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EXHIBIT V - RESIDUE 3:330:00/3:33
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EXHIBIT VI - WITNESS 2:520:00/2:52
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EXHIBIT X - REMAIN 2:500:00/2:50
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SINCERELY
An Editorial on Collapse, Reconstruction, and the Composition of a Life
There are albums that document a period of someone's life.
And then there are albums that become evidence of it.
Sincerely belongs to the second category.
It is not simply a collection of songs released under the name Thaddeous. It is the recorded artifact of a period in which identity, trust, relationships, ambition, faith, and the artist's understanding of himself were forced into confrontation with one another.
To describe Sincerely merely as a hip-hop album would therefore be insufficient.
It is hip-hop, but its ambition is larger than genre.
It is autobiography expressed through composition. It is storytelling expressed through sound. It is an attempt to take experiences that were difficult to organize psychologically and give them structure musically.
Most importantly, it is not an album about having survived.
It is an album about what survival does to a person.
I. THE WORK DID NOT BEGIN WITH A REBRAND
The easiest version of the story would be to say that an artist abandoned an old identity, created a new name, and emerged with a more mature artistic direction.
That version is clean.
It is also incomplete.
The transition from Lyfe3x to Thaddeous was not simply a branding exercise. Sincerely emerged from a period of personal collapse in which the structures surrounding the artist were being questioned simultaneously.
Relationships changed.
Trust changed.
The understanding of family changed.
The understanding of loyalty changed.
And eventually, the understanding of the artist's own identity changed.
The result was not an album constructed from the outside inward.
It was constructed from the inside outward.
That distinction matters.
Because Sincerely does not sound like someone attempting to invent a persona.
It sounds like someone attempting to determine what remains after the persona has been stripped away.
II. SINCERELY AS A LETTER
The title itself provides the framework.
Sincerely.
It is the word placed at the end of a letter when the writer has finished saying what needed to be said.
It carries intimacy without demanding intimacy in return.
It does not say listen to me.
It says:
This is what I have to tell you.
That makes the album's title more than a name.
It is a compositional premise.
The record functions as correspondence between the artist and the people, relationships, memories, identities, and versions of himself that occupy its narrative.
There is an unusual vulnerability in that approach.
A conventional rap album can construct distance between performer and listener through bravado, mythology, status, aggression, humor, or spectacle.
Sincerely repeatedly moves in the opposite direction.
It asks what happens when the artist removes some of that distance.
III. THE ARTIST AS SUBJECT
Thaddeous has spent years building a catalog around observation, identity, struggle, ambition, spirituality, isolation, loyalty, and self-determination.
But Sincerely changes the position of the observer.
The artist becomes the subject.
The record is therefore less interested in presenting a perfected character than in documenting contradiction.
Strength exists beside vulnerability.
Ambition exists beside exhaustion.
Faith exists beside doubt.
Love exists beside betrayal.
Isolation exists beside the desire to be understood.
The album does not require these contradictions to resolve themselves.
Instead, it allows them to coexist.
That is one of the defining characteristics of the work.
Sincerely does not attempt to make the human experience aesthetically convenient.
It preserves the friction.
IV. FROM TRAUMA TO FORM
The significance of Sincerely is not simply that difficult experiences informed the writing.
Artists have been writing about suffering forever.
The more interesting question is:
What did the artist do with it?
The answer, in Sincerely, is composition.
Pain becomes narrative.
Memory becomes sequence.
Contradiction becomes juxtaposition.
Silence becomes space.
Repetition becomes emphasis.
And individual songs become components of a larger argument.
This is where the project begins to move beyond the conventional definition of an album.
It becomes an assembled work.
The songs are not merely individual statements placed next to one another. They participate in a larger psychological architecture.
The listener is not simply being given events.
The listener is being given the consequences of those events.
V. THE IMPORTANCE OF “LOYALTY”
Within that architecture, Loyalty carries particular conceptual weight.
The word itself appears deceptively simple.
But loyalty becomes complicated once trust has been damaged.
What does loyalty mean when the people you believed would remain beside you do not?
What does loyalty mean when remaining loyal to someone begins to require disloyalty to yourself?
What does loyalty mean when forgiveness, distance, love, resentment, and self-preservation become impossible to separate?
Those questions give the concept greater weight than a conventional song about allegiance.
Loyalty becomes part of the album's larger examination of relationships and the moral consequences of choosing who—and what—to remain committed to.
That is consistent with the larger project.
Sincerely repeatedly asks not merely what happened?
It asks:
What did what happened make me believe?
And then:
Was that belief true?
VI. THE RECORD AS A SELF-EXAMINATION
There is a temptation, when discussing autobiographical art, to treat confession as the highest form of honesty.
But confession alone is not necessarily art.
Documentation is not necessarily composition.
Sincerely becomes more interesting precisely where it moves beyond disclosure.
The work examines the narrator himself.
That creates an internal tension:
The artist is simultaneously the person telling the story, the person who experienced the story, and the person attempting to understand the person who experienced it.
That is a fundamentally different artistic position.
It resembles the process of examining one's own memories from outside oneself.
The past becomes material.
The present becomes the interpreter.
And the album becomes the space in which those two versions of the self meet.
VII. WHY THE PROJECT MATTERS WITHIN HIP-HOP
Hip-hop has always possessed an extraordinary documentary capacity.
It can preserve a neighborhood.
A relationship.
A political moment.
A death.
A childhood.
A generation.
A personal transformation.
But hip-hop is also capable of something more unusual:
It can turn autobiography into mythology without necessarily abandoning truth.
