Childhood passions lead Myko Glaze to the Ohio R&B Music Festival stage

At age 5, Myko Glaze pressed his ear to the stereo speaker at his grandmother’s home on the North Side of Columbus, enraptured by the sound of Donny Hathaway swooning his way through the minor key piano ballad “A Song for You.”

He’s been chasing that feeling ever since.

“I would leave my head on the speaker, just feeling the vibration of the piano,” said Glaze, who will take part in the second annual Ohio R&B Music Festival at Up Front Performance Space on Saturday, Oct. 4, performing alongside Akoiya, N’Shai Iman, and Kasiya, among others. “And that’s really the moment I fell in love, where I knew I wanted to make things that felt like that.”

Raised by a custodian father who moonlighted as a cartoonist and an art connoisseur mother, Glaze grew up with what he jokingly termed “dual citizenship,” splitting his childhood between the South Side and Bronzeville. From a young age, the singer threw himself headlong into music, earning his first paid singing gig when a neighbor asked him to record the greeting message on their cell phone. The brief recording fell in line with much of Glaze’s vocal experience as he moved into his early 20s, which frequently centered on creating soulful hooks for a rap collective of which he was part.

“And one of the things you need to do to stand out in a group of rappers when you’re an R&B singer is that you sing really hard about love,” said Glaze, who drew from his own romantic flirtations and failures in crafting these early hooks. “At the time, I was still learning, and I was writing from my own experiences.”

In more recent years, the singer has worked to distance himself from this approach, adopting a storytelling mindset that has allowed him to embody a range of characters whose invented lives can be more colorful than the one he’s currently living. “I think I’m a little bit boring at this juncture,” Glaze said, and laughed.

More importantly, where the songs once dwelled heavily on heartache, there now exists within Glaze’s emerging body of work a growing resilience, his collected narrators shedding the hurts of the past and learning how to stand comfortably on their own. “Had to be alone to find my own,” Glaze sings on “A Fool (LoFi Love),” while the measured “For You” arrives with an acknowledgment that “sometimes you gotta clap for yourself.”

“When I listen back to the songs I recorded in my 20s, I’m singing about breakups, and so people have experienced me having a broken heart,” Glaze said. “And now I want people to see that other side of me, the side that inspires. My actual business is wellness, so it keeps me on brand, you know? I want to keep people in a good space … and tell them you gotta do it for you.”

While Glaze initially gravitated toward music owing to its sonic reverberations, it’s a deep love for writing that has continued him down this creative path. When he was getting his start crafting lyrics, he would study songwriters such as Diane Warren and Jim Croce, recalling how the form opened more to him once he realized the narrative weight that could be packed into a handful of tightly edited verses. 

“Music is where I really learned to tell stories first,” said Glaze, who traced his skills with the pen in part to the advanced reading materials he absorbed growing up in an effort to keep pace with his older siblings, who were nearly a decade his elder. “If music didn’t exist in my world, there’s no way I would be surviving and thriving. It’s something that’s really in the blood for me.”