“Dropped the mixtape, that shit sounded like an album…”

My forthcoming project Under The Influence wasn’t meant to be an album, per say. The idea started out as just a mixtape, with the main idea being that I wanted some music out for summer, that was available for free. I planned to have a few original songs on there, but to use a lot of famous beats as well. Mixtapes like So Far Gone, Friday Night Lights, nostalgia/ultra had dominated my iTunes in recent times, and I wanted to make something in a similar vein.

The turning point from mixtape to album was when I started working with a pretty unknown producer named Matt Miller. I was checking out his SoundCloud page and liked how he’d taken well known tracks, flipped them and made them his own. His production style was pretty raw, but I liked the DIY nature of it. I wrote to a few beats he had out, and pretty soon we had a good group of songs together. I would send him tracks to sample, interested to see what he would come up with. I was impressed every time with where he took them.

We ended up with 12 songs, and I realized what had started out as me trying to make a mixtape that sounded like an album, was actually an album with the soul of mixtape. There’s some big samples on there, and its free like a mixtape, but Matt still hand crafted all the beats himself.

The song we’re dropping tomorrow is “Stranger (Pt. 1 & 2)” and is a perfect reflection of the whole album. A reworking of a song everyone will recognize, but still far from a simple rap over the original. I feel we made it our own.

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