The Walking Dead - Interview with IronE Singleton

What prompted you to change your name from Robert to IronE?
The thing that happened was my life [laughing]. IronE stands for an eagle in flight with an unbroken spirit. I coined that term because it is indicative of my life story and the fact that I'm out of the inner city. Statistics state that as a young black male from the inner city, I would be either in prison or dead or more than likely hanging out on a street corner selling drugs or something like that. So once I graduated from college, and right before I moved to LA, God just put it in my heart. There was this overwhelming desire to come up with a name that served as an ice-breaker. IronE was it.

So how did you find your way out of the projects and a situation so many see as hopeless?
Speaking metaphysically, there is just this overwhelming power, this supreme being in my life. It was bigger, way larger than life. I refer to it as God. I always had a relationship with God as early as 8 years old. I can remember having these conversations with God. I'd go in the bathroom and look in the mirror and talk to myself, but then I knew I was not the only one present.
Speaking in worldly terms, I visited my paternal grandmother and saw that the life that she lived totally contrasted with the life that I had lived in the projects. So it inspired me to want more out of life. It made me more ambitious because before that I didn't know that anything else really existed except on the TV. ...

Source: Full interview @ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette