Today is the day of my birth, and as I plan to spend the entire day being drunk and silly, I figured I’d get some writing done before my eventual drunken phone calls to wonderfulamazing and of course my emergency liver transplant.
Now it may seem contradictory for the creator of “Creative Process” to say this, but I genuinely enjoy reading or watching commentaries and interviews from artists that talk about how their songs came to be. The Jay-Z film Fade to Black that followed Jigga as he created The Black Album was really interesting to me. I don’t dig hearing about the creative process of kids in a creative writing class when all they do is regurgitate shit they’ve read in far more cleaver books, but I do dig it when an artist talks about creating something I enjoy.
Ok, I think I’ve properly justified this post.
As most of you might remember, Shael Riley and I started collabing a year and a half ago when we made Miss Information. I really dug working with Shael and I was talking a lot to MC Router at the time, and the three of us kind of really dug what the other was doing. We decided it would be cool to work together on a project called Tri-Forc3 and Shael called his buddy Trenthian to do production for us and we were all pretty excited. We made Mint Potion and were working on two other songs. One was about D&D called The Session, and the other one was a song called Balloon Flight. When I asked Shael what the track was about he told me, “Think early 90’s Marky Mark. Like a song that’s catchy and fun and doesn’t mean a thing.” After completely missing the message, I ended up recording a demo that he dug much more.
The chorus for the original BF actually went “Running through the deep snow/and you’ve gotta keep going/uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh/get that balloon growing/no one does it louder/courage, wisdom, power/Beefy, Shael Riley, and MC Router”
Clearly it’s obvious why we had to lose the last bit when we recreated the song as Grammar Club, which really sucks because Shael had made it one of the catchiest bits of the whole song in my opinion. When Tri-Forc3 eventually collapsed under the sheer size of our brilliance, I think Balloon Flight is something Shael and I were really sad to see go away. So when we decided to do a project together, completing BF was one of our first priorities. Originally Shael and I were going to work with Baddd Spellah, but that dude is super busy and admitted to us that there was no way he’d find the time to run this project. Then we moved on trying to hunt down another producer. We conned DJ Snyder to join us and he actually produced the first really good version of Heart Tits, but his main role in the group became that of DJ.
I actually remember driving home from Portland and stopping in The Dallas for some Taco Time when I got a call from Shael telling me that Glenn Case was down for the then nameless project and that he was going to conference a call between the three of us. We got cracking and Shael and I recorded more and more demos using Shael’s original synth beats while Glenn was recreating those synth sounds with real instruments. Seriously, when I say I do the least amount of work in the group, that’s not a lie. So Balloon Flight became one of the first songs we started on.
Shael sent me a new beat (we couldn’t use the old one because Trenthian was no longer in the picture) and when I heard those familiar lyrics in the chorus I knew two things. 1) The song was going to be crazy fun and 2) Router was going to be pissed. Router really dug the demo she had recorded for the original BF and I knew when she heard this new version she was going to lose her shit. I related this to Shael and he had been thinking the same thing, so we decided pretty early on that we would feature Router on the track. So we send her the new beat and she tells us that it’s too fast and she can’t record her vocals and she can’t find time to get to Tanner’s in order to record it. Feeling good that we tried, we moved on with the song. I would have loved for Router to be on the track, but now that the EP is out, I’m glad we don’t have any special featured artists. I mean The Grammar Club is already so swollen with talented musicians and artists that we really don’t need features, that was the whole point of working on this project together in the first place.
I rewrote what became my second verse first because I really wanted to re-work that whole hadooken line back into this mix. I then wrote another verse and Shael didn’t really dig it. I did, but looking back I don’t think it was very fitting. It was kind of angry. I was a little angry when I wrote it. So I flipped the whole thing and wrote what is now the first verse of Balloon Flight. I also wanna say that the part where I start out with “And I drive real slow…” is a total rip off of Kanye West’s “Drive Slow.” However, Shael adding vocals on top of mine covers it up a little and really makes that part stand out I think. I also threw in that last line about the strip club in honor of a friend of mine who worked as a stripper like twice, but when she told me about it we talked about how awesome it would be if she stripped to one of my songs. It was also the first time that I decided that I wasn’t going to be Beefy on this project and that I would just be the character in whatever story I wanted to tell. So while I’ve never been one to get with the ladies, I still wanted to talk about loving 3 chicks in a minivan.
That’s probably enough. I honestly can’t speak to the music making aspect of this or any of the other tracks on the EP. If you guys dig shit like this you should really demand that Shael, Glenn, Adam, and Snyder do the same thing. I plan on doing this for every track on the album, so if you’re not a fan…tune in much later. I also plan on adding more about our group’s little history and how Shael and Glenn were able to rope Adam into this beautiful train wreck. Anywho, it’s 4am, I have a sample article to finish, and I have to prepare for a drunken tomorrow. You stay classy…Planet Earth!
