The more I sat with this album, the more the title started to hit different. Pigs can’t fly, and Northside kids aren’t supposed to either. That’s the lie they grow up hearing. It echoes in the way just surviving gets mistaken for success. Don’t aim too high. Don’t miss.
Pigs Can’t Fly Vol. 1, the album Troy made with producer Fan Ran and vocalist Ronnie Luxe is a record born from grief, reflection, and the stubborn need to imagine more than what’s visible from the front porch or the corner out on North Ave.
(For those on Spotify, he released “fanran 003” featuring Mick Jenkins off the album yesterday HERE.)
Troy grew up in a house off Parkwood — three bedrooms, multiple generations, and chaos he couldn’t see clearly until he got older. By five, he was in Northside proper, on North Ave and Wickham, a block he still carries in his bones.
“When I grew up, it’s crazy, because I don’t be talking about it that much now, because it changed so much, like even my block, but where I grew up and where Northside is now – is two completely different things. When I was growing up, I never seen a white person on my street,” he says. “Now, I see people jogging past the corner where someone I loved was killed. That memory’s embedded in my head. People having fun right there… it makes me realize how different people’s worlds are.”
The day his cousin’s best friend was shot “like a big brother, my older cousin used to babysit me”, Troy had just left that same corner to go to church. “It was a Sunday,” he recalls. “Me and my mom were going to church. I was just a kid. What’s crazy is, when we passed the corner, my mom asked him if he wanted to come. He said no. We got out of church… he was dead.”
That memory, like the absence of the father who was never in his life, doesn’t dominate the album but it lingers. Troy’s voice is even and matter-of-fact, but it cuts through. “I used to act like it never mattered,” he says about his father. “In reality, I think it always did.”
He rapped as a kid, elementary through middle school, but dropped it in high school. “Something funny that I always forget, but my cousins remind me all the time, is that I used to rap super young,” he says. “All through elementary and middle school, I was the only kid around who rapped. But once I got to high school, I felt like it was childish. I grew up, started getting into other things. I didn’t really think music was possible. I was just having fun with it as a kid.” The pressure didn’t kill the dream, but it did push it to the side. “The dudes rapping in high school were on a different level.”
Now, it’s different. “I’m trying to make the movement more relatable to kids in the hood,” he says. “Since I come from it, and I know the damage it can do, I’m trying to reach the kids who see me doing what I do and think they can’t. I want to reach their spirits and let them know they can do anything they want to do. Because one thing I’ve realized is, if you’re surrounded by poverty all day, it’s not even that you can’t do anything — it’s that you don’t see anything else that tells you you could.”
That clarity is what drew in producer Fan Ran, known for his extensive work with Gritty City, a mainstay of Richmond’s underground, and a crate-digging alchemist in his own right. “He hit me up,” Fan says. “I was already a fan of his going back to NameBrand’s stuff, working with him on the Highway to Hell joint. I think I had just gotten into 96 Degrees, or at least I’d seen it before we started working. But he hit me up, I think it was through DM, and said, ‘Yo, I’m trying to lock in.’ And I was like, ‘I’m a fan.’ That’s how I always start, I let people know I’m a fan first. Because I am. I’m a fan of this shit before I’m anything else. If God took my talent away tomorrow, I’d still be in it somehow. So when he reached out, I was like, yeah… this is gonna be good.”
Fan saw the project as an invitation to go all in. “I’m always hunting for that next sound,” he says, “but this time I knew from our first conversations I could really push it. I’ve done street records before, but this felt different, I could bring all my weird ideas to the table and he was with it. That’s why you hear all the dialogue stitched between songs; weaving those movie clips and radio snippets has been my thing the last few years. We’re old-school—grew up on albums with skits, so I wanted that energy. And he got it, man. Took it to another planet.”
Fan says Troy’s creative pace changed the process entirely. “He turns around records so quick that it’s like, once you get into the mix with him, it’s not even pressure,” he says. “You gotta honor that. You gotta honor that energy. And I’m very much an energy reflector, whatever energy you’re giving me, I’m gonna give it right back. If you’re hype about it, I’m with you. If you’re not, I’m gonna leave that shit alone and put it on the back burner until you’re hype again. But with this, it wasn’t even about being hype. The records were just getting turned around so fast. It felt organic and easy like — no notes. No notes. I don’t really have notes for Troy when he gives a record back, because you can’t make notes on something that’s its own animal. You know what I mean? It’s like when somebody sees a new version of a tiger they didn’t know existed. They’re like, ‘Yo, I’ve got all these records on these other tigers I’ve seen… but this right here? We’re gonna have to start a new page.’”
Ronnie came in like gravity. Her vocals didn’t just complement the sound, they helped ground it. “There were certain emotions Troy wanted to paint,” she says. “We passed those feelings back and forth until the songs had it. I met up with him that first time and we recorded at his house. And I don’t know — we’ve just kind of been locked in ever since, for real, for real. Slowly but surely, we started working together more and more. Now he’s the only rapper I work with consistently, like all the time at this point.”
Troy says he would not have finished the album without her.
Together, the trio made something that resists the usual narratives. Pigs Can’t Fly isn’t polished for radio or built for hype. It feels more like a dispatch, something recorded after midnight and played back on an old stereo with the windows open. Gentrifiers jog past corners where kids used to die. Police roll slow. A generation of young Black artists keep working anyway.
The title Pigs Can’t Fly carries weight. It’s not defeatist, it’s defiant. It’s what the city mumbles when someone like Troy dares to dream past the block.
Main photo by Sèlah Marie
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