Lyfe hit the ground running after his release. He sent those tapes as an audition to the Showtime in Harlem television talent show, and two days before he was released he got word that he had been accepted. Auditioned from PrisonĪs he approached his prison release date at the end of 2002, Lyfe talked prison administrators into letting him make videos of performances he gave for other prisoners. "Like, I'd get a chord here, and a chord there, just write a whole song off that one chord, the whole mood of the chord." He was also inspired by Erykah Badu's Baduizm album, a copy of which he had in his cell.
"I definitely got some tips from some guys that was in ," he told Associated Press writer Raqiyah Mays in an interview reproduced in America's Intelligence Wire. Everybody was, like, upset." After a while, Lyfe won over the other prisoners, some of whom were musicians themselves. "It wasn't like there was somebody there teaching me to play, so it was really hands-on training and a lot of bad notes. "One of the hardest parts was that people kept on telling me to shut up," Lyfe told the Baton Rouge Advocate. He joined a prison gospel group and also learned to play the acoustic guitar, one of the few instruments available to him. Lyfe made use of his time behind bars by working on his music. At 16, he was sent to prison for ten years on an arson charge. "I ran around, did a lot of nonsense, got in a lot of trouble," he told Corey Moore of National Public Radio. However, he began to drift away from his studies at Toledo's DeVilbiss High School. The group broke up after that, but local producers had already identified Lyfe's voice as something special and encouraged him to work toward becoming a solo act. The Dotsons tried to follow in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful sibling ensemble New Edition they scored several talent-show wins and got as far as making a demo recording. His brother Jay joined a group called Lade Bac that was featured on an album by R&B star Keith Sweat, and an uncle, Keith Dotson, formed a family group called the Dotsons that Lyfe joined when he was ten.
The spelling, according to Toledo Blade article, indicated that his music often asks the question "why?" His first musical experiences came in church, and several members of his family went into musical careers. He took the name "Lyfe" after he was released from prison and began a career writing songs, he said, about life's trials. Lyfe was born Chester Jennings in Toledo, Ohio, around 1976. After releasing his debut album, Lyfe 268-192, in 2004, he gradually but steadily gained a large fan base. And Lyfe's musical style, like that of the philosophical vocalist Erykah Badu, hovers between hip-hop and R&B, with classically soulful vocals framed and interspersed by spoken interludes or brought up short by hip-hop's abruptness and humor. He plays an acoustic guitar, an instrument he learned in prison. Lyfe writes honest, emotional songs, drawn on his own experiences. The many attempts that have been made to label it show just how unusual it is: they range from folk-rap (Lyfe's own contribution) to singer-songwriter ( Seattle Times) to R&B/hip-hop/folk ( Billboard). Toledo, Ohio-born singer and songwriter Lyfe has a sound that is all his own.
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