I’m beginning to realize why some bands take years between albums.
Hi. I’m MC Lars. You probably know my music if you’re reading this. My last CD came out in March of 2006 and I thought I’d give you guys all an update on what I’ve been up to with the new one, as it has been “a minute” as the rappers say. This article is complete with pertinent links.
I finished “The Graduate” in the fall of 2005. I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in January 2006 with three very cool roommates. It was an awesome year. I was touring to promote the album… toured the UK four times that year… toured Japan and Australia… and toured the US with the Matches and Whole Wheat Bread.
In 2006 I did a bunch of random tracks. I worked on a song called “Time Slows Down” with my friend Chris Ayer about riding the subways underneath New York. I did a song called “Quarter Life Crisis” with my friend Steve Connolly, the dude who sang on “Signing Emo” and has done a bunch of shows with me in the past.
When I came back from Japan, my friends in the Bay Area hip-hop group HardNox invited me to their Concord studio to do some music with them. I dropped a verse on their track and we started working on a new song for my record. We realized we had different perspectives/approaches to the song writing/production process so we put that song and any other future stuff on hold.
When I went back to England, I worked on a song with my UK friends who did “Internet Relations”, A Scholar and a Physician, and we did a track called “Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Religion I Learned from Daniel Johnston.” In the fall, I recorded “Hipster Girl” with my producer friend Mike Sapone, Steve, and my roommate Mike Kennedy of Bloodsimple and V