the craziest feeling,” he remembers fondly. “Me and my friends were like, ‘We got hit! We got a hit! We actually did it!’ But when the snippet came out, the song wasn’t done. So we got a bunch of people in the studio, finished it, and just turned up.”

Richman wisely capitalized on the hype and rushed to drop it as soon as possible—something he says would’ve been impossible if he weren’t signed to an indie label like ISO. When “Million Dollar Baby” hit DSPs on April 26, 2024, it exploded on impact. It tallied an incomprehensible 5 million streams in its very first day, went No. 1 on the Apple Music charts, and debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

He’d never had a song on the charts before, and now he was seeing his name sitting right above A-listers like Taylor Swift and Future. “It was a lot,” he says. “In the first week I was like, ‘Oh, this guy I used to look up to just followed me Instagram. Oh, this guy can just DM’d me that I used to look up to. I was literally sending screenshots, like, ‘Oh wow. Everybody. Everybody except Kanye, bro. [Laughs.] Everybody, man. It was insane.”

Just a few weeks after being disillusioned with the music industry and confused about how to “make it,” he had spoken his dreams into existence. “That song has a weird manifestation vibe to it because it literally happened in that song,” he says. “That shit’s a real Cinderella story, bro.”

Mostly, he’s glad how it all happened. Instead of chasing a gimmick or relying on a viral trend, he proved it was still possible for a song to become massively successful on the strength of simply being good.

“We were having that conversation [about how to go viral] the day before we made that song, and then it went viral the next week off of no gimmick,” Richman points out. “I never thought we would go viral just off a song just being hard. I was like, ‘There’s no way. It doesn’t work these days.’ But we did it.”

“I’m not no fuckin TikTok artist,” Tommy Richman tweeted on June 18, 2024.

Yes, the snippet for “Million Dollar Baby” did initially blow up on TikTok. And yes, it did set a record for the longest running No. 1 song on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart. But the idea that Richman makes songs solely for TikTok virality doesn’t sit well with him. His career may have exploded because of a viral single, but he’s always prioritized something else: full-length albums.

“I’m an album guy,” he says. “That’s just the shit that lasts forever. These guys that come out today, they could be a flash in the pan. All these guys can be forgotten, man. There’s nothing wrong with that. They can make cool shit, but it’s not going to stick forever.”

In conversation, he visibly lights up when speaking about the careers of Prince and Kanye West, two artists renowned for world-building (who each happen to have several classic albums under their belts).

“When I’m retired, bro, and I look back in the catalog, I just want to see all these albums and all these different worlds that have been built,” he explains. “I’m so excited to look back at my Spotify and see these, like, seven albums I have. I’ll just be like, ‘Wow. These were just moments of my life that I was just living, and this is the artistic interpretation of it. Shit fucking excites me. Building a catalog, man…”

After “Million Dollar Baby” and “Devil Is a Lie” had accumulated hundreds of millions of streams, two new questions emerged: What would Tommy Richman’s album sound like?

Well, it turns out he already had a full project in the tuck. In December 2023, he had recorded a bunch of songs “in the middle of nowhere”—a small desert town called Beatty, Nevada. And he says “the album was basically done” before he even made his two hit singles. COYOTE, which he describes as “a funk, disco album,” was created with one goal in mind: “I wanted to make an album that you can play front to back, from the first song to the last song, and then you just play it over and over again. This is my real art side. I was trying to make a vinyl record—not trying to make a playlist.”

The issue was, everyone had already heard “Million Dollar Baby” and “Devil Is a Lie” countless times, and he didn’t think they fit the vibe of the rest of the album, so he made a controversial decision. He left his two biggest songs off of his album.

“In my mind, the song blew up, so everybody already knew the song,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking about it from a logistics label standpoint. I’m like, ‘Oh, people already know the song.’ Let me put out the album.’ That’s literally the dumb elementary reasoning. But of course, if you put the song on there, the sales go up, and it looks better numbers-wise. But I just wanted to stand on business with that.”

The decision to leave two streaming juggernauts off the album was a shocking one, and Richman had to fight for it. “With some of my friends, they understood it, and they were like, ‘Fuck yeah,’” he reveals. “But everybody on the other side was just like, ‘What are you doing?!” He slams his fist on the table for effect and laughs, before repeating his favorite phrase, “I just thought it would be cool to stand on business.”

