Luke James at Vinyl
I always had a plan to use my knowledge & skill to help benefit somebody before I went off and did my own thing. And I feel like this day was a full circle day. I went from pushing his first pre album in the streets, to working behind the scenes in some distribution for for his mixtape, to being in the studio with Luke while he recorded many of his records for the album, which is on itunes right now for those who don’t already have it.
Somebody asked Luke about he’s back up singing days when he was doing backgrounds for Tyrese and when he thought it was time to move on from singing background for him. In his response Luke talked about how he eventually got depressed doing that and he knew where he was supposed to be and that was to be the artist and not doing background vocals behind the artist.
When he said that, everything in my mind clicked. I had always been depressed in my situation from the very beginning but I thought that because I was getting money, and traveling across the country that whatever emotion I was experiencing wasn’t depression. Everybody around me knew I was depressed, I didn’t know I was depressed. All I was focused on was the small fragment of my dream coming into reality.
I was always musically frustrated though. I hadn’t really been writing and recording for months at a time. Being in these big studios and hearing these amazing records to me was equivalent to a man going to strip club EVERY night and not being able to smash the strippers (Don’t ask me why I used that metaphor) but it gets pointless after a while.
My reasoning for being there was short-term and I was not there for myself, I was there for the other artists like Luke. And that’s what I kept focusing on them and not me, because creative people can def go off on a tangent being caught up in something else.
One of the worst and most musically frustrating times is when we were in LA and we somehow rolled into a conversation about me and about me spitting a “hot 16” and what I wanted to do all and all while this is going on about me Timbaland randomly walks in the studio and we all got mad quiet lol and then like 30 seconds later he’s like listen my new music lol. At the time I only had been getting money for like 2 months, and for me being a rapper and this has always been my passion, and being in the room with people I have always dreamt about….I really wanted to turn up on rapper beast mode but I know for a fact that once I’m in that mode there is no off button and I still had to focus on that task I was getting paid for. So I had to remove myself from the room for like 30 minutes just to completely calm down cause the rapper in me was going NUTS!!!
I sacrificed almost 2 years of my life to try to be a blessing to somebody else, which I felt was needed, but now that I’m 100% focused on me, things have been really falling into place. (Check Out some of other blogs to see what I mean) And for me when Luke made that statement, it just brought complete confirmation that I was doing the right thing. #OnTheRoadToEightGrammys
Click Here to see my radio interview