For Marcel Patillo, music was never a distant dream. It was the air he breathed.

“As my mom took her first job at a record label… we kind of just grew up in mixing rooms, studios and music video sets,” Marcel says. “So pretty early on, it was kind of like just the normal way of life,”

That family legacy runs deep. His mother, Jackie, now serves as president of the Gospel Music Association, his father, Leon Patillo, was a Christian music mainstay in the 1980s and his late brother Gabe was a longtime member of TobyMac’s Diverse City, a voiceover artist heard across major sports leagues, and a quiet example of faith lived with obedience. Marcel doesn’t speak about that legacy with entitlement, but with reverence.

“There’s a pressure to live up to the example that she set,” he says of his mother. “And I just hope that I can minister to the world in the way that my family has done.”

That desire to minister, not just create, is what brings Marcel back to music under the name I AM ABLE, releasing his debut single “From The Beginning” on January 30. The EDM-Rap track, written, performed, and produced by Marcel, marks a full-circle return after years spent stepping away from the industry.

“I originally got a development deal with Gotee,” Marcel recalls. “My brother played one of my demo tracks on the bus, and Toby called me like 2 a.m.”

But early success didn’t bring clarity. After fronting the mainstream band Lovers Ball and producing in Los Angeles, Marcel found himself burned out.

“I really didn’t like being the creative factory,” he admits. “There’s a difference between creating from your heart and just being a painter with your blank canvas and then having to sell paintings a certain amount per week.”

That season led him somewhere unexpected: bodybuilding.

“I needed it bad,” he says. “I was in a lost place with faith, a lost place professionally and emotionally.”

Ironically, it was filming his first bodybuilding competition that reawakened his creative spark. When his friend sent him the raw video footage of the competition to edit, something clicked. “I just fell in love with that process,” Marcel says. “You can kind of mix the music and the video to create something even grander than the music or video alone.”

That discovery eventually grew into The Modern Filmmaker, a widely followed platform where Marcel taught creatives how to tell stories visually. Along the way, he learned to embrace emerging tools, including AI, not as replacements but as extensions of vision.

“This isn’t here to replace me,” he explains. “This is here to evolve me and to help me go forward in a faster way.”

That same philosophy shapes the music video for “From The Beginning,” which blends original footage with AI-generated visuals. “I’m still going in with a ministry and a message that I feel like God has put a fire in my heart for,” Marcel says. “This is just helping me conceptualize the art.”

The song itself is rooted in spiritual certainty rather than self-confidence. “‘From The Beginning’… it’s really kind of a boast on God,” he says. “From the beginning He’s already won the war.”

That belief anchors the I AM ABLE identity.

“I AM ABLE is really just a guy trying to get to heaven,” Marcel explains. “The journey is not easy. There’s a lot of speed bumps and traps.”

The name, he says, reflects both personal history and faith. “Through obedience to God and faith… you are able of achieving your dreams,” he says. “If you lean into that, you will see that you are able to do things that you would have never imagined.”

The loss of his brother Gabe sharpened that conviction. “When you lose people… you kind of have less time for the unimportant stuff,” Marcel says. “You have a message that I’ve given you… you have a voice, so use it.”

With “From The Beginning,” that voice finally steps into the open.

“This message is who I am,” Marcel says. “My hope is that I AM ABLE just becomes an avenue… to help people find their fire and to help fuel it.”

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