He also faced temptations to do a short-sighted “Million Dollar Baby” remix or add a bunch of features from major label artists on his album, but he (you guessed it) stood on business and stuck to the collaborators who were originally on the album: his friends Paco, Trevor Spitta, Zachary Moon, and mynameisntjmack.

When the album dropped on September 27, 2024, it underperformed, moving around 4,300 units in the first week and failing to chart on the Billboard 200.

A few weeks after the release of the album, he sounds somewhat conflicted about his decision to leave his biggest hits off of the album. “I mean, I guess it’s like a mist—I don’t know,” he says, seemingly about to say it was a “mistake” before quickly doubling down. “I don’t regret it,” he says firmly.

First-week sales are an inescapable topic of conversation in the music industry, and he’s wrestling with his own thoughts about it, explaining, “It’s an indicator of where your motion’s at. try not to look too deep into it. Well, I want to not look too deep into it. It’s fine. I try not to let it bother me too much. I know it’s a beautiful piece of art and yeah, it was a little disappointing seeing how it looked and how people made fun of me, but it’s whatever. It’s fine. I’m not going to let a first week number get to me.”

For now, he’s focusing on the people who have resonated with the music in a deep way. He’s happy to play the long game with COYOTE, and he has a plan to release music videos for every single song on the project, because he believes people will appreciate the music over time. “I know this is a timeless project, and the people that understood it, really understood it,” he says. “A lot of people love it and they’re saying it really helped them a lot. Me and my friends think it’s a classic, so we’re going to keep telling people it’s a classic and be annoying and try to just push as much as we can.”

If you spend enough time around Tommy Richman, you’ll inevitably hear the phrase “the art of music.”

Onstage during his Los Angeles COYOTE album listening party in September, he told a crowd of people that he feels like “the art of music is dying,” and in conversation, he’ll frequently throw around phrases like “I live by the art, and I’ll die by the art.”

It’s why he made unconventional choices on his album that may have sacrificed commercial success, and it’s why he’s very skeptical of shortcuts like artificial intelligence in music. “You’d be surprised how many people in the industry use AI for music,” he says. “I’m not for it at all.”

Richman mostly works by himself or with a small group of collaborators, but when he’s ventured out to work with others, he’s come across high-profile producers who are using AI.

“I was in a session with a very well-respected producer who has made a lot of hit records,” he says. “I’m sitting there and he’s at the AI thing, and he’s typing out prompts and shit. He’s like, ‘Hmm, what should I type out?’ I’m just like, ‘What is going on? Bro, make some music! Make a beat or something. I was like, ‘Wow.’ Coming from someone like that, which I still really respect and they’re still a great person, but I was like, ‘Wow, are we losing it?’” 

He is hopeful about some things, however, arguing that the music industry is in a moment of transition right now. “I feel like the industry’s in a 180,” he says. “Like, ‘Why is this guy not selling? He should be selling.’ And then some random shit’s going nuts. And it’s all because the whole mold is done. A lot of media outlets are dying and it’s just a new form of entertainment. I think the real art’s going to win. Realness sells right now, and I think that people gravitate towards relatability.”

Richman stands on his art, even when it leads him to tense situations. This summer, he stopped by Rolling Stone’s office to play COYOTE for staff members. A couple of months prior, the publication had published an article called Who’s Afraid of ‘White Boy Summer? In the piece, a Rolling Stone writer critiqued Richman, comparing him to artists like Ian and drawing parallels to Chet Hanks’ infamous “White Boy Summer.”

The energy was off as soon as Richman entered the building. He noticed that one of the writers avoided eye contact with him, and he says the staff generally dismissed him and his music. “I was just like, ‘Bro, the energy here is so bad. Let me figure out who wrote this,’” he recalls. “So I was like, ‘Who wrote that article about me and Ian?’ He was like, ‘It was me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really? That was you? What’d you think about that?” He was like, ‘I think I made some good points…’ So I was like, ‘Really? I think that was fucking disrespectful.’”

Richman says he understands that the writer has a job to do, but from his perspective, the article was “a smack in the face of everything I do.” As he remembers it, “I told him, ‘I think you’re a piece of shit. That’s exactly what I said. Then the next song played and I was like, ‘Alright, bro, sorry, I’m out.”

Tommy Richman left the building.

That incident in the Rolling Stone office was one of the rare moments where he actually had a chance to stand up for himself in-person, so he took the opportunity, but he generally tries to let negative internet comments roll off his back.

