My hands feel like someone poured concrete in them!

Fantastic Negrito had to find a new way to play guitar after he was injured in a near-fatal car crash. But he gets by - with a little help from a friend...

- Ellie Rogers

First discovered by many when his explosive NPR Tiny Desk Concert aired on YouTube back in 2015, Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz- or Fantastic Negrito, as you'll more likely know him - has one of the most incredible and unique musical life stories imaginable. Indeed fantastical at times, and calamitous at others, it would probably be deemed too implausible by even the most fanciful of Hollywood movie directors - if it weren't entirely true, that is.

After growing up in an Orthodox Muslim household in Massachusetts, Xavier's cultural horizons exploded into full technicolor when he relocated to California in the 1980s, settling in "beautiful, grimy old west Oakland", as he calls it. He learned to play and write music on multiple instruments by infiltrating classes at the University Of Berkeley, and by 1993, had landed himself a million-dollar deal with Interscope Records. Around this time, he met Masa Kohama - a Japanese self-taught guitarist who was living and working in L.A. at the time, and they began making music together.

Then in 1999, Xavier was involved in a near-fatal car accident which left him in a coma for three weeks, and robbed him of almost all mobility in his right hand and wrist. His future as a musician seemed doomed. “I remember waking up from the coma," he says. "It was three weeks I had a full beard, long fingernails, I weighed about a hundred pounds - and I remember, in my weak voice, I said, 'Are my hands okay?' and the nurse didn't say yes or no, she just shook her head. It was the first thing that I thought of."