Miguel American Rapper With 4.8M Instagram Followers

Early life

Miguel Jontel Pimentel was born on 23 October 1985 in California and grew up in San Pedro. He was raised on the older R&B that his mother played at home and on the funk, hip-hop, jazz and classic rock that his father liked. He attended San Pedro High School. In the eleventh grade a friend introduced him to a member of the production company Drop Squad, and he spent the rest of his school years learning how a recording studio works before looking for a record deal.

Career

Miguel signed a production deal with Drop Squad in 2000. In 2004 he was signed by the independent label Black Ice and began work on a debut album, Young & Free, which was never released. He left the label after deciding to change his sound and image. In November 2007 he signed with Jive Records, though a legal dispute with Black Ice held up his first record for about two years. During that wait he contributed to records by Usher, Asher Roth and Musiq Soulchild.

His debut, All I Want Is You, came out in November 2010. It opened modestly on the Billboard 200 but kept growing, re-entering the chart and eventually peaking at number 37 in May 2011. It produced the singles "All I Want Is You", "Sure Thing" and "Quickie". "Sure Thing" returned to the charts in 2023 after it spread on TikTok and rose to number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100.

After Jive closed, Miguel moved to RCA Records. His second album, Kaleidoscope Dream, was released on 2 October 2012 and entered the Billboard 200 at number three. Its lead single "Adorn" reached number 17 on the Hot 100 and became a number-one hit on the R&B and hip-hop chart. "#Beautiful", a 2013 single with Mariah Carey, was his third song to sell a million copies in the United States.

Wildheart, his third album, followed in June 2015, and the single "Coffee" came from it. War & Leisure arrived in December 2017 with singles such as "Sky Walker", "Told You So" and "Shockandawe", the first of which featured Travis Scott. In 2017 he also sang "Remember Me" with Natalia Lafourcade for the Pixar film Coco and performed it at the 2018 Oscars. In April 2019 he released the Spanish-language EP Te Lo Dije, which became his first entry on the Top Latin Albums chart. He released Caos in October 2025.

Miguel plays guitar. His music takes in R&B, funk, hip-hop, rock and electronic styles, and he has named Prince, David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix among his influences.

On screen, he played Malcolm in the 2017 film Detroit, which is the single title in his listed screen credits, and played a gangster in the crime drama Live by Night.

Recognition

Wildheart received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album, and its single "Coffee" was nominated for Best R&B Song.

Public roles

Miguel has spoken about immigration and incarceration in his work and public appearances. He took part in the Schools Not Prisons tour, which sought to raise awareness of mass incarceration in California, and he shot the video for his song "Now" in Adelanto, the site of a large immigration detention center. In the 2025-26 academic year he became a Scholar-in-Residence at New York University's Steinhardt school, where he hosts events on creativity and the business of art.

Personal life

Miguel has said that Transcendental Meditation helps him keep a balance in his daily life.