BALTIMORE ROUND ROBIN TOUR – FALL 2008

Jones, Frank and I took our new trio out on another Round Robin tour with Beach House, Ed Schrader, Jana Hunter, Deathset, Dan Deacon, Future Islands, Videos Hippos, Nuclear Power Pants and many more. Similar to the first round robin tour, we did two nights in each city with a totally different bill each night.

64 people went on the tour. We traveled in a school bus and in two 15 passenger vans. There were people on the tour I didn’t even meet once. It was like a traveling village that came in and took over whatever was going on… You might stay at someone’s house and not ever meet your host, or play at a club and never meet the promoter.

Being in such a giant squad was a blast and it was also exhausting. This was my last trek with Jones and Frank. I was glad we were able to do our thing to some big, hype audiences and that the three of us got to go on this unforgettable trip.

HEIGHT WITH FRIENDS BEGINS – NOVEMBER 2008

Jones let me know that after three intense years of touring, he would be stepping down as my DJ. I think he felt that his (significant) contributions to the show were going unnoticed.

This made me realize that I had to tweak the way I present things. I started billing shows as Height With Friends. I didn’t want to change the name to some whole other thing, but I wanted to imply that you should watch the whole unit and not just the guy with the mic. Also, I hoped it would encourage people to pay attention as members slip in and out, and take note of what each new person is bringing to the table.

Mickey Free, Emily Slaughter and Travis Allen served as the first live line-up of Height With Friends. We warmed up with two house shows in the Carolinas, and then made our big Baltimore debut in December.

BALTIMORE HIGHLANDS – JANUARY 2009

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.

HIGHLANDS TAKES OFF – 2009

Baltimore Highlands was released on Wham City Records. This was my first record to come out on vinyl, and my first record to get press. It got press because of the hard work of Wham City’s unofficial press czar R.M. O’Brien.

Justin Barnes and Team G came out with a video for the album’s opening song, and ShowBeast did a video for The Woods.

BACK ON THE ROAD – MAY 2009

Throughout 2009, we did a long tour with Ed Schrader and short tours with Nuclear Power Pants, Thank You and Future Islands. Gavin Riley joined the group. He became the most consistent presence in HWF throughout the next three years.

To keep things rolling, I put out the final installment in my Utility Fog series. The earlier volumes had been EP’s, but Utility Fog Four was a full-length album.

BALTIMORE HIGHLANDS REMIX ALBUM – OCTOBER 2009

My man R.M. O’Brien suggested doing a remix album. I was never big on remixes, and it sounded intimidating. What if no one I like wants to do it? What if people give me remixes that I don’t like?

Despite my apprehension, I started making calls and sending out accapellas. To my surprise, it came together quickly. Tobacco’s remix of the title track was my favorite remix, but everyone came tight. Aural States Records helped release it.

SWISS CHARD – NOVEMBER 2009

After making Utility Fog Four, I decided that CDR’s were for the birds and that my next EP should be a free download. I put together this EP called Swiss Chard. The baltimore-based website Splice Today hosted it. I wrote a little blurb for each song on their site.

THE CABIN – SUMMER 2008 – SPRING 2010

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.