His musical past goes back much further than that, however, and it predatesYouTube. He is 25 years old now and midway through his international Under the Spotlight Tour, but he began making music on his father’s computer 20 years ago. He hasn’t looked back since. Lately, though, he’s branched out into releasing more personal pieces about his life, his battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the effect that it’s had on his past and current relationships.
Heartfelt songs of personal struggle like “Forbidden Feeling” and his newest release “OCD” pepper his channel’s timeline, sandwiching in character-driven songs aboutFreddy Fazbearand the shopping mall gnome meme between them. In a Game Rant interview with CG5, he reveals that he loves making both types of music for different reasons, and he’s not entirely sure exactly which direction his career will go.
‘A Fight With Enjoyment’
While CG5 loves stumbling across new subjects for songs via internet trends or close friends showing him the “next big thing,” he treats his music writing and production as a serious business. This understandably involves honing in on trending topics that he expects to generate a lot of traffic on his channel. He wants fans of his older music to know that he’s not abandoning them, and he plans to keep releasing songs aboutpopular gamesand shows for at least a little longer, “because that’s what people expect from me, and I’m going to give it to them. I’m going to scrape the bottom of that barrel.” However, there is the other side—his more personal work—and he describes managing the two as a “fight with enjoyment. Specifically, CG5 said,
“It’s like a fight with enjoyment. I don’t know. It’s always changing because I love the attention that the game stuff receives, the community that comes from it, the togetherness, and all of that. And then I love the mainstream stuff because it’s not about a property, it’s just about me, and people care about a song because it’s about me. I don’t really know right now. I’m just doing what I need to do. That’s the short answer.”
CG5 is Still Pursuing Both Avenues of Music, For Now
He also believes in the high quality of his music, and that his longtime fans will continue to support him even as he transitions into more personal and mainstream music. However, that remains a balancing act. As he explained, all the publicity he put out for the recent release of “OCD” was outperformed by the reveal he’s working on a song about the Australian web-based showMurder Drones. This communicates to him that any transition to mainstream music will be a long road, and he’s going to continue balancing personal music withvideo game music.
“It’s a blessing and it’s a curse because I would like to do more mainstream music more often and put out another album, but the timing is not quite in my favor at the moment. There’s still more work to be done on the game side, and I would like to see what happens moving forward. I’m still releasing singles about myself, but I’m also doing this game thing, which I really do enjoy.”
For the time being, CG5 is simply enjoying the growing wave of success he began eight years ago, touring the United States and Europe and spending time with his new wife, Emma. The Under the Spotlight Tour has stops planned for major cities in Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Florida left on the U.S. leg before moving onto Ireland, England, Scotland, and The Netherlands starting in late October.
