Summary

Swerve Strickland said his path into making rap music began while balancing military weekend drills, early wrestling commitments, and long drives between Virginia and Pennsylvania.

He described teaching himself through repetition by listening to and rapping along with albums during those trips.

Strickland said his music output accelerated after connecting with Monteasy, then taking studio sessions seriously during the COVID period and continuing to build after releasing the BrokeBois record.

Swerve Strickland music timeline mirrors his wrestling development process

Swerve Strickland framed his music growth as a grind similar to wrestling, because he said progress came through repeated reps, writing, recording, features, and gradually increasing investment.

His account also shows that his performer identity expanded in parallel with his wrestling career rather than as a separate side project, with momentum building from podcast conversations into structured studio work.

For related context on Strickland’s broader self-reinvention approach, see our previous report on his return-era physical evolution.

Quotes

Quote from Swerve Strickland

“I was in the military and just starting wrestling. I had to go from Richmond, Virginia, all the way back to Pennsylvania [for] military weekend drills. My daughter was born at the time, so I had to go make those trips every weekend or other weekend. So throughout those drives, it was just music. I had CDs stacked in the cubbies of the car, in the middle, console, wherever. I would just listen to these albums. Some were super mainstream, some were super niche. I was developing a skill that I didn’t even know I was developing. I was just memorizing every word of these songs and these albums. I was rapping along to them. The muscle memory was just picking up, and I didn’t realize what I was really doing. I was teaching myself. So when I met Monteasy, that was 2015, and then I moved to Florida in 2017. He was living in Tampa. He interviewed me, and we started a podcast together. We always leaned into talking to music because he was the artist. He was like, ‘Yo, you talk so much about it. I feel like you could actually be good at doing it.’ I didn’t know. I was like, ‘I don’t think so, man.’ Then Covid hit, so that was the first time we got in the studio and actually started writing. They were not good, not cohesive raps and stuff. But I was like, I’m going to try again. I’ll keep going at it. Then we wrote the BrokeBois record. Then that stemmed into some other songs that we started putting out. That’s where I was like, ‘Okay, I’m getting that.’ It felt like the wrestling grind all over again. Let me just write a verse. Let me write two verses. Let me get a book. Let me get a feature on it. Let’s do a video for it. Then it was like, ‘Okay, let’s actually like put money into it.’ So it started growing again the same way. That’s where music really started becoming a thing for me.”

Sources

As reported by Fightful.