It’s an uncommonly warm Friday night in Providence, and fans are slowly filing into AS220, a local nonprofit venue, for a night of rap and companionship with Osiris and Friends.
Inside the room, folding chairs are arranged carefully around the merch stand, where Osiris sits selling home-printed posters and custom stickers tagged “pay what you can.” As the room begins to fill and the laughter gets louder, the crowd congregates around a brown paper sheet plastered to a pillar in the center of the room, scribbling their answers to the prompt of the night: “What feels like home to you?”
The lights dim. Osiris and his partner Mick Banks climb to the front. The rustling whispers die down. All eyes are on the stage.
“Before we get started, I have one request,” Osiris announces. “Turn to your left. Say hello, how are you? Turn to your right. Learn a new name.”
***
When I first met Osiris (Osiris Russell-Delano) and Mick Banks (Jesse McCormick-Evans) it was in a very different setting. Instead of standing in front of lime-green spotlights and protruding speakers, we sat tucked between a pot of meatballs bubbling on the stove, a communal chore list hanging in front of us, and a plastic pull-up bar dangling above our heads.
As I talked to them in the bustling kitchen—squeezing in as many questions as I could between beeping timers and five additional roommates passing through—I learned that Osiris and Mick Banks started their musical journeys in opposite places: one classically trained, one homegrown; one in Queens, one in Cambridge. But despite all these differences, the two artists shared one thing in common: a messy independence.
“My earliest memories were with my dad, in my grandma’s house, where he was living at the time, in East Elmhurst,” Osiris told me. “I’d play the keys, not knowing what I was doing. He didn't get me any actual classes or anything, but I was cooking on that, and then eventually I went to Guitar Center, got my first bass, and started writing songs in kindergarten.”
For Mick Banks there was some technical training, but it wouldn’t last long: “When I was really little, probably four or five, my parents put me in piano lessons,” he said. “And I remember I would always have just scales [that were] classically oriented. And every week I would instead just make up my own stuff and come in with songs that I made.”
Until, one day, at age six, he officially dropped the charade. The young Mick Banks put his tiny foot down and told his parents, “No, I like making songs.”
By the first grade, both boys had a feel for the pen and a desire to strike their own path.
12 years later, that passion in their palms subsided, but it never died down entirely. In the fall of 2021, Osiris and Mick Banks arrived at Brown University as scientists: Osiris planning to major in political science, and Mick Banks in public health. But before long, the facade began to crack. Science wasn’t who they were, and the pen was still calling.
Osiris, in pursuit of law school, tried to ignore the regret of abandoning his passion and hoped the feeling would pass. But the longer it went unacknowledged, the more the regrets began to eat away at him. “It was one of the worst, most turbulent times of my life,” he told me, as he pushed around the meatballs in his pan. “I wasn’t living up to myself, or my dreams.”
Mick Banks remembers the time well. After meeting Osiris in MUSC 1240R: Rap as Storytelling their first semester at Brown, the two quickly hit it off, becoming best friends and eventually roommates. In the restless nights they spent together, the two finally reached their reckoning.
“I remember we were having these big talks about whether we go the suits route or the artist route,” Mick Banks said, recalling a time when it felt like they’d reached a stalemate. But one night, the fever broke. Osiris couldn’t take it anymore, and the dreams he had tried so hard to repress suddenly broke out.
“One night,” Mick Banks recalled, “I had woken up and I was just chilling there, and this dude [Osiris] shoots up in bed, across the room, and he’s sleep talking. He’s like, ‘Harry! Meghan! A suit won't change anything. It never will!’” (Osiris was quick to clarify he was watching Meghan Markle’s dramedy Suits at the time.)
After that, everything changed. The two dropped the act, switched their majors, and decided to pursue music full-time, or, as Osiris put it, they finally went “all in.” The decision was hard, and the transition at times was grueling, but according to Osiris, the driving force was simple:
“Why would I waste the years of my life when I have the most freedom being unfree?”
***
These days, Mick Banks no longer jerks awake to the grating call of an alarm clock; instead, he starts his days with the sunrise—sometimes. For some artists, going “all in” might mean Google Calendars overflowing with appointments, writing with militaristic precision, and relying on rigid rituals, but Osiris and Mick Banks don’t create that way. To them, the creative process means freedom; it’s messy, sporadic, and impossible to wrangle, and that’s exactly how they like it.
When I asked Mick Banks if his sunrise runs helped him find a creative ritual of his own, he promptly rejected that theory. “I would like to say it does, but honestly, I don't think so,” he said. “I think that the best people who do this for a living have learned to create and be healthy. But for me, it'll be a week where I'm just living crazy, but the creativity is just coming. And that goes back to the big challenge of this whole thing,” he added. “There’s no one telling you what to do. There's no structure. It's all in your hands.”
At times that independence gets lonely, but when the inspiration hits, the words come in bursts. The work becomes all the company he needs. “If I'm locked in, I'll be locked in for three days straight,” Mick Banks said. “I won’t eat, exercise, shower; I'm just straight making music. I don't feel good, but I feel fulfilled.”
***
“I would describe it more, but I’m telling the story loosely,” Osiris raps on “Feels Like Home,” a single from his latest project that he performs for his finale. As a listener, perhaps there is no better way to describe their project. With all its loose structure, the work of Osiris and Mick Banks is also an intense exercise in storytelling.
“I grew up with a lot of books and writing, and then also a lot of music, both from my mom and my dad,” Osiris told me. “I think I found rap as the perfect medium to express both of them. And so I think for me, with my art, a lot of it does feel very literary.”
And he certainly has the literary bonafides to back it up. His grandmother, whom he often lived with, was an English professor; his mom is an avid reader; and, at one point in our conversation, Osiris casually brought up novelist Toni Morrison’s four-hour daily writing practice as if it were common knowledge.
Mick Banks too comes from a house of storytelling. Growing up, his mother was a screenwriter who took great care with his cinematic education, but while she was focused on the screen, he was enraptured by the music.
“I would just listen to movie scores, casually,” he said. “And I think that was super formative in terms of how I think about music. My music is very visual to me. I always have a visual world happening when I'm making music.”
In the tiny room at AS220, it was clear that what was once a private project had already become something bigger—it was, as Mick Banks put it, an entire world, built around their music. Whether you’re jumping up and down with them in front of the stage, sitting in their buzzing house of seven, or squeezing between legs and elbows on the floor at one of their listening parties, these artists are always rebuilding that house of storytelling, along with the family inside it.
“For me, all of it is about building community,” Osiris said. “My mission is helping people learn more about themselves because it helps me learn about myself.”
Even when they’re off-duty, this creaky old house puts the two artists right back where it all started. Every communal pot of massive meatballs shared lovingly between sessions is a steaming hot reminder that, even while he may tinker alone, Osiris first “fell in love with rap in a room with a bunch of my friends.”
The heart of the rappers’ craft will always be introspection. But when Osiris and Mick Banks put their creations out into the world, their music suddenly grows a lot more vast. It turns into a house littered with drumsets, keyboards, and an upright bass in the living room; it turns into a shoe rack overflowing with too many pairs to count; it turns into potluck dinners, stirred throughout an interview. It’s a house where everyone creates together.
