Some musicians have the misfortune to discover, at a certain point in their careers, that it is possible to lose everything. Anderson .Paak had learned this harsh lesson twice over before he had graduated from high school.
It all happened in Oxnard, California. His mother – a Korean-war orphan, raised in Compton – built up a successful organic strawberry business that enabled the family to move from a one-bedroom apartment into a five-bedroom mansion. Brandon Paak Anderson thus enjoyed a privileged adolescence, until El Niño devastated the crop two years running and plunged his mother into bankruptcy. She remarried and made another small fortune as a professional gambler until she was prosecuted for undeclared winnings. This time she lost all her money and went to jail for seven-and-a-half years. These whiplash reversals of fortune have left her son with a keen sense of the contingency of life.