Brothers Timothy and Teron, aka R. City, are about to make their major label debut with the album Wake the Neighbors, but chances are you've been singing their songs for a long time. How's that? Well, R. City has racked up an impressive record of penning the biggest hits for the biggest sellers, from Akon to the Pussycat Dolls. Here, they talk about getting their start in the business, how they moved into songwriting, and how they used their songwriting success to win attention for their own music.
Question: So, you just got back from the Virgin Islands, is that right?
(Teron)Yeah, we were in the British Virgin Islands and US Virgin Islands for four days.
How was that?
(Teron) It was GREAT. We had a show in the British Virgin Islands and it was amazing – they knew all the words to all the songs. It was kind of surprising to us.
So, just a few questions for you guys. First, can you tell me a little bit about how you got started in St. Thomas?
(Teron) Ok, we stared at the ages of 5 and 6. We started out as backup dancers for a local group in St. Thomas. A local rap group – a girl group. They broke up but my brother and I wanted to continue to do music, so we were doing the dancing thing. But then Kriss Kross came out and kind of shifted out thoughts. We were like, “yo, they’re young, they’re like us.” So we went through the whole wearing out pants backwards phase and everything like that, emulating them. Then we kind of came into our own.
Our dad used to manage us at first, and he’s the reason that we do all the things we do. We started out trying to rap, and he said, “everyone can rap.” Then we started to do reggae and rap, and he said everybody can do that. We started singing, and he said, “yeah, but…” and he made us take Spanish lessons. We can’t speak Spanish, but we can read it very, very well (laughs). He made us do all of those things, and it kind of gave us the edge and sound that we have now. That’s kind of like the reason we do all that.
It wasn’t until we graduated out of high school and moved to Miami for about ten months – things were kind of slow. We got offered to perform in Atlanta by a promoter from St. Thomas. He said, “yo, I’ll pay you guys $350 to come out and do this show for me.” And you know, nothing wasn’t really popping in Miami for us at the moment, so we said, hey.
(Timothy) At that time, we both decided it was either going to be Atlanta or New York. We felt like, you know, the music scene in New York or Atlanta at that time, we needed to be in one of those places and the opportunity presented itself for us to be in Atlanta, so we went to Atlanta.
Why did you pick Miami first?
(Teron) Because the plane ticket was cheaper (laughs).
(Timothy) The plane ticket was cheaper, plus we had family there.
(Teron) WE didn’t know nobody in Atlanta, we had family – a cousin and an uncle (in Miami) and we said we can stay with our uncle or our cousin for awhile until we get ourselves on our feet. And it just wasn’t moving the way – you know, you’re young and coming out of high school and we were the number one group in the islands. We thought we were gonna fly, we were gonna be in the States for a month or two and get a deal. WE didn’t know any better. We were like, wow, it’s harder than we thought, so ended up moving to Atlanta.
So when you moved to Atlanta, you moved as performers, but when you got there, you started getting into songwriting?
(Teron) Yeah, we moved as performers. We actually used to do talent shows to pay our bills, and we actually won so much they told us we couldn’t compete any more. We were like, “a chance? This is our grocery money,” you know. They stopped letting us do that. You know, we’ve been homeless, slept at studio, you know had no money, had to sneak on trains. You know, we’ve been through all of the artist stories you can think on, and we just was like, yo, what else can we do? We’ve always been writing the songs for ourselves, so..
We started dibbling and dabbling in writing songs but I wouldn’t say it didn’t get serious until like 05, cos we did a song for Akon his album, on Konvicted, called The Rain, and the funny part about the song is it was our song. We put it on your second album.
(Timothy) Second independent album
(Teron) Yeah, second independent album we put out in the The Virgin Islands, called The Rain, we wrote it in like seventh or eight grade. You know, and we was like – we were working on our album Wake the Neighbors – and Benny D, Akon’s DJ, said Akon might be able to do it. And he was like, yo, we gonna send it to him, and Akon loved it, and he did it.
From there, everyone was like, yo, these kids wrote a song for Akon, yo, and they asked us what else can you do, and we said we can do whatever, and from there, the songwriting thing just opened a whole new door that we never knew existed. Everyone was talking about Rock City. It was like, wow, ok.
We’ve just been writing songs for anyone who would let us write a song for them. We’ve worked with a lot of people – The Pussycat Dolls, that first single we just did – When I Grow Up – they just performed it on Jimmy Kimmel the other night. We wrote that.
(Timothy) They’re also performing it on the MTV movie awards on June 1
(Teron) – Yeah, they’re opening the show with that song. Also, Leona Lewis, her American album, she did two songs - Akon did a song called Foolish, and we did a song called Mrs. Glass, which is going to be her second single to be released over here. Also Mario got a song called Music for Love which is his next single, which we did. We also did four songs on Sean Kingtson’s album - we did the hit single Take You There, which was successful for him.
