Marco Restrepo was born in
Marietta, Georgia, and raised in
Atlanta,
Georgia. He grew up listening to
Jackie Wilson, other
Motown acts and commercial radio. During high school he adopted the name A.Tone Da Priest and began rapping with friend Sean Spellz in a group called 1Up. He began self-producing material in 2006 and eventually put out his first mixtape online titled
Still A Rapper Pt. 1. While a senior at
Chamblee Charter High School in 2007, a recommendation from hip hop production team
J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, landed him an internship at a premier Atlanta recording studio. There he learned how to record and engineer and began to take his craft more seriously.
The Address EP (2011),
Stand By My Words (2011),
The Fi King (2012),
The Fi King and
October Sky would both prove to be guitar heavy albums. In late 2014/early 2015, Restrepo released two albums,
1989 (2014) and
Lonely Hearts Club (2015). He took on the task of playing all of the instruments featured on the projects. He was credited with guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and percussion. Although general consensus of his new material was positive and even at times boastful of his genius and originality, he was criticized for his "garage band sound" which some critics felt held him back from his full potential. In the summer of 2015, he announced that two LP's titled
Promised Land and
Change were in the works. Restrepo has long been a content creator on YouTube for his material and has gained well over a million views cumulatively across his many videos and channels. His first national break occurred in 2014 when his song "Get Up & Go" from his
Stand By My Words album was featured on a short lived MTV series called
Scrubbing In (TV series) and again in 2015 on a reality show about rapper
Ja Rule's family life called
Follow the Rules. ==Style==