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Early Hours (2051)

Early Hours was the self-released debut LP of Raffie Cruz, issued in 2051 when he was sixteen. A six-track acoustic project that crystallized the intimate, singer-songwriter aesthetic he had been developing through years of his YouTube channel “R.C. Sessions,” it established Raffie as an artist in his own right years before his 2057 studio debut ‘’Inheritance’‘.

Overview

‘’Early Hours’’ was a short, voice-forward record—six tracks, minimal production, acoustic at its core. It drew on both sides of Raffie’s heritage—soul, reggae, jazz, Latin rhythms—but filtered everything through a stripped-back intimacy that owed nothing to his father Ezra Cruz’s explosive energy or his godfather Charlie Rivera’s orchestral ambition. The title held several meanings at once: the late-night and early-morning recording sessions of a teenager, the early hours of a career still taking shape, and the quiet liminal space before the world fully sees an artist.

Creation and Recording

Raffie made ‘’Early Hours’’ at sixteen, in 2051, as the natural extension of “R.C. Sessions,” the YouTube channel he had launched at eleven in 2046. Years of casual bedroom recordings had taught him what he wanted his music to sound like: voice and instrument forward, warm, close-mic’d, unhurried. He produced the LP himself, keeping the project intimate rather than reaching for outside polish.

The same year, he launched a second channel, “Cruzing with Raffie,” a personal vlog separate from his music work—signaling a teenager increasingly willing to be seen, on his own schedule.

Production and Sound

The production was deliberately minimal, built around voice and a single accompanying instrument, most often piano. Raffie worked in the opposite direction from artists who compensate for developing confidence with elaborate arrangement: he removed everything that could distract from the voice and what it was saying. The result was a record that sounded like a room with one person in it.

Track Listing

‘’Early Hours’’ comprised six tracks. Individual track titles are not documented in canonical materials; the LP is recorded as a six-track acoustic singer-songwriter project drawing on soul, reggae, jazz, and Latin influences.

Themes and Emotional Arc

The album sat at the threshold the title named—the early hours of a life and a career, the quiet before recognition. Filtered through a teenager’s late-night sensibility, it carried the soul, reggae, jazz, and Latin influences of Raffie’s upbringing without ever raising its voice, an argument by example that intimacy could hold as much weight as spectacle.

Body, Health, and the Album

‘’Early Hours’’ embodied, early, the sustainable and unhurried creative practice that would define Raffie’s career. Raised inside a chosen family of musicians living and working with disability and chronic illness, he had absorbed from Charlie Rivera that pacing oneself mattered more than burning bright and fast. The record’s restraint—its refusal to compete, its trust in quiet—was the first full expression of that inheritance.

Release and Promotion

Raffie self-released ‘’Early Hours’’ in 2051. It performed far better than he anticipated. Between the built-in audience of his father’s fanbase, the Cruzados; Ezra’s promotion across his own platforms; the reach of the chosen-family network; and Raffie’s genuine talent, the LP generated substantial streaming and sales revenue for a self-released project by a sixteen-year-old.

The income, combined with years of YouTube monetization from “R.C. Sessions,” required the financial infrastructure around Raffie’s earnings to become formal. Ezra handled it the way his own mother, Marisol, had handled his childhood modeling earnings: with absolute clarity that the money was Raffie’s. A Coogan trust account held the legally required portion, a separate custodial account held the rest, and an accountant managed tax obligations across platforms, with Ezra overseeing everything in full transparency.

Critical and Public Reception

‘’Early Hours’’ reached an audience that already existed for Raffie through “R.C. Sessions”—Cruzados drawn by his last name alongside listeners who had found him independently and connected with his acoustic, intimate style. The LP cemented that audience’s investment in him as an artist in his own right. By the time he arrived at Berklee College of Music, he was not starting from zero; he brought a fanbase with him.

Legacy and Influence

‘’Early Hours’’ was the foundation of Raffie’s body of work, the first documented step in a trajectory that ran from “R.C. Sessions” at eleven through this LP at sixteen to ‘’Inheritance’’ at twenty-one. It proved, before any formal training or major-label apparatus, that he could make work that stood on its own merit—an early demonstration of the independent voice his Berklee thesis and debut album would later confirm.

Creative Works Albums 2051 Raffie Cruz