Donald Glover made an appearance at the Grammys on Sunday night as Childish Gambino performing “Terrified“ and was also honored with a Grammy Award for Best Traditional R&B Performance for his hit “Redbone.” Despite all of this, Glover once again said he will retire his Childish Gambino moniker.
“I’m really appreciative of this [award] and I’m making another project right now, just, you know, to make,” he said when asked about the retirement plans by Variety. “But I like endings and I think they’re important to progress. I think like, if a lot of things had death clauses in them, we wouldn’t have a lot of problems in the world, to be honest. So I think endings are good because they force things to get better.”
Before he says goodbye to Childish Gambino, Glover will reissue Gambino’s first EP, 2011’s five-songs release which contains his breakthrough song “Freaks and Geeks.”
Childish Gambino’s third studio album titled Awaken, My Love! was released in December 2016, and represents a departure from the hip-hop style which was predominant on the previous two releases. On this album, the majority of the songs are sung rather than rapped and are influenced by psychedelic soul, funk, and R&B sound. Awaken, My Love! ended up receiving positive reviews from the critics who described it as “colourful, brilliantly messy, and a fully committed hodge-podge of psych and spacecake croons”. The album debuted at number five on the US Billboard 200, becoming Glover’s highest charting one to date.
Donald Glover intends to focus more on his acting career, which has been on the rise in these past few years. Despite creating, writing and starring in Golden Globes and Emmy award-winning drama Atlanta, Glover also starred in Spider-Man: Homecoming as Aaron Davis and is set to portray a young version of Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story and Simba in Disney’s Live Action version of The Lion King.
