“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.
This was one of the last songs we did for the album. Nick suggested that we do something around the 100 BPM tempo, seeing as a lot of the stuff we had been working on was really fast or quite slow. That speed is where I’m probably most comfortable, but I’ve also tried to switch it up as I’ve continued making music. I remember reading a really positive review of Rookie Card that said something like “only slight gripe is he doesn’t change up his flow or tempo much”. I kind of agreed with that and took it on board. But Nick reminded me that that doesn’t mean abandon it, and he sent me this demo that was my shit all day. It had a soulful disco sample and a 90′s summertime feel. Those are the type of songs that gave me a career.
I just wanted it to have a party feel to it, so I kept the lyrics playful and wrote it really quickly. The hook melody was pretty instant too, and I demo’d the whole thing on GarageBand with the laptop mic. The only issue was the chorus had a singing part and I can’t sing whatsoever. When I got in the studio to lay it down, me and Evan played around with it to see if we could tune me trying to sing, or do some sort of vocoder thing with my voice. Neither worked. Like anyone that was into West Coast Hip-Hop growing up, I’d always wanted to get someone to do an authentic talk box vocal on a song and thought this might be my chance. I put a message on Facebook and asked if anyone knew someone that had some skills at it, and my mate Taye Williams linked me with Jay Diamond. I went over to his pad to show him the song, and he did the hook with ease on his home set-up. Me and Evan had bought a talk box and rubber pipe when we were doing Bazooka Kid, but we couldn’t do shit with it. It was mean to see and hear someone who knew how to use it properly. After Jay layed his parts in the studio, I thought the song was cool but it now had kind of a pseudo-Funk sound. I decided if we were gonna go that route we should do it all the way, so Nick added a classic West Coast synth line and I got Evan to replicate the bass sound from Snoop Doggy Dogg – “Who Am I”. That bass is what really makes it.
My mate Askew One and Mukpuddy did the clip for this. He’d been doing a few videos for FMG and liked the track, so I asked him if he’d be keen. It took us a while to work out a treatment though. He thought doing it completely animated would bring the character of the lyrics to life, but me and the label weren’t completely keen on it. They had dealt with animation delivering late before, and personally I thought those clips often came and went and didn’t have too much replay value. I trusted Askew artistically though, seeing as he’s a world renowned Graffiti artist and all, and we met in the middle by doing a part live action, part animated video. We did it pretty DIY at his studio in town, even putting up the green screen ourselves which was a comedy of errors. Shushila Takao came on board, and she was natural in front of the camera. Both Askew and Mukpuddy put in a lot of post work after the shoot, and I was really happy with how it turned out. I think it fits the song nicely.
At the beginning of making Man On Wire, Jordan asked me what type of beats I was looking for. I never know how to answer that, cause really I never have a set idea for a type of sound I want. I understand that can be frustrating for producers, so I thought about it and asked him to send me some “decadent rap shit”. It was the best way to describe a vibe I think me and Fire & Ice are both big fans of. I used some late 90′s Bad Boy and Roc-A-Fella songs as a reference, and I think Jordan laughed but also got what I meant. A little while later he emailed me a group of demo beats, and this instrumental was on there. I loved the sort of sophisticated soul sound of it, and told him I was keen to use it.
With this one, a distinct rhyme structure for the verses came to me first. I usually rap gibberish to a beat for a while, to get some sort of flow and cadence that feels natural with the music. Usually it just acts as a basis and I still have a lot of room to change it up as I start writing. sometimes I end up with a strict pattern though, that I’ll try stick to for the whole verse. Rappers have been doing this forever, but Eminem was the biggest influence on me with this style. He owned it on songs like “The Way I Am” and “Git Up”. I told Jordan I was working on the song, and that the beat was right up the “decadent rap shit” alley. He agreed, and said he’d originally titled the demo “Champange Gang”, which sounded dope to me so I used that for the hook. I knew David Dallas would be killer on this cause he’s all about that cool, smooth Hip-Hop. This is both. I played him the beat when we were driving round one day, and rapped my gibberish flow to it. He was feeling it, and a few weeks later came through to the studio and did the damage.
The chorus has a group “Hey!” vocal on it that took us a while to get sounding right. Sometimes when you do that, it can sound a bit like a bored class singing the school song. To finish it off we added a slick Ed Norton quote from The 25th Hour to the intro, and Evan re-did the bass line live. Funny thing is, I don’t really drink champagne whatsoever. Too expensive, and it goes straight to my head.
Back in 2009 Forty One asked me if I’d be keen to maybe do a verse or two for The Checks. They, like Nick, are from Devonport on the North Shore, and were looking to do some work with him in the Hip-Hop realm. I’ve always liked their stuff and said I was keen, but didn’t hear too much about it for a while. Then Nick sent me a demo beat titled “This Is Weird” and I liked it straight off the bat. It was a re-interpretation of their song “Let Your Lover Know” from their album Alice By The Moon. I didn’t know what Eddie was saying on the hook, and it sounded like four different genres at once, but like most of Nick’s productions it caught my intention and instantly I wanted to do something with it.
I wasn’t sure what direction The Checks guys wanted to go with it, so I just laid a 16 bar verse for it at the studio and thought we’d take it from there. My inspiration for the verse was Juelz’s guest spot on The Dream’s “Rockin That Thang (Remix)”. I saw Sven and Callum (Check’s members and co-writers of the song) at a press thing for the Big Day Out and they said they were really stoked with the demo, and also liked how my engineer Evan had EQ’d it. I told them I would be keen to do another verse to it, and maybe turn into a song for myself if they were cool with it. They had no objections. Like “Murderer”, I had two verses and didn’t really know how to end it, so Nick and Eddie decided a bridge from him would work. We met up at the Serato office (where Nick works) and recorded some demo vocals in their mini studio room. It took us a while to get the bridge sounding right. We had it over the normal beat for a long time and it didn’t quite work, until Evan added the dark pad line to it, then it all came together. I was really happy with the end product and knew it should be the first thing I released for Man On Wire. It was a bit left field and I knew fans of both mine and The Checks would have mixed feelings about it, but I thought it was engaging no matter what. It was for a small audience, but an audience I think is important.
Tim Van Dammen ended up directing the clip and he killed it. It’s probably my favourite video I’ve put out so far. We met up and went over some ideas for the clip, and he was really on the same page as me with how he thought it should look. He envisioned it with an edgy art aesthetic, but to still have a Hip-Hop core. The video I wanted to reference was Jay-Z’s “On To The Next”, which is exactly that. We both thought Cassy Silver would fit great with the treatment, so we contacted her and she was into it. Cracked me up when she told me on the set that she had flown up from her home town Palmerston North to do it.
Another banger from the Iusitini Brothers. I picked this out when I rolled over to Jordan & Aaron’s place to go through beats for the album. I instantly recognized the Fat Freddy’s Drop sample and loved how they flipped it. They had a Barrington Levy vocal on it at the time that said “Murderer” over and over, and combined with the brass it gave it a real sinister vibe. I knew DJ Babu had used the same sample for a Bishop Lamont track, but Fire & Ice killed it more on this in my opinion. No disrespect.
I sat on the beat for a while, not completely sure where to go with it lyrically. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t have much experience at killing people, so anything literal wasn’t gonna work. I just started writing some battle raps to it, trying to think of ways to riff on the murderer line. Once I had two 16′s and a hook I did a demo to it. P-Money suggested we get P Diggs to re-do the vocal line, so we got him to lay that quickly when he was at the studio one day. Its a slow tempo, so I didn’t think it needed another whole verse on it to end it. The chorus already had a kind of bridge on it, so Jordan decided to chuck in the scene of Ox shooting everyone and yelling “Bumbaclot!” from Belly. I added 8 bars after that and we were done.
Fire & Ice ended up directing the clip for it too. I told Jordan I couldn’t really find anyone keen to do it for cheap, and he said they were keen. Aaron sent through a story board for it, so I knew they were serious, plus I trusted they wouldn’t make anything wack. If it was it would cost us fuck all anyway. When we released it we hadn’t actually cleared the Fat Freddy’s sample, but lucky for us they’re good dudes and we got it sussed soon after.
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I’ve said it before, but as long as I make music I need Fire & Ice for my opening track. The production of Only Child Style and the Bazooka Kid Intro had this epic feel that made me want to step it up lyrically, and this was no different.
Jordan emailed me the demo beat, and when I heard it I instantly thought it would be a mean intro track. A lot of the lyrics were short 4 bar lines that I came up with driving around listening to it on my Ipod, that I put together later. It ended up being a 24 bar verse, no real concept just some train of thought raps that I thought fit the track’s grandiose sound. I threw a hook on it at the end too.
The percussion on this changed up a bit for the final version. Fire & Ice stripped back some of the original drums, and put in some industrial sounding ones that really added a lot. The engineer for the album Evan Short really killed the mix on this one too. Sounds large as fuck.
"And this... is where the magic happens"
Over the following days leading up to the Man On Wire release on April 18th, I’m gonna give a bit of background info for each track on the album. I always like to hear the behind the scenes story about how a song or album came about, so I thought I’d do the same for you guys. Keep hitting the page each day for a new update.
"Fuck the police."
To start us off I thought I’d give some insight as to why I chose the title. Its derived from an excellent documentary that I saw a few years ago with the same name, about the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit. He was famous for doing a high-wire routine between the World Trade Center towers in the 70′s.
The main word I wanted to convey in naming the album was balance. Thats an aspect of this albums sound that I’m proud of. I think it has a good proportion between the different styles of music I like, and the type of songs I think are my strengths at making. Balance also had to do with just life in general. Whether it be juggling time and effort between your relationships, money, work, partying, or whatever, at 27 years old it was something I was trying to get a grasp on during the making of this album.
The other reason I thought the film’s title worked was in a more metaphorical sense, thinking of parallels between a Trapeze Artist and a Rapper. Sometimes thats what it feels like being a musician. Your up there putting on this show and its thrilling for the most part, but your always weary that a few slight mistakes and that could be the end of that. I also really respected Petit’s passion for his art. In the film you see he just has a desire to show his skills to world, and as he conquers each goal he strives to do it bigger and better, by any means necessary. I think thats the kind of mindset you need to have to succeed in any profession.
06:”VSOP” featuring David Dallas (produced bt Beat Kamp Muzik)
As long as I’m making albums, I think its safe to say your gaurunteed two things… a song about drinking and a David Dallas feature.
This was one of the last songs we did for the album, but it was a beat that I’d had for a while. One day, after a heavy night in the clubs with Dave, I showed him all the stuff I’d been working on for Bazooka Kid. None of the songs I’d done were really screaming for a rap feature, so at that point I didn’t think I was actually gonna have another MC on the album. So I played some of the instrumentals I had in reserve, and Dave was instantly vibing on this Beat Kamp one, unceremoniously announcing that it was “better than any of the beats on the album”. I already had a verse, so I wrote another, came up with the hook and sent that demo to him to write his verse to it. When we recorded it though, we had nothing for a bridge from the chorus to the verses, so we came up with that on the spot. I don’t think Dave wanted to do the singing, but me and Evan made him, and it turned out nice.
Aaron from Beat Kamp is someone who I really wanted on the album too. I’d met him through MZRE and done a song with them on their mixtape when they still lived in NZ. I went over and hung at his pad in Brisbane too (he has an ill studio set-up) and I was just impressed by his diversity as an artist and his dedication to music. Some producers would just rest on their laurels after producing something like “Swing”, but his work ethic is right up there.
Sometimes instrumentals will just put a picture in my head of a scene, and the vision I got from this was just dudes driving around town, city lights reflecting off the bonnet of the car. The porno sax at the start gives it that 80′s Miami Vice type swag, so if we ever did a clip it should probably look something like this.
Lyrically this song is Roc-A-Fella influenced all day, something that is no secret to anyone who’s listened to me and Daves stuff. I’ve always thought our collabo’s have dope chemistry, similar to a Sigel and Jay, and we got something coming up for the masses soon, so keep yo ear to the street for that one.
05: “Whats Up” produced by P-Money
04:”Moonlight” (produced by Official)
Moonlight was the very first song we did for Bazooka Kid, and really set the tone of the albums soundscape. Its produced by Official, who also produced the first single off Rookie Card, Just Roll. He had sent a CD to P-Money with like 40 beats, and I skipped through it one day at Pete’s and ripped the ones I was feeling off the bat. I liked the contrast between the sparseness of the verses, and the overdriving synths on the chorus. It was really easy to write, I came up with the hook first, and the verses were fairly straight forward as the beat is around 114bpm, right in my flow-comfort-zone. I was listening to Britney Spears’ Blackout album at the time, and really wanted a female pop vocal on the track. It’s a funny thing in New Zealand though, how the genre we’re kind of void of is straight forward pop. So thinking of who to get on the track would become more of a task than I initially thought. I ended up searching the NZ music section of Myspace for artists who had people like Mariah Carey and Gwen Steffani listed as influences, and Zeisha Fremaux popped up. I flicked her a message on her page, and she came and laid the parts in the studio that same week.
That was also the first session I did with Evan, and I was slightly nervous about it. I knew he made Drum n Bass and was a die-hard Metal head at heart, so I didn’t know how he’d react to a song like Moonlight. We knocked it out with ease though, and its one of the mixes I like most off the album. The bottom end booms nicely on the right system, especially during the verses.
This song generated a few suspect looks, mainly from the indy-rap/angry-rap flag wavers, but at the same time it has been my most popular song with another group of I have even more love for… women!
