“They say everybody has two lives, and the second life starts when you realise you have one”: Childish Gambino reveals he had a stroke in 2024

Donald Glover, the hip hop artist better known as Childish Gambino, has revealed that he recently suffered a stroke.

Last autumn Glover was supposed to have gone an extensive tour to support his 2024 album Bando Stone & The New World but he ended up cancelling, citing ‘health concerns’ and explaining that he had scheduled surgery.

It seems that the health problems were of a fairly serious nature. Performing onstage at Tyler the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw festival in Los Angeles over the weekend, he told all, explaining that it was prior to a show in New Orleans last September that he began feeling that something was up: “I had a really bad pain in my head in Louisiana and I did the show anyway,”

“I couldn’t really see well, so when we went to Houston, I went to the hospital and the doctor was like, ‘You had a stroke,’” he recalled.

“The first thing I thought was like, ‘Oh, here I am still copying Jamie Foxx,’” he said, referring to the actor’s near-death experience back in 2023. “That’s really like the second thing. The first thing was like, ‘I’m letting everybody down,’”

But that wasn’t all. He then broke his foot, which required surgery and led to doctors finding a hole in his heart. “So I had this surgery, and then I had to have another surgery,” he explained. “They say everybody has two lives, and the second life starts when you realise you have one. You should be living your life how you want. If we have to do this again, it can only get better.”

He seemed to be in good spirits and performed an 18-song set that included a cover of Outkast’s Prototype. He finished up his monologue about his health by quoting his spouse: "As my wife says, which I love, 'If this life is the flavour, as soon as I'm done, give me another scoop.’”