Donald Glover Says He’s Not Done With Music Yet: ‘I Like Telling Stories’

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At the premiere of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie in Kyoto, Japan, Donald Glover gave an update on where he’s at when it comes to making new music.

The actor-filmmaker-musician released his fifth album as Childish Gambino, Bando Stone & the New World, in 2024. At the time, he indicated it was his final album, at least under the Gambino moniker. Speaking with Nischelle Turner for Entertainment Tonight at the Mario premiere, Glover said that his passion for music is still there, but for now, he’s keeping anything he records to himself.

“Why are you putting me out there?” he laughed when asked about whether he is actually done with music. “I still really love making music. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. I love making it, you know, even if that’s for myself. Even if it’s just, you know… I have plenty of songs that are, like, just for me. And I’m not saying like, oh, I’m like, putting them out. … I just love making it. You know, I don’t know if I…I like telling stories. So, like, if I can make something that I’m like, ‘Oh, people should hear this,’ I definitely will put it out.”

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Glover’s longtime collaborator Ludwig Göransson revealed last year that he’s still processing his friend’s decision to retire Gambino.

“We are a family … I’m not sure actually I [can] still kind of wrap my head around it,” Göransson told Zane Lowe at the time. “But it wasn’t sad in a way. I wasn’t sad … because I know that it’s not like he’s gonna stop making music.”

In 2024, Glover kicked off a tour in support of Bando Stone & the New World, but was forced to cancel a large portion of dates due to health reasons. In November 2025, he performed at Camp Flog Gnaw Festival and shared that he suffered a stroke.

“I had a really bad pain in my head in Louisiana, and I did the show anyway,” he told the crowd. “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.’ And the first thing I thought was like, ‘Oh, here I am still copying Jamie Foxx.‘ … They found a hole in my heart. So I had this surgery, and then I had to have another surgery.”