THE BROTHERS BEHIND FALL’S HOT SONG
ITmay be fall, but it still sounds like summer on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. R. City’s chirpy, dancehall-tinged hit “Locked Away,” featuring Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, has given the Top 10 a sunny, feel-good factor. (It’s at No. 6 this week.)
The R. City duo, Theron and Timothy Thomas, 33 and 32, have a new album, “What Dreams Are Made Of,” out Friday. Here are three things you need to know about these two brothers from the US Virgin Islands.
The brothers’ biggest hit is inspired by their dad going to prison.
When Theron and Timothy were just babies, their father committed grand larceny and was sent to prison for five years. “Our mother kept faith in him, visited him in jail, and they’re still together today after 38 years,” says Timothy.
They came from dirt-poor beginnings.
Growing up in the projects on St. Thomas, Theron and Timothy had little in the way of creature comforts. “We had to tie our front door with a rope, the bathroom was outside with no light, and our father got our first bed from a dumpster,” says Theron. When the duo signed a music publishing deal in the mid-2000s, they were able to move their parents to a house in Atlanta.
You’ve heard more R. City songs than you think.
Although “Locked Away” is their first US hit, the Thomas brothers already have years of success behind them, as co-writers for “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus, “Bow Down/I Been On” by Beyoncé and Rihanna’s “Pour It Up.” “She is our Caribbean sister from another mister,” says Theron of the Barbadian star. “Every time we see each other, we always talk about how we can’t believe we made it so far in the music business.”