DougieTheDon’s debut solo record, This One’s on You, begins with a voicemail from his father.
“Doug Jr., this is your dad,” the deep and pleasant voice bellows. “I haven’t heard from you, hope all is well.” Lately, Doug Sr. mentions, he and his son have been distant. They’ve had their differences, but he believes things will one day realign. “Just called to say ‘I love you.’ Hope to hear from you soon,” the dad says before the sounds of piano keys take over.
“I’ve been making music since I was 13,” says the son, 33-year-old Douglas Sorro, who grew up performing in a hip-hop group but eventually got into basketball and stopped rapping.
Later, he switched gears again to become a father himself. It wasn’t until COVID-19 hit that he found the time to reignite his childhood passion—and to connect with his father through song. “Things just started happening out of nowhere,” Sorro says.
The rapper and singer attributes his newfound success to the camaraderie he has found in Las Vegas since relocating here from LA in 2009. Though Sorro didn’t get involved in the music scene right away, he found kinship in the community. It’s partly why the importance of his family is a theme of This One’s on You.
“I’m a little bit older. I can’t sit here and talk about stuff I don’t live [through]. I don’t talk about guns and killing people, I talk about my actual life and I have fun with it,” Sorro says. “Everything I put on there is the truth, and whether it embarrasses me or not, I want to be transparent.”
Being homeless, ending up in jail, visiting his dad in the hospital following Doug Sr.’s open heart surgery are all topics on the record, and “those are all things that really happened,” he says.
“I was tired/I was lonely/I was broken inside/But instead of begging for change/I was begging to die,” Dougie raps on “Owe It All to You.”
“Me and my father, we’re extremely stubborn,” Sorro says. “We don’t agree on a lot of things … but my dad usually is the one who will always reach out and apologize.”
That’s where the voicemail comes in. “My dad’s not getting younger, and tomorrow’s not promised, so I wanted to make sure he could see something while he was still standing, and show how much I appreciate everything he did for me and my brother.”
Originally, This One’s on You sounded entirely different. He says the cover photo—of baby Dougie cradled in his father’s arms—is just about the only thing remaining from that earlier version. “I was letting my father listen to the original album and he liked it, but as I was playing it, I was like, ‘This album doesn’t match my dad in any way.’ So I got rid of those songs and I [re-]made the album within two weeks,” Sorro says.
The final track, “Dad,” brings the LP full circle, beginning with a dial tone and a message to Sorro’s father. “What would I do without you, Pops?/Truth be told/I don’t know if I’m’a grow old/But if the Lord take me here today/Just know I’m a part of your soul,” Sorro raps over a melancholy beat, while his daughter echoes, “Grandpa, I love you.”
“He’s one of my biggest supporters,” Sorro says. “It’s wild, because he always critiques something. … But when he heard this, he had no complaints.”
DougieTheDon linktr.ee/Dougiethedon
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