CV’s Tyler Coolidge Nominated for a Grammy

Musician and producer Tyler Coolidge, raised in Castro Valley, just received a Grammy nomination.

Castro Valley-raised musician Tyler Coolidge (he uses all lower-case tyler coolidge professionally) was thrilled recently to be nominated for a Grammy Award for his work as a producer on “Your Power” by Lecrae & Tasha Cobbs Leonard. It was his first nomination and his first work with those artists.

The category is Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance or Song. The Grammy Awards will be held on February 4. 

Tyler has only been producing music for about two years but has been recording his own music in rap, hip-hop, and rhythm & blues (R&B) for over a decade.

If his name isn’t totally familiar, play or just look at a copy of the video game NBA 2K22. His song “Slow Burner” is on the soundtrack and has been listened to millions of times on YouTube, as well as whenever anyone plays the game, a big seller.

Coolidge started off not paying much attention to music, and when he did in his early years at Castro Valley High School, it was very different from his parents’ musical taste for bands like Aerosmith and AC/DC. 

“I started really listening to music as Drake’s career was taking off, and I liked how he approached songwriting. He did about half rap, half R&B,” he said. “And I really liked Kanye (West) as well.”

But he got into poetry before he got deeply into music, reading it for inspiration, doing some poetry slams (competitive public readings), and then writing raps. At some point, though, Coolidge says, “music was the only thing that felt right.” 

While he lived a life full of poetry and music at Castro Valley (Class of 2011), he never took a music class. When he went to Cal State East Bay, he majored in English rather than music.

“But I really enjoyed going, and I found that it was creative writing classes that really helped me in writing music,” he said. 

Coolidge said he usually started out with a beat, which could be from almost any style of music, before adding words and music.

“About half the time it ends up as a rap, and the other half the time as a song,” he said. “With ‘Your Power,’ I was asked to work with the artists and a group of people, and I sent them some beats to work with. It ended up a Grammy-nominated song.”

He said he hasn’t worked that much in the field of Christian music himself but was happy to provide material to artists Lecrae and Tasha Cobbs Leonard, who had.

So how did he get from a Castro Valley High music lover to being a professional musician nominated for a Grammy? Coolidge said every experience and decision he made led him along that path to today.

“Even my non-hit songs somebody heard on some streaming service. And maybe they told someone else who might be in music. Or maybe they were involved in music themselves, maybe even well-known, and they remember the name when a project comes up they’d like to work with me on,” he said.

“One of the producers of the Grammy-nominated song called me because he’d liked my album ‘Moonside’ in 2021,” Coolidge said. 

He cut back on doing live shows when the pandemic hit, though he’d appeared live in San Francisco, Oakland, and Castro Valley by then.

“Touring is good, but one can do much of your music from home these days,” he said. “But I’m getting the itch to go back to live performing soon.”

Coolidge currently works out of San Diego but considers the Bay Area home and would like to return soon. Meanwhile, he said, he’s finishing up several projects as a producer. 

His longer-term goal is to become financially successful enough as a musician to support his family, but then go on to give back to Bay Area Communities and especially Castro Valley.

He thanks his parents, Craig and Kim, his sister Jill, and his “loving, wonderful girlfriend Ashley” for their roles in his success so far and says he got much of his inspiration and encouragement from Castro Valley itself, though.

“There are lots of good people, good energy, and good friends, and very little bad energy there,” he said. “When you go to Castro Valley, there’s a charmingness to it. It’s a good energy incubator.”