“I love being the most unknown known person,” Jon Bellion once triumphantly stated on the Spotify Under Cover podcast, sharing a piece of advice he’s gotten from Andrew Wyatt and Mark Ronson that “it’s okay to be mega-successful and not famous, because if you’re about the music, then your product will sell itself.”

It should hardly come as a surprise that LA based singer/songwriter ADN (real name Adien) Lewis lists Jon Bellion as one of his biggest influences, because it seems that the R&B crooner took a page straight from Bellion’s book. Sharing the same age with his idol as well, until recently ADN was one of the industry’s best kept secrets after having written, produced and featured on songs with well-known artists already for over a decade and building an impressive track record all while managing to stay out of the limelight. But like many of the greats before him, ADN wasn’t meant to stay hidden forever; always striving to innovate and pushing the limits of R&B, electronic and pop music, it was only a matter of time before the young crooner would become an artist in his own right, lending his sultry vocals to genre-bending pop music and blending infectious hooks and experimental sounds with intricate melodies and thoughtful lyrics.

Growing up in the DMV (short for DC Maryland Virginia metropolitan area), Adien soon moved to the bay area to attend college in San Francisco where he studied CGI. It was during this period that life tested him seriously for the first time: his mother got diagnosed with a rare form of throat cancer and he vowed that he would give his all to make her proud and give her the best life possible. Soon he started posting self-recorded and produced covers on YouTube, slowly gaining traction and attention from fans and industry heavyweights alike, one who would eventually become his life-long mentor and manager: Curtis “Richa” Richardson, a well-known songwriter and producer who worked with artists such as J-Lo, Rihanna and David Guetta.

But the road to success is hardly ever straight and Adien’s journey is no different: he moved to LA to pursue his musical dreams but soon he would end up struggling to pay rent, commuting for hours a day and suffering from depression and anxiety, not knowing where he would get his next meal from. It was around this time that his mother told him that her only wish for him was to be happy and live his life to the fullest, doing what he loves to do most, and that she didn’t want to pass seeing him stuck in a dead-end job. But God sometimes works in mysterious ways. With his brand new manager in his corner, Adien now had access to a studio and a gateway into the industry and his rise to the top can best be described as meteoric: in a matter of years he started working with Brian Kennedy (the executive producer for artists such as Chris Brown and Rihanna), collaborated with multiple international DJs such as Lemarroy, Luca Testa and Adrenalize while amassing millions of streams in the process, scored global hit records with K-Pop acts such as BTS (where he worked on their multiplatinum album “Inner Child”), Taemin (penning his smash “Move”), SHINEE, GOT7, KEY, Jackson Wang to name a few and sold over ten million records globally. What is more, his mother’s cancer pretty much went into remission and she was healed, a kind of divine blessing that he could only ever dream of.