STURGIS, SD – The Game canceled at Sturgis Thursday night, and Dakotah Faye ended up closing out the Iron Horse instead. He’d come to the 86th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally booked as the opener. He left having headlined it.

Ask him how he builds a verse, though, and the answer goes back further than any rally stage, to a kid alone with a stack of Shel Silverstein books in North Dakota.

An only child’s diary turned into bars

He grew up an only child, and reading filled the space other kids fill with siblings and neighborhood noise. “It was my diary,” he told Mark Houston and Stitch at the Homeslice media center before the show. He was already a hip hop kid too, taking in Silverstein’s poems on one side and rap on the other, until the two stopped feeling like separate things.

“The way that you can flip words and rhyme and tell these stories in beautifully eloquent ways, transitioned so well to rap music,” he said.

Ask him for a favorite Silverstein book and he answers fast: The Giving Tree. He tried to wave it off as an easy pick before anyone could call him on it. Houston didn’t let it slide. “I don’t think a lot of people would say that,” he told him. Most rappers don’t build a freestyle off a picture book about a boy and a tree that keeps giving away pieces of itself.

He says the influence runs straight into the structure of his verses. “There’s a lot of certain structures of verses, how you structure rhyming, the way that you structure your bars, that I take from a lot of my favorite poets,” he said. He borrows the way poets paired real situations with feeling, then builds his own bars on that same frame. Growing up introverted, he wanted to be the cool guy, and poetry gave him the tools to write his way there.

Turning “North Dakota Doesn’t Exist” into a business plan

The same instinct shows up in his branding. Part of his merch line is a shirt that reads North Dakota Doesn’t Exist. Growing up, he said, plenty of artists hid the state off their bios entirely. “There was a lot of artists that wouldn’t claim they’re from North Dakota because it was like almost a scarlet letter,” he said. He claims it loud. “I’m proud to be where I’m from,” he said. “The 701, we have beautifully talented people and some of the best sunsets in the whole world.”

He built himself into the name that shows up when someone searches for a rapper out of North Dakota, and the internet had already found him twice before that search paid off. Stitch first came across him on TikTok, covering another artist’s song, and traced the account back to a small town in North Dakota. That led to booked shows around the Black Hills, well before anyone in the music industry came looking.

Producer Mike Squires ran that exact Google search, rapper, North Dakota, and Dakotah’s name came up first. Squires sent him a message cold. Dakotah wrote and recorded the track in two hours. Squires told him it was the fastest turnaround he’d gotten from an artist. Dakotah didn’t hesitate before saying yes. “I took one look at who Mike was and what he was doing, and I was like, I gotta do this right now,” he said.

Three and a half years sober, and a lot more purpose

Dakotah’s been sober for three and a half years. “Once I finally got through that mental break, having the people around me and having music to fall back on, it was a seamless transition,” he said. That energy went into his music, and it changed how the work felt. “My moves had purpose,” he said. “I’m seeing the fruits of that labor. I am very thankful.”

He’s Chippewa, from the Turtle Mountains, and last year he opened for Tech N9ne at this same venue, a show he called a dream come true, bucket list stuff. Thursday was supposed to be his second opening slot at the Iron Horse in as many years. Instead, he closed the night.

A headliner before he knew it

The interview was recorded before word of the cancellation reached the Homeslice media center, so when he wrapped it with thirty seconds of freestyle, no backing track, straight off the top of his head, he was still rapping about a night he expected to open. “I’ve been grinding for years, by the time that I’m here, I’m never gonna fold under pressure,” he raps, before name-checking the crowd waiting on The Game. A few hours later, that crowd was his.