The whole reason Thaiboy Digital ended up in Sweden was because his mom used to be a teenage bruiser. When she was a kid she was — “How can I say this? Not crazy,” the Auto-Tune crooner explains as we sit in an empty balcony at New York’s Irving Plaza and watch his pal and collaborator Yung Lean clown his way through an afternoon soundcheck. “She just go … out of line sometimes.”

So her mother, Thaiboy’s grandma, found a disciplinary solution: she got her daughter an exhausting job in the kitchen of one of the smaller palaces of the Thai royal family. There, Thaiboy’s mother learned to prepare everything from traditional Thai food to international haute cuisine. First, that landed her kitchen jobs throughout Thailand. Then, when Thaiboy was 8, it got her a job at Austria’s embassy in Stockholm.

Thaiboy and his mom and dad settled in a towering apartment building in the southwest neighborhood of Alby. “They would call it ‘hood,’ I guess,” Thaiboy says. “But it was dope. Like, the kids all know each other and we all go out and do stupid shit.” Thaiboy’s mother is half-black, which made him a bit of a target in Thailand; in kindergarten the kids would him “niggo.” In school in Sweden, for the first time, he met other kids from all over the world: “Arab, Latino, Russian, Chinese, North America, South America — every continent in the same class.” He also started learning both English and Swedish, to the point where the three languages began taking turns flitting through his brain. “If I get surprised, I think in English,” he says. “I like to curse in Swedish. And when its some real shit, I think in Thai.”