Donald Glover is retiring Childish Gambino

By Lisa Respers France, CNN

(CNN) — This is America, which means Donald Glover has choices.

And the actor and writer has made one in deciding to retire his musical alter ego, Childish Gambino.

“It’s not fulfilling,” he told the New York Times in a recent interview. “I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.”

The Grammy-award winner said he’s doing it after the release of his sixth album, “Bando Stone & the New World,” scheduled for Friday.

Not that his music career has come easy.

Glover has been open in the past about trying to find his tribe in both comedy and music. Recently, while presenting at the BET Awards, he noted that he has the same amount of BET Awards – one- as singer, Sam Smith, who is white.

Glover talked to the New York Times about clashing over the marking and promotion of his music with the then head of the label that put out his first three albums.

“I used to get so mad at what he was doing that I would have stress dreams where I went into his record company with a bat and just bashed all the windows,” Glover said.

His single “Redbone” burst on the scene after his critically acclaim series “Atlanta” debuted in 2016 and he won his first Grammy. Two years later, his song “This Is America” became a protest anthem and won him multiple Grammys, including song and record of the year.

Around that same time, Glover both lost his father and welcomed his second child, something that made him more reflective.

“I’m not 25 anymore, standing in front of a boulder like, ‘This has to move,’” he said. “You give what you can, but there’s beauty everywhere in every moment. You don’t have to build it. You don’t have to search for it.”

With so many projects, including acting and his production company, Glover said he doesn’t have the time to put in the work to make music up to his standards.

He does have some thoughts, however, on defining success for what could be his final Gambino album.

“Success to me is, honestly, being able to put out a wide-scale album that I would listen to,” he said. “For this album, I really wanted to be able to play big rooms and have big, anthemic songs that fill those rooms, so that people feel a sense of togetherness.”

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