Michael Robinson, best known as R&B singer-songwriter Tatum the Dreamer, didn’t settle on his stage name lightly. “I had a couple of different names I went through trying to figure out who I was, but once I found out the meaning of Tatum, I knew that was going to stick,” says Robinson, who hails from Chicago but moved to Las Vegas at age 6. “It means ‘to bring joy,’ and that’s what I want to do, even if I make sad music. It brings joy, because you heal.”
Dreams have always fascinated the 25-year-old musician. And since he was 3 years old, singing on the family’s karaoke machine, he’s always had big ones.
Robinson originally had a blueprint for how his ascent would go: He’d break into the music industry by way of his honeyed baritone, which falls somewhere between Take Care’s Drake and Channel Orange’s Frank Ocean, then someone else would pen the songs. Fate had other plans.
“I had one meeting with a vocal coach named Fate,” Robinson remembers. “He told me, ‘I think I see a writer in you. I need you to explore that.’ I went home, and within a week, I was writing so many songs … the love that I found for it was crazy.”
The floodgates had been opened, and Robinson, who cites Rihanna, Kehlani, Mariah the Scientist and Oscar-nominated film Everything Everywhere All at Once as some of his biggest inspirations, had every intention of channeling those innermost thoughts into the sensitive persona of Tatum the Dreamer. When the singer sat down to record his December album Besties, for Life!, he already had more than 150 songs written.
The 13-song LP debuts as an opus of heartbreak, love, lifelong bonds and beauty. Many tracks, riddled with stories of ex-lovers and friends—many still in his life—cut to the quick of Robinson’s emotions in poignant ways. But rather than resist that pain, he wades into it.
“It won’t leave my head/That you want her instead,” he sings on album opener, “Adelphia.”
“I looked the devil in his eye/He told me not to cry,” he laments on “Issues.” “You did not see the way he looked at me/It never dies.”
Some cuts also connect to earlier works, such as the lovelorn “To Beloved” and “Enough” off his 2021 Wasteland EP. But as cathartic as it might be to write about relationships, Robinson says some of his favorite tracks don’t touch the topic at all.
“Songs like ‘Sweet Thing’ are more so for me,” he says. “Those are letters to myself to remember who I am and what I’m doing everything for.”
Robinson confronted a lot of demons on Besties, but the next step was confronting them in real life, so, the singer says, he mustered up the courage to reach out to the people he wrote his songs about.
“It’s always scary, but I always try my best to show them before it comes out. I don’t want them to be blindsided,” he says, adding that sometimes, those conversations have helped repair what was originally so broken.
These days, Robinson says, he’s put a pin in love to prioritize work. But when looking back on the stories, people and pain that inspired Besties, he sees nothing but the best.
“I’m really proud of myself,” he says, “because I turned a lot of that wildness into one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever created.”
Tatum the Dreamer linktr.ee/tatumthedreamer
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