That tradition provides the cultural foundation for Sincerely.
Yet the project does not attempt to imitate the artists who came before it.
Instead, it contributes another interpretation of what a hip-hop composition can be.
The Pulitzer Prize's Music category explicitly recognizes musical composition across the spectrum of American music, and the current guidelines allow eligible recordings and collections of multiple compositions to be considered. The Pulitzer organization has also explicitly described hip-hop as part of the American musical landscape eligible for consideration.
That context matters because Sincerely was conceived not simply as a commercial release, but as a compositional work worthy of formal examination.
VIII. THE EXHIBITS
One of the most distinctive aspects of the Sincerely project has been the decision to build a body of supporting material around the album.
The exhibits do something important.
They make the creative process visible.
Instead of asking a listener or juror to encounter the finished recording without context, the project provides a framework through which the work can be studied: its construction, its ideas, its narrative relationships, its artistic intent, and the reasoning behind the composition.
This transforms the album from something merely heard into something that can also be examined.
That distinction is central to the project's ambitions.
The supporting material does not exist to convince someone that the music is important.
It exists to demonstrate how the work was constructed and what the construction means.
In that sense, the exhibits become analogous to an artist's sketches, composer's notes, manuscript pages, or archival material.
The recording is the finished architecture.
The exhibits reveal some of the architecture beneath the walls.
IX. THE PULITZER QUESTION
Sincerely was ultimately prepared for consideration in the 2027 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
That should be described carefully.
As of the current 2027 competition cycle, the Pulitzer Prize organization states that Music entries are open for compositions receiving their U.S. premiere through December 31, 2026, with submissions closing January 5, 2027 at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. The organization defines the award as recognizing distinguished musical composition by an American whose work has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year.
And there is an important distinction between entering a work for consideration and being officially designated a Pulitzer finalist or winner.
The significance of Sincerely being entered into that process therefore does not depend upon a prediction about the eventual result.
The more immediate significance is artistic.
A work that began as a deeply personal attempt to process upheaval has been organized, documented, and presented as a serious musical composition.
That is meaningful in itself.
The submission represents an assertion:
This work deserves to be heard not only as a record, but as a composition.
X. THE REBIRTH OF THADDEOUS
The emergence of Thaddeous from the Lyfe3x identity is inseparable from the story of Sincerely.
But the change is not simply:
Lyfe3x → Thaddeous.
It is more accurately:
constructed identity → examination → destruction → reconstruction.
That is why the new name carries significance beyond marketing.
The artist was no longer interested solely in maintaining continuity with everything that came before.
He was interested in determining what deserved to survive it.
Sincerely became part of that process.
It was not the soundtrack to a rebrand.
The rebrand became one of the consequences of the deeper transformation.
XI. THE ALBUM DOES NOT ASK TO BE UNDERSTOOD IMMEDIATELY
There is another quality worth preserving in Sincerely:
It does not necessarily reward a single listen.
Its subject matter is cumulative.
Individual moments acquire meaning through context.
A lyric can mean something different after the listener understands what surrounds it.
A song can function differently when considered as an isolated track versus a component of the entire work.
That is characteristic of albums conceived as bodies of work rather than collections of singles.
The listener is being asked to do something increasingly rare in contemporary music:
stay.
Stay long enough for the contradictions to become visible.
Stay long enough for the narrative to develop.
Stay long enough for the person behind the voice to become more complicated than the first impression.
XII. SINCERELY IS NOT A CLEAN STORY
Perhaps that is ultimately the most important thing about this album.
There is no perfectly resolved ending.
There is no convenient moral.
There is no transformation that erases what came before.
There is only the recognition that a person can be changed by what happens to them without allowing what happened to become the entirety of who they are.
That is where the album's title becomes most powerful.
Sincerely is not a declaration that everything is okay.
It is not a declaration that everything has been forgiven.
It is not even a declaration that every question has been answered.
It is an acknowledgment.
A signature.
A closing of the letter.
A willingness to put the truth—or at least the artist's most honest attempt at understanding it—into the hands of another person.
Sincerely.
XIII. THE PERMANENCE OF THE RECORD
Every album eventually becomes historical material.
The question is what survives.
Streams become statistics.
Promotional campaigns disappear.
Social media posts become buried.
Algorithms change.
Platforms change.
Names change.
But the composition remains.
That is ultimately what makes Sincerely important to its creator.
It creates a fixed artifact from a period that was anything but fixed.
The circumstances could change.
The artist could change.
The public could interpret the work differently.
But the recording would remain as evidence that, at a particular point in time, this was the truth the artist was capable of putting into music.
That is the permanence of composition.
EPILOGUE
A Letter Left Open
Sincerely began in circumstances that could have produced silence.
Instead, they produced music.
Not perfect music.
Not painless music.
Not music designed to make the past easier to remember.
Music designed to make the past legible.
That may ultimately be the defining achievement of the project.
Thaddeous did not attempt to erase the person who existed before him.
He examined him.
He questioned him.
He carried parts of him forward.
And he left other parts behind.
Sincerely is the document of that process.
It is a record of collapse without making collapse the final destination.
A record of betrayal without allowing betrayal to become the entire identity.
A record of isolation that nevertheless reaches outward.
A record of reconstruction.
And perhaps most importantly, a record that refuses to pretend reconstruction is the same thing as returning to who you were before.
You cannot return.
You can only become.
And when the music finally ends, the letter remains.
Sincerely,
**Thaddeous.**
LISTEN TO SINCERELY, BELOW