As I began work on Baltimore Highlands, I was compelled to do something different with my raps. I had always rapped on the slower side, but I wondered what would happen if I rapped so slow that my lyrics would match the cadence of a folk song.
I kept playing around with these slow, drawn-out phrases. I started to emulate the lyrical structures from folk and blues songs, in this slow style. Sometimes I wanted the pause between lines to be as long as the line itself. Sometimes I wanted to say a line and then say it again, like a blues singer would do. The point of all this was to try my hand at traditional songwriting, while still pushing forward with my sound.
We tried a different approach to the production as well. No one handed me a beat that I used as is. When I came across a beat that moved me, I would strip it down to the one loop or drum pattern that meant the most to me. Starting with just the skeleton, I would write words to it, and then build a new beat around the words with the help of King Rhythm, Mickey Free and Jones.
All this experimentation led to fuller beats and led to me being able to express a wider range of emotion.