All his life, he wrote.

Writing is the one thing that has kept Gregory Raymond Joseph Forrest Tompkins sane. “Writing is like keeping your own sanity, when you have something in your head you have to figure out how to get it out,” Tompkins said on writing whatever comes to his mind.

Writing was also the one thing that has brought him to where he is today: an aspiring rapper who has just come back from a trip to Tokyo, where he spent one month performing in clubs and filming a music video.

“The whole goal of music is to make people happy and bring joy to them. That’s why I like it,” said Tompkins after describing how it felt like performing in front of an audience.

As a child, Tompkins never pictured himself as a performing artist, but instead as a college student, excelling in his academic studies. At the age of 10, Tompkins knew that going to college was going to be expensive, and had made up his mind that going to a community college would be the best path to take.

However, it was not that long ago that Tompkins got into rapping. He was only 17 years old when he started hanging out with a group called the TINTED FIGMENTS. According to group member Gabriel Joaquin Aranda, it’s a name representing TV images of people not being transparencies, but instead images of people of different colors. Now, Tompkins is 19 and has traveled across the world to do what he loves to do most-perform and share his music with others.

“The crew I work with now started recording in this ghetto setup, where the microphone just had a sock over the microphone and I just started recording with them.” Tompkins said.

His love for rapping started with a friendly association to members of the already formed the Wu-Tang Clan-esque TINTED FIGMENTS. Members of the group knew that Tompkins wrote, and, one day, they asked him to “drop a verse.” After recording a few times with TINTED FIGMENTS, the group decided that Tompkins had to join.

“Music is a lot more personal than a lot of other rap songs that people normally hear,” according to Tompkins. His lyrics range from the struggles of life to whatever others thoughts come to mind.

Tompkins describes making music as, “one of the finest things that you can do with your life, and the main goal of our music is to make people happy.”

So far, the biggest step in Tompkins’s musical aspirations has been his trip to Japan. He even recalled his most memorable performance in Japan at a club called The Core. With the opportunity to only perform one song, TINTED FIGMENTS delivered the performance of their life.

“It was a great feeling knowing that a song that you wrote and performed is a 150 percent yours and the audience loved it,” Tompkins said.

Tompkins finds happiness in the music that he performs, and he reminds everyone to, “take a good feeling and run with them. And if you’re not having fun, then you’re doing things wrong.”

Coming soon – Listen to Tinted Figments