Many who follow the music industry know the standard clichéd story: a musician, eager to make it big, finally quits a mundane job and puts it all on the line in pursuit of a dream.

For the rapper Hoodie Allen, the decision to quit his job wasn’t the standard throw-down-the-apron routine—up until a few weeks ago, Allen had a full-time job at the tech powerhouse Google.

Most recent graduates would cling to a Google job in these tough economic times; over 75,000 applied to work there in one week in late January. Then again, most of these recent graduates do not have an EP (Pep Rally) that has been downloaded over 200,000 times. Allen’s breakout single, “You Are Not a Robot,” was featured as the number one song on Hype Machine, an aggregator that collects the most blogged-about music in the country.

When at Google, Hoodie Allen was known by his given name, Steven Markowitz. And surprisingly few of his co-workers were even aware of his other life as a rapper. There, he was just a first-year member of the Google sales team, having come on as a full time employee over the summer, freshly recruited out of UPenn, where he graduated in May.

While “You Are Not a Robot” was just starting to break in a big way after releasing the song over the summer, Allen decided one song getting some traction wasn’t enough to justify not taking his job. In August, he left his home on Long Island, moved into an apartment in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, and started working full-time at Google.

“It was hard but it didn’t really fit into the plan,” he said. “We never really knew if the music would take off like this, so it didn’t seem reasonable to pass up the job at the time.”

The music did take off, however, as websites around the country began featuring Allen’s EP and the downloads accumulated. Allen soon found himself leading a double life: after a 7 a.m. bus ride from his neighborhood to the Google offices in Mountain View, he would work a full day at Google, ride a 6 p.m. bus back to San Francisco, then set to work answering fan emails, working on new songs, scheduling concerts—often until two or three in the morning.

“I wasn’t sleeping all that much,” he said. “It got to the point I needed to make a decision.”