Yes, y’all.

It’s been a minute. I’ve been in deep work mode. The next album is quickly taking shape now. I may start recording vocals by the end of the coming week. Then I mix and it’s done. I wanted to jump in today to tell you about the weird thing that happened to me yesterday. I wrote a song and I don’t know where it came from. Let me break it down for you.

For me, the hardest part of making an album is writing lyrics. I don’t know why but there’s always this massive hump I need to get over. It feels a bit like standing at the edge of a cold swimming pool and trying to gather the courage to jump in. Sometimes it takes days. Sometimes it takes months. After standing at that edge for an unusually long time, I finally took the plunge earlier this week. Once in the water, things started flowing pretty quickly, which is usually the case.

There’s a process. I keep my radar on at low power all the time. Year round. Whenever an idea for a lyric or a beat or a scratch comes to me, I log it in a file in the Notes app on my laptop. When the time comes to write to a beat, I listen on repeat for a while until I become submerged in a vibe. Then I look over the stockpile of lyric-ideas I’ve saved and decide if any might work with the vibe I’m feeling. And then I go from there.

So yesterday, I’m listening to this one particular beat. It’s 82 BPM. For me, a tempo that slow is a bit harder to write to than one up around 110. Anything at - say - 75 bpm or slower is even harder. I digress. So I spend some time meditating at 82 BPM and lock in on a flow. I pick a handful of line ideas from the stockpile and then I tell myself, “channel Rakim”. I have a plan. I sit in silence for ten or fifteen minutes and then my hands move to the keyboard. What happened next was something that hasn’t happened to me in a very long time and has only happened a handful of times since I started making music. The plan I came up flew out the window as words started gushing out and I felt as though I had no control over what was happening. I read the words as they appeared on the screen with no clue as to their origin. It’s like my body was taken over by someone else’s spirit or something. The last time I remember something like that happening was when I wrote the Untitled song on the Man Overboard album: “I used to be the town cryer in a city of stone throwers…”

This thing I wrote - or that I was a conduit for - kinda freaks me out. It’s pretty dark. Pretty psychedelic. It seems to be about someone who has the ability to slip through the walls that separate parallel universes. It gives me the creeps to think about that too deeply. A lot of the architecture of the lines and rhyme schemes kinda looks like something I would build but there are certain lines that absolutely do not. I’m really quite excited about how tricky the rhymes are in one line in particular. It’s utterly unlike anything I’ve written before.

Although the lyrics are not what I was planning for the beat at all, I’m not going to mess with it. No editing. I’m going to leave it exactly as it is. You’ll probably know it when you hear it because it’s so strange but I’ll point it out when the album drops.

So that’s it. I just wanted to document this feeling while I’m still in it. The writing is coming fast and furious, so I figure I’ll be done writing for this project in the next couple of days. The plan is to keep the faucet running and move right into writing for the next project I have lined up.

One more thing I should mention, real quick. You may have seen the photo of the cover of the special edition of Man Overboard I posted on IG back on December 18th. And you may know that we took pre-orders for two different special editions at the same time. The other batch basically went missing and unaccounted for since then. Ian (from Obsolete) and I expected to get both batches at the same time. But one got lost. We were starting to shit bricks about it and then the lost boxes finally shook loose yesterday. Maybe they got stuck in a parallel universe. Anyway, we should have them in hand by next week (as long as the weather doesn’t get too crazy) and then your orders will be shipped out. They’re coming. Thanks for your patience.

Weird and spooky times we find ourselves living in.

Until the next.