Meet the Most Productive Musician of 2025

For much of 2025, my daily morning routine involved checking for the latest post from Cure for Paranoia, aka the 32-year-old Dallas rapper and preschool teacher Cameron McCloud. While his no-days-off strategy of uploading a new rap verse every 24 hours or so might sound like the kind of meme scheme that’s engineered to gain viral popularity, for McCloud, it’s a personal project to cope with the horror that is current U.S. politics while leveling up his considerable rap skills. In his “dailies,” as he calls them, he captures the churning news cycle with acerbic wit, frankness, and a charisma that seems to be an extension of how much he cares, as well as incorporating lyrics about his personal mental health struggles and the loss of his mother. (It’s also the kind of thing that wouldn’t work if his verses, set to beats ranging from Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” to Cilla Black’s “Surprise Surprise,” weren’t absolutely fire.) As an example, here’s his verse from today, December 29: 

McCloud and I spoke in early December, when he was embroiled in a bit of internet controversy: He had recorded a video with the rising Democratic Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett about her run for Senate, which some of McCloud’s staunchly progressive viewers disliked because Crockett voted for an aid package that included money for Israel’s defense in April; all year, McCloud has been consistently and vocally supportive of the Palestinian cause. If there was any question that McCloud didn’t write his verses brand new every day, there he was, responding to what was going down in his comment section at that moment—while also preparing for Cure for Paranoia’s third official release, the Work of A.R.T. EP, and coming off a truly rousing On the Radar performance of his song “The Artshow.”

This year, McCloud’s raps have been a consistently grounding force—art that has tangibly helped me get through the political climate of this shitty-ass year—that have also made me laugh at the insanity of it all (those punchlines, whew!). “You literally called me at the perfect time,” he said when he picked up the phone. “I just finished recording my verse.” 

It’s kind of crazy that you’ve posted a song every day for a year. How are you doing this? What is your process?

Cameron McCloud: Um, stress. [laughs] Honestly, what’s been great about it is that I’m really just getting an outlet to talk about things that I’m going through every single day anyway. And luckily, I have a lot of fucked up material to work with, in light of the state of the world. I could do a whole ’nother year next year if I wanted to. 

The text is rich. 

I could open my Instagram right now and the first thing that would pop up would probably be a news story about something that just happened, so I will refresh halfway through writing my verse just in case something else stupid happened in the 30 minutes that I was writing. But I think the most difficult part of the whole process would be just figuring out what beat I’m going to rap to. I want everything to be super intentional and for people to be able to catch the Easter eggs of like, “Oh, he chose this beat because of that.”

How do you pick the beats? Do you have them in mind in advance?

No, literally it’s based on whatever happens throughout the daily experience. Like yesterday, I used DMX’s “Party Up (Up in Here)” because we played this Recording Academy party, and I didn’t get home until like 9:45 to even start working on the verse to have it up before midnight. But at the Grammy party, there was a part where we were all in a dance circle around my producers’ two babies; they were having a dance battle with each other in the circle, and it was just the cutest thing in the world. And the song that they were like going off the hardest to was “Up in Here.” So as that was happening in the background, I thought, OK, I can use this one whenever I get home. It also is appropriate because people are making me lose my mind up in here. 

With today’s verse, the lyrics came first. I just saw Wicked 2 and, just in light of the pushback that I’m getting for my support of Jasmine Crockett, it’s making me feel like what Elphaba was talking about on that little broom, how she was like “no good deed.” So those are the first bars of tonight’s verse, and I just found a Kendrick Lamar beat that was sinister enough for me to put this over it.

I have to say, I can’t believe you almost got through a year without internet controversy.

Well, I had it in the first month, but back then this project wasn’t popping enough for people to notice. I expect controversy at this point because one thing I’ve learned this year is you cannot get 10,000 followers overnight without it. The first time it happened was in February, which seems crazy that it was even in the same year, but whenever we did our Tiny Desk audition, I had a line where I say, “If you’re homophobic but it stings to watch me/I’m Black and I’m bi and I’m better as well/My boyfriend is white but he pretty himself.” And people were in an uproar; it turned into “Oh, so you hate yourself and you hate your race” in comments on my verses like every day. But the rest of that song is like, “I just started liking myself.” Even now, there are people who will listen to a couple lines and just go to the comments.

How did the cameo with Rep. Jasmine Crockett happen?

She followed me back in September and has been sharing the dailies for months now. This past weekend, she reached out to me on Instagram and was like, “Hey are you going to be in town on Monday?” And I responded, “I will now.” She was like, “I haven’t announced it yet, but I am running for Senate and I would like for you to write your daily about this and present it at the event when I announce it.” That was just crazy in itself, because people think I write these in advance and batch them up a week at a time and then put them out. And I always respond with, “That would be so smart, but I don’t.” Especially right now, I want to be so topical and update people daily about stuff. 

So coming back from Houston the day of the event I literally had my boyfriend drive so I could write my verse in the car. We got home to Dallas 30 minutes before the event. I changed real quick, grabbed my recording equipment, and went to the church where the event was. They put me in this little closet somewhere so that I could record my verse, and then I got the verse to the sound guy 30 minutes before I was supposed to go up there, and then I went and did it. Afterwards, I was with her while she was shaking babies and kissing hands, and I was like, “Yo, are you down to be in today’s video?” And without even a second thought, she was like, “Yeah, I can’t spit bars, but what do you need me to do?” 

When you first started this at the beginning of the year, what was the motivating factor? 

The day after Trump got elected, I posted a post on my story and was like, Y’all screenshot this and hold me accountable, but in 2025, I’m gonna put everything I can into music because it’s the only thing that’s gonna get me out of here. That’s when I started thinking, What needs to happen next year to put me in a different position? What variables can I control? There was a lot that I wanted, but the only variable that I could control was myself. It wasn’t about what would happen throughout this year; it was mainly centered on what I would become—what the me on the other side of this year looked like.

What do you think you’ve learned? 

I’ve learned that I’m capable of anything. I’ve learned that I am in charge of my career, I am in charge of my trajectory, and nobody else is. I’ve learned one of the most powerful spells in the world, and the spell is: “No.” It’s just so powerful. And not even explaining my “no”s. My no is no, my yes is yes, and I haven’t steered myself wrong once this year by just trusting in my gut and my intuition and not doing shit that I didn’t want to do.

I mean, I even had people around me in my ear being like, “You shouldn’t do the politics thing.” But that’s changed the trajectory of my career even more. The biggest thing I’ve learned this year is to trust myself.

What are you going to do when this year is done and your dailies are fulfilled? It seems like you’ll have a lot of free brain space.  

I don’t know, honestly. I’ll decide on January 1st if I even stop. You know those stories of people who get out of jail and don’t know how to acclimate back to society? I don’t know if, on January 1st, I can not record something about what’s going on in my life.

It also seems like you have a lot of devoted fans who are gonna be like, “How do I process the news?” Because it’s artistically really impressive, but as a viewer it’s also super cathartic. 

In its inception, Cure for Paranoia was supposed to be music that was therapeutic for other people as well, a way for people to process things, and I think that I’m literally curing paranoia by making people hear the way I feel about what’s going on in the world, and they’re like, “OK, so I’m not tripping.” 

There’s something so open-hearted and kind about your verses and your music. My larger question is: Why are you this guy?

Um, trauma. I was talking to Jasmine [Crockett]—I’m not even trying to flex, I was literally just trying to figure out which nice auntie was saying this to me—but literally on our phone call the first time we spoke, she was saying, “You just seem so assured of yourself, and I don’t know what it was, but I feel as though there was a lot of hell you had to go through to get to this place.” And she hit the nail on the fucking head. We’ll be on this call for two hours if I tell you about the hell I went through to get to this place. I’m so, so, so, so, so grateful for what all of that has turned me into, Lord have mercy. Even this year, I’m still in the process of dealing with the worst thing that a person can deal with in their life. I feel the same way I felt when I was 16 and I asked my coach if you can have a midlife crisis at 16. But it’s all for a reason. I hate being a testimony for people, I really truly do, but those are just the Uno cards I drew this round. We’ll see what happens when we shuffle.

Damn, you are inspiring the shit out of me.

I’ve been here, like, Wait a minute, do I need to write this down?