“I’m a human being, so sometimes there’ll be a comment I see where I’m like, ‘Egh,’” he explains. “But other than that, it’s fine. This is what happens, man. You want to be a popular artist? Alright. There’s going to be people saying things you don’t like.”

He’s also starting to realize that he’ll never be able to please everyone. In July, he performed “Million Dollar Baby” for the first time in front of a live crowd at a Spotify event in New York and posted footage from the show shortly after.

“I knew what I was doing with that show,” he says now. “I knew what I was doing posting that. I posted it myself. I was like, ‘What are people going to say about this? I don’t think I sound that bad. Let me post it.’” He was met with backlash right away, as thousands of people shared comments about how his falsetto vocals in a live setting didn’t live up to the recording.

There were a few factors at play. The performance was outdoors in a suboptimal setting, so the sound wasn’t as good as it would have been in a traditional venue, and it was Richman’s very first time performing the song in front of people, so he hadn’t fully dialed it in yet. The next month, he performed the song again on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and it went much more smoothly, but he noticed that it didn’t stir up nearly the same amount of discussion as the Spotify show did.

“[The Kimmel performance] was perfect and no one said anything about it. Of course!” he says. “That really spoke a lot to what the internet is today.”

Now, he’s come to an understanding about whose opinions really matter. When the internet was giving him shit for low album sales, artists like Tyler, The Creator showed support. In an Instagram comment, Tyler wrote, “‘Green Therapy’ is so nice man. ‘Elephant in the Room’ is incredible!”

Richman says he saw the comment, and he appreciated it: “It was cool. He gets it. I’ve never spoken to him and I’ve never met him, but I really really appreciate that cool little low key co-sign right there. Because I don’t see him commenting like that, so he definitely knew what he was doing with that.”

Just a couple of weeks before, Richman had stood onstage at his album listening event and praised Tyler for being one of the only artists who still cares deeply about the art of music. “He’s so calculated,” he says now. “He’s so particular. He knows exactly what’s coming out and he knows exactly what he’s doing. I appreciate that a lot. And there’s a couple people that are doing it like that. Mk.gee is very good. Yves Tumor, I like how he’s doing it. Playboi Carti, I like how they’re all doing it. I just like people who are very particular with the moment.”

Earlier in the year, Richman met (and made music with) another artist he respects deeply: Virginia’s own Pharrell. “I met him in Paris one time at the Louis Vuitton, his office, and I was playing him the records,” he says. “We got a few ideas together. It’s cool. One of ’em is really cool, which I hope comes out at some point.”

Pharrell also passed along a nugget of wisdom. “One thing he said to me that stuck me was, ‘You’re in your own world, so stay in that.'”

“I just be tweeting how I feel in the moment and it comes out,” Tommy Richman says, which might be the understatement of the year.

If you scroll through Tommy Richman’s X—formerly known as Twitter—profile, you’ll see a peek inside his subconsciousness. One minute, he’s praising Kendrick Lamar. The next, he’s saying he “wants to do a pop song with Freddie Gibbs.” Then he’ll hit you with an observation like, “Do y’all really put sushi as your favorite food? I don’t even be seeing y’all eating it like that.”

They’re his “little fucking manic little tweets,” as Richman describes them, and sometimes they land him in hot water.

On October 2, 2024, he posted, “I am not a hip-hop artist.” This immediately stirred up backlash, as people pointed out that he has incorporated elements of hip-hop in his music. And, of course, it reminded many fans of a long history of white artists who initially used the aesthetics and culture of hip-hop to become successful, only to ditch it and move on to something else once they “made it.”

Richman quickly deleted the post and tried clarifying what he meant. He explained that he makes a lot of different kinds of music so he was simply trying to communicate that he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed into any single genre, including hip-hop. “I meant to say I’m not SOLELY a hip-hop artist,” he wrote in one post. In another, he explained, “I’ll say again, I’m thankful for everything. I’m saying I don’t wanna be boxed in. I grew up on hip-hop. But I’m a singer.”

Looking back on the situation now, he says, “I remember when I tweeted that, I was like, ‘Wow, that didn’t look right. I feel like people are going to take this the wrong way.’ And I deleted it, but it looked even worse deleting it. Honestly, man, I was just seeing discussions about it, and I just wanted to tell people that I was a versatile artist. I don’t want to be boxed in. I could go to many different pockets. And I think I should have just explained it better.”

