When you’re a white, albino, politically radical rapper, the conversation tends to be dominated by these facts.

Google “Brother Ali” and you’ll unearth scores of articles on these very subjects. But what’s perhaps more interesting about the American wordsmith—at least now, 14 years, five full-length albums, and four EPs into his career—is the way in which his extraordinary experiences have shaped the artist he’s become.

Ali, who was born Jason Newman, has, after all, had a life that’s taken him far from the Midwest communities in which he was raised. Reached on the road, driving from Kansas to Colorado on the first day of his Home Away From Home tour, the indie rapper looks back.

“I went to hear KRS-One speak when I was 12 or 13,” he remembers. “I asked a question at the question-and-answer period and he actually brought me on-stage. It was very transformative to me. He talked about books and how knowledge can be empowering. He recommended The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which is the book that brought me to Islam.

“KRS looked at me and said, ‘This [music] is your job, this is who you are meant to be,’ ” Ali adds. “It meant the world to me.”

The encounter set Ali on a path that would take him around the world, beginning with a conversion that led to a stint in Malaysia to study the faith, and eventually a pilgrimage to Mecca.

But it also established a lifelong pattern of forging friendships with the people who inspire him most, including Chuck D, Rakim, and Cornel West.

The music tells this story of growth. Indeed, the master storyteller sees his music as charting the evolution of his soul. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the awakening he’s undergone when it comes to gay rights. After dropping the other F-word on his first album, he subsequently made gay friends and empathized with their experiences (he later wrote about this for the Huffington Post). His song “Tight Rope”, off 2009’s Us, explores a gay teen’s suffering to powerful effect, and concludes with the admonishment: “It’s a cold world y‘all/shame on us.”

“In Islam, it is a duty to uphold the dignity that a human being was created with,” Ali says. “If you wrong somebody, it is not enough to ask God to forgive you, you need to go to that person and do everything in your power to make it right. I wronged a community of people­—I had to try to repair that.”

This tough, clear-minded look at his own shortcomings and the heartache of the world is always underscored by a profound optimism—and that’s what makes Ali’s music so poignant. “Every few years, I go through a really enormous trial,” he reflects. “I go through a major change that involves a lot of pain. And it always comes out right. It’s uncanny. I have experienced that so much that I just know how real that is. So both things have to be in my music—both how terrifying life is, and then also how much hope really does matter.”

Brother Ali plays the Biltmore Cabaret next Wednesday (September 24).