Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D.

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Paul Joshua "Sonny" Sandoval (born May 16, 1974) is an American singer and rapper. He is best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band P.O.D..

Sandoval was born in San Diego, California to a Hawaiian-Chamorro mother and a Mexican-Italian father. He grew up in the Otay Mesa neighborhood of South San Diego, and joined a gang at age thirteen. He drank and used marijuana frequently during his teenage years. However, in 1992, when he was eighteen, Sandoval's mother died of leukemia at the age of 37. During her illness, Sonny was greatly influenced by his mother's faith as a devout Christian. Turning his life around, he pursued a career as an MC. He later joined the band Enoch, a group started by Wuv Bernardo, Gabe Portillo and Marcos Curiel, which, with the addition of Sandoval, later became P.O.D. (acronym for "Payable On Death"). Sandoval states his musical roots as reggae, rock, and rap, all of which are apparent in P.O.D. He and his wife Shannon married in 1996, and have two daughters, Nevaeh and Marley, and a son, Justice. Sandoval is widely credited with the sudden popularity of the name Nevaeh, which, as he revealed on MTV Cribs, is Heaven spelled backwards.


For most of P.O.D.'s career, Sandoval was well known for his dreadlocks (which, by the release of the video for "Going in Blind", had reached the length of his waist), but since the release of P.O.D.'s seventh studio album, When Angels & Serpents Dance, he has cut them off. He did this because of the meaning of the dreads. He realized people started using the style as a way to look cool and then seeing that the meaning wasn't seen by fans, he then decided to remove them.

He has been named number 63 in Hit Parader's Top 100 Metal Vocalists of All Time in 2006. He is currently involved with EXIT Concerts and his own organization, The Whosoevers.