I got involved in a new label, the now-defunct Normative Records, run by Jake Lodwick. He asked me what I would need to make the best album I could, and I decided that what we needed was to go to a cabin in the woods and make an album far away from our hometown distractions. He made it happen for us.
Mickey Free, Travis Allen, Emily Slaughter and I headed out to a cabin in western Maryland and got to work. It was one of the happiest times off my life. After years of balancing music with day jobs and with each other’s schedules, we had ten days alone with new songs and a room full of equipment on which to make them real.
I came with the songs ready to go. It was my first foray into writing songs from scratch. I would write simple guitar riffs and drum patterns, then I would write rhymes to these riffs. The lyrics to every song were written to focus on the interplay between me and the background singers.
Travis replayed the guitar, bass and organ, which Mickey would chop up and loop. Mick would take my puny drums and make them boom, and make the whole thing feel like a beat. We got the tracks mostly laid down within those ten days, but learning to mix these new songs took a lot longer.
My inspiration in writing these guitar-based songs was Whodini, noting how they didn’t let being rappers hold them back from doing songs with choruses, bridges and melodies. I was also inspired by music like Andre Williams and Hasil Adkins, in that they built melodic songs around a singer who is more talking or screaming than singing.