A few weeks later, the optics of his tweet looked even worse when it was revealed that “Million Dollar Baby” was submitted for Best Rap Song and Best Melodic Rap Performance at the Grammys. Richman says it had been submitted on his behalf long before he sent the tweet and he understands that the whole thing looked “in poor taste.”

“I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I’m just trying to make my music and stay out the way,” he says. “I’ll definitely try to just explain myself better or just not tweet.”

Richman tends to wear his heart on his sleeve and he has an impulsive side to him that jumps to the surface from time to time. During a September 18 show at The Roxy in Los Angeles, he performed in front of an audience that had lackluster energy, at least compared to the other crowds that showed up to his mini tour this fall. Throughout the show, he tried hyping up the crowd to bring more energy, eventually telling them, “Y’all be too cool, man.”

“I’m like, bro, I can’t get out of here with a mid Roxy show,” he remembers. “I’ve got to make this a little entertaining. I was like, ‘Man, you guys are the worst crowd of the tour. I’m sorry.” And I left.” He dropped the mic and walked offstage.

After the crowd chanted for him to return, Richman came back out and finished the show, confessing that he can be an “erratic guy” sometimes. A couple of months later, he reflects, “Honest to God, man, I really felt that when I said that. Bro, I just be so intense on stage. I just want everything to be like this crazy movie. That’s not the first time that’s happened with these shows, man. I just try to unleash the rage and it’s like when I feel like people aren’t with it.”

Live shows are very important to Richman. “I’m really inspired by Travis Scott,” he says. “I loved how he did his shows, so I kind of wanted to recreate that to my own thing.” Early in his career, he used to throw high-energy concerts that he called “Everything Is Punk” shows in small, sweaty rooms. “We were doing some of the shows and we were just so angry, man, but the people in the crowd, they’re like rabid animals. It was insane,” he says.

As he prepares to head out on the road again on his upcoming 29-show COYOTE show across North America and Europe, he promises that he’ll be bringing back that raw, explosive energy. And he’s excited to translate all of his new songs to the stage.

Of course, “Million Dollar Baby” will always be a fan favorite at each show. Asked how he feels about his big hit roughly six months after it dropped, he gives an answer that reveals he’s still wrestling with his own feelings about it.

“It’s a great song,” he begins. “I don’t got a problem with it. I try not to put myself tied down. Like, ‘I hate this song!’ Because you know, artists with their biggest songs are like, ‘I can’t stand this song.” So it’s cool. Performing it is super fun. I’m going to have to perform it for the rest of my entire life, so I have to like it. I have to at least be okay with it.”

Later in the conversation, he adds, “My life changed, and all my friends’ lives changed off of one song. I wouldn’t take anything back. I don’t regret how it all went down. But that song doesn’t define me. And I’m really proud of this album, and this shows the real me. I hope people see it eventually.”

Now, Richman is ready to move forward. In the studio, he’s been making a lot of high-energy music lately, and he’s already settled on his next sound. Asked to describe it, he offers: “outside music.”

With the last album, I was like, ‘Oh, hopefully people will appreciate the art,’” he explains. “Now this next one is going to be some ‘outside’ shit, so that one’s going to go up, and I hope when that one goes up, people see the last one and appreciate that one. But the next one’s going to be great. I wanted to make a swagged out sound. It’s going to be better than COYOTE for sure.”

With a massive hit already under his belt, he’s relaxed, and taking things as they come. “I know we got a few more of those in us, but it’s like, I don’t want to chase that hit,” he says. “You’ve just got to just keep making music and it’ll happen organically. That’s why I’m not really worried, man. That’s why I want to stand on business with the album. I’m an artist. I don’t care about this viral shit. We’re going to get there off of me. Don’t need no virality.”

Leaning back in his chair and looking back on everything that’s happened in his life since March, Richman lets out a deep exhale and acknowledges it’s been one hell of a year.

“I feel like this is a growing year,” he says. “The universe has taught me a lot of things about how to move and how to respond to anything. And I’ve learned a lot, not only about myself, but about the people around me. I feel like my energy is a lot more protected.”

So now that he’s had many of his dreams come true, faced backlash, met his idols, and as he likes to put it, “stood on business” in the face of immense pressure, what has he learned about the world? How does he feel about his place in the universe? What does it all mean?

“Life’s very beautiful. Life’s very cruel,” is the way he puts it. “Honestly, man, I’m very thankful I get to wake up and make fucking music every day. I could be doing some fucking construction job. So I’m chilling.”