Brenton Allen is known as a student at UCLA and a former Bruin baseball player who helped his team reach the College World Series in 2013, but he is emerging as an up-and-coming musician.
Allen, a fourth-year history student, left UCLA after three years of collegiate baseball to pursue a career in professional baseball. After playing for a little more than half a season with the Washington Nationals, he decided to leave baseball to return to school to finish his degree.
Allen said his drive to keep making and releasing music stemmed from his background in baseball. He said baseball and music go hand in hand: Determination, ambition and persistence are needed to excel and continue at both crafts.
At the urging of a few friends for a few years, Allen decided to write and release a hip-hop single titled “Make a Move,” which features his longtime friend and singer Bryan Fischer. The track was produced by SC, who created the beats and sings in a verse.
“Make a Move” was released Sunday on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, SoundCloud and Amazon.
The song centers on a fading relationship – it details a man who thinks that a woman is unworthy of his time because she has wronged him in the past. The woman still wants the relationship to work out, but the man no longer sees their potential or any growth happening.
SC sings about the troubled relationship through Allen’s lyrics: “This girl can’t get enough, no, this girl can’t get enough/ … Give me that look like, ‘You gonna make a move?'”
Allen said “Make a Move” was inspired by how he dealt with past relationships and issues in his life. He said it is meant to connect with other people who have gone through similar relationship experiences.
He also said he hopes that people who listen to the song will find his words relatable and empathize with the relationship portrayed in the song.
Allen said he has connected emotions to songwriting since he started writing music at the age of 12. After recording his first song at 17 years old, he took a three-year hiatus from music to focus on other activities before deciding to return to his music again this year.
Allen wrote the majority of “Make a Move” in a couple of days a few months ago, but had thought of the first verse about the relationship years ago, a memory he said he had held onto and drew inspiration from for the rest of the song.
Allen decided to record the song after Fischer gave him the final push he needed.
Fischer convinced Allen to go to his studio in Sherman Oaks and record. At the studio, Fischer said he brought his own verse and Allen’s lyrics to complete “Make a Move.”
Kyle Fischer, Bryan Fischer’s brother who helped engineer the track, said he saw potential success in the song despite Allen’s initial hesitance to record.
“What some people don’t understand maybe is that it takes a lot of confidence for you to be willing to make music and present it to people around you,” Allen said. “For those three years, I had lost confidence in myself. I lost confidence in my music, and when I stopped recording, I just didn’t feel like I had any potential in it.”
After he kept receiving questions from his friends about his music during his three years off, Allen got the encouragement he needed from Bryan Fischer and decided to get back into music to see what he could write and record.
The result was “Make a Move,” the first single of an EP he plans to release in November.
Despite his busy schedule, Allen said he isn’t new to balancing music, school and sports. He draws inspiration from his idol, actor and TV writer Donald Glover – also known as the musician Childish Gambino – who achieves and balances the multiple paths that Allen aspires to follow.
“I enjoy making hip-hop. I just enjoy the whole overall feeling of getting better in it, and I think it’s also relatable to baseball by the ambition behind it,” Allen said. “For music, it’s all about enjoying it.”