Six years ago, Brandon Reid Allen was homeless, broke and ready to end it all. Today, the Chandler resident is a rising star in Christian rock.
By CHRIS HANSEN ORF • Get Out

Homeless and penniless, Brandon Reid Allen hit rock bottom in the freezing rain on the roof of the Westerner Hotel in downtown Las Vegas.

“I was full of hatred for everything,” Allen remembers. “I was a good person with a lot of integrity — I never robbed anyone, never prostituted myself — yet here I was, my feet dangling off the roof, looking down and thinking, ‘It would just take one second, then I'll be dead.’”

But then Allen felt something familiar — a feeling he'd experienced one day years earlier at a small church in his home state of Indiana, a feeling of overpowering clarity and calm that would save his life.

“The Lord never gives you more than you can bear,” Allen says. “I've found that to be true.”

Six years later, Allen's days of standing on the side of the road with all of his belongings on his back and a sign in his hands are in the past.
“The sign said ‘Anywhere,’ ” Allen recalls. “I didn't care where I went.”

Where Allen has gone since those days is “somewhere.”

The 31-year-old Christian rock singer/songwriter now lives in a comfortable Chandler home and is married with his first child on the way. He has a new album, ‘‘Empty Chair,’’ that is receiving airplay across the country.

“I survived drug addiction, alcoholism, child abuse and physical abuse,” Allen says of his upbringing and teenage years. “Now I am in a real place of comfort. If my life was a movie, I'd think that it was made up.”

First experience with God

Allen began performing in his parents’ band as a drummer when he was 5 years old, taking after his drummer father. His mother sang lead.

The musician life was hard on his family. His Syrian mother and Irish father had tempers to match, and when alcohol was added to the mix, it made for an unstable home life.

So the young musician left home for good at 15 and fell in with a rough crowd that took him in.

“They were real good to me when they were out of prison,” Allen remembers of his friends. “They were selling weed, and I was a terrible drug dealer.”

Allen ended up in church one day, being prayed over by a woman who said she saw him leading people with his Christian music.

“I just laughed,” Allen says. “That was not me. I wasn't religious at all.”
The woman laid her hands on him, and the singer felt a shock that he believes was his first experience with God.

“My knees buckled,” Allen remembers. “I was crying. I just ran out of the church. I didn't know what happened.”

The band he was in decided to chase their rock ’n’ roll dreams in L.A. The group got as far as Las Vegas before the band, without Allen, decided to return to Indiana.

“I had burned a lot of bridges back there, so I couldn't go back,” the singer says.

An elderly woman picked up Allen on the Utah freeway — telling him God told her to do it, and took him to a Las Vegas truck stop — where a trucker gave him $20 and dropped him off on the Strip.

“It's a strange feeling being in Las Vegas all alone,” Allen says. “The good thing is that there are a lot of possibilities, but the bad thing is, there are a lot of possibilities.”

All Allen had was the clothes on his back after his bag was stolen during his first night in Las Vegas.

So he spent nights in the safest places he could find — the roofs of semi-trailers and downtown casinos.

Trek in the wilderness

The day after his rainy-night epiphany, while selling his plasma for $20, he heard somebody talking about a resort on Lake Mead that was hiring and would provide employee housing.

“I heard it was 40 miles away so I left, walking, the next day,” Allen says. “I didn't know that the lake was 500 square miles around. I thought it was a small lake with one resort, not a huge one with a bunch of resorts 30 miles away from each other.”

Allen wandered the scorching desert for three days, like Moses leading the Jews in the wilderness in search of the Promised Land. Out of water and food, his lips blistered and his face beet red, Allen began talking to God.

“‘Are you getting pleasure from this?’” Allen says he asked. “My steps were getting heavier, and it was too far to go back. I realized I was completely at the mercy of an invisible God.”

Suddenly, a black Lexus came from out of nowhere. The driver gave Allen a ride to the resort. Upon arrival, Allen asked the desk clerk if the resort was hiring.

“She said ‘no,’” the singer says. “I broke down and sat outside for hours — one more night sleeping on the curb. I got a ride to the next resort in the morning.

‘‘I tried to clean up — I looked terrible — and I asked the woman there if they were hiring. She told me her husband was the general manager and she let me eat at the buffet — I wanted to eat it all but I was too sick — but I didn't see her again for hours.

“Just as I was walking out she hired me as a yacht washer at $7 an hour and took me to my own trailer.”

‘I've had a lot of angels’

Allen saved money all summer and bought a small truck, which took him to Phoenix, where he landed a job at Coyote Springs Brewing Co. & Cafe and met local musicians. Allen, who hadn't played music in years, bought a guitar and started writing songs.

“I didn't sit down with any intent to be a Christian singer,” Allen says. “That's just what came out when I started writing songs.”

Allen's transition from one life to another was cemented when he met his wife, Ali, a Scottsdale Unified School District administrator. The couple explored their faith together, and Allen now plays churches across the Valley, spreading his ministry through his modern alternative Christian rock.

But he never forgets that cold night in the rain on the rooftop in Las Vegas, which he believes became the starting point on his road map to a new life.

“It humbled me, frightened me, directed me,” Allen says. “Once you are stripped of everything, you're not really who you were. It's like laying a foundation and seeing how strong it is — if you build it in the sand it won't last, but if you build in the midst of a tornado, it's going to last. I had lost everything, included all the anger that I had inside of me.

“God had to have been with me the whole way. I believe an angel is when God directs a person to help another at the right time. I've had a lot of angels in my life.”

With major labels calling Allen and a live album with national distribution scheduled for early summer, the singer has come a long way, and he's still finding angels in his everyday life.

Brandon Reid Allen
Where: Amazing Grace Bookstore, 8830 S. Kyrene Road, Tempe When: 12:30 p.m. Saturday
How much: Free
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