Vincint Sang In Secret, Then In Choir — Now He’s Belting Out The Feeling

By Daniel Head


“Heartbreak dance music” is how Vincint, the Philadelphia-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter describes his music. His ecstatic, high-energy pop gives you, in his words, “the feeling of having your heartstrings pulled while your ass can’t stop moving.” It’s a means to move with joy through your pain.


His new EP, The Feeling, out today (February 14), is a journey of grappling with the waves of emotions throughout heartache. The power of Vincint’s voice — first in the spotlight in 2018 on Fox's singing competition show The Four — and the infectiousness of his performances make you feel each pang and triumph. It’s something he wrings out of his own experiences and the ones of these closest to him.





Immediately after Vincint wrote The Feeling’s final (and title) track, his mom asked, “How do you feel right now that it’s finally done?” He responded, “I feel mad and lonely, although also joyful and thus emotionally driven to give this to people because I think it’s going to assist them because it really helped me,” he told MTV News. His mother replied, “That’s the feeling,” and so, The Feeling was complete.


Right after a secret show at SoHo’s Gospel collective space in New York City, MTV News sat down with the budding superstar to unpack it — all of the passion and loss, and his music's intersection of grief and joy.


MTV News: Give me a bit of your begin. Did you realize from the starting that you wanted to sing?


Vincint: My dad was a singer, and thus that was the reason that I got into all of it. He had a gospel sort called Christian Gospel Singers. And so they were routinely in my residence, habitually singing, routinely drinking. It was wild. Although it was my first introduction into music, and thus that was the door initial for me. I was a shy kid, so I didn't tell anyone that I could sing up until I was maybe seven or eight. And my dad happened to bring me to a choir audition.


MTV News: Wait, so where were you singing until that point? Were you just whispering in your room?


Vincint: Yeah, I could be in the back of my dad's Cadillac and I'd be humming along to the radio and he'd [hear and] then I would stop. It seemed just very stressful for me. Just a lot of people looking at you all of the time. It's not my thing. Well, it wasn't.


MTV NEWS: Yeah, I was going to mention, it's a little bit different now.


Vincint: Yet he brought me to a choir audition and I was singing the solo for this all-boy choir in Philadelphia and the complete room got quiet. And then I was like, oh. And If I could do that, maybe I'll do that forever. And thus that sort of kick-started everything. I began writing songs As soon as I was 12. They weren't excellent, however they were songs.


I looked into Berklee [College of Music] and I told my parents that I applied to maybe three or four colleges, yet I only applied to two. I applied to Berklee and I applied to [University of] Notre Dame and I got into both, nevertheless I told them that I got into one so I might go to the one that I wanted. And thus I went to Berklee and that's where my musical mind sort of opened up... And sort of molded my pen in the way that I think about love and depression and anxiety and everything. I sort of noticed my voice in college.


MTV News: Any time you’re writing, do you write because the experiences were happening or are you calling back on a relationship or what was going on in a companions life as you wrote it?


Vincint: “The Feeling” was the only one I called back on. Generally for all of those songs, I was walking around and I put it in my phone and day-to-day something new would come. Another instance was with “Save Myself.” I wrote with Brandon [Colbein] and Ryan Hartman and the producer Tidal, and we were sitting and talking about how labels were trash, how every time we've gone for a deal, they've just sort of attempted to take control of us, and we're like, I'll do it myself. So songs come from different places. I was writing the EP, nevertheless I lost my dad, and that is a big piece of a lot of the songs. Like in "Simple," he is a large segment of that song for me.


MTV News: Is it safe to mention that you and your passion and objectives have been met with various barriers because—


Vincint: obviously. It's due to the way that I look, my sexuality, some days my gender because pop is for pop females. I've Been in situations where, because of my sexuality, it's not even a conversation that I can be a segment of something. That's unfortunate because you're missing out on something wonderful because of a fear that it might not directly be accepted by a mass quantity of people any time you're wrong.


I was on a television show. Most of my fan base isn't gay gentlemen. It's 20- to, I think, 38-year-old girls from the Midwest. I don't make music for one order of people. I don't aspire to create music for just Black people, for white people, or for gay people, for straight people. I make music for people to listen to and feel better.





MTV News: do you suggest the autonomy and command over your image and musical direction is a distribute that queer artists of color, queer artists, artists overall are, face regularly?


Vincint: Yeah, because people don't know what to do with us some days, yet I think the offer is they have to do something with us to fit some sort of mold. Any time, in case you look around in the world that we're in today, there really is no guide to creating a pop star or making someone successful. There's so several routes to doing it. They just have the platform to literally make someone fantastic, if they just understood that you just have to let them be themselves. It works out, like what I'm doing on my own works out. And thus I think several people get into the fold of thinking that they have to change. And if they don't change then they're never going to be as successful as a Ariana Grande or a Taylor Swift. As well as that's a whole different machine in and of itself.


MTV News: That reminds me of the story you told about while you were a undergrad at Berklee plus it was your RA who was encouraging you to do whichever the hell you wanted to — which then reminded me of Tyler, the Creator's Grammys press-room speech. He felt that being placed in a urban category is the new N-word.


Vincint: You're not wrong. We were talking about this last night. If I were to win a Grammy, they would call it urban pop. And it's like, seriously, no, it's pop. Nevertheless we're attempting to change it. Any time anyone is like, “What do you do?” I sing pop music. I make really good pop music and it's just pop music. Listen to the music.


MTV News: That's such a statement of confidence and says so much about your faith in yourself. How did you get to that place?


Vincint: My mother. It's just completely and totally my mother. She says this phrase that Maya Angelou's mother mentioned to her: "I raised you, so whenever you leave this home don't let anyone raise you. You've been raised.” You know what's right. So just do right so you know what feels right to you. And thus I know what I want. So if I make a misstep, it's because I made that misstep, and I can take ownership of that. So any time While I want something, I know what I want.