Apollo reenters orbit St. Johns musician prepares to release new EP

A decade ago, City Pulse profiled a 17-year-old rapper named Logan Brown, aka Apollo, ahead of his first headline performance at The Loft in Lansing. The St. Johns High School junior had garnered more than 13,000 listens to his track “I Lied” on SoundCloud and was gearing up to release his second mixtape.

Since then, Apollo’s career has had its ups and downs, from releasing a hefty catalog of songs that’s reached over 80 million streams across platforms, including one track that’s approaching RIAA gold certification, to taking a semi-hiatus from music following the pandemic.

Now 27, Apollo is staging a comeback, preparing to drop a new EP on his own label, Midwest Kids Collective. The first single, “Logan,” is available on streaming services.

In 2018, Apollo signed to a local independent record label, The Specktators Collective. He dropped several singles and an LP, “I Don’t Wanna Go Outside.” His biggest songs to date, “Okay” (8.5 million streams on Spotify) and “Elephants” (28.75 million streams on Spotify), were released during his two years with the label.

Then the pandemic hit. Apollo was supposed to go on tour, but it was canceled. The label dissolved. After that, things “kind of just dissipated,” he said.

“I took a little hiatus from releasing music. I was dropping one song a year,” he said.

That five-year period of few-and-far-between releases inspired the concept of his new EP, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

“I would come out and drop a song, and fans would get really excited, and then I would leave,” he said. “So, this is me kind of calling out that I’m not doing that anymore, I’m no longer ‘the boy who cried wolf.’ This is a reintroduction to me as a person and as an artist, and it’s a call out of myself, you know, keeping myself accountable for what I’ve done in the past.”

Throughout the years, Apollo’s music has evolved alongside his music tastes. He takes influence from a range of artists, including Drake, mike., Jeremy Zucker, Quinn XCII, Goody Grace, Machine Gun Kelly and Microwave.

“I love all types of music. Like, my favorite kind of music is bedroom pop and indie and folk music, and I just want to bridge that alternative music and hip-hop together,” he said. “Before, I was using YouTube, typing in, like, ‘Drake-type beat’ or whatever it was. The music I’m making now is all curated by my producers that I’ve been working with the last couple years. We’re using live instruments; we’re trying to create a song, you know?”

The last time Apollo spoke with City Pulse, he said he dreamt of getting “out of the cold in Michigan.” A decade later, he can’t imagine calling anywhere else home.

“I’ve done a lot of traveling. I’ve been to, like, 38 states. I’ve toured, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, and you know what? I love Michigan,” he said. “I was actually planning on moving (to LA), until they had the fires. I took that as a sign from the universe or something. And the whole brand that we’re trying to start is the Midwest Kids. I’ve had this realization, after traveling this much, that Michigan is my favorite state, and every other place is kind of overrated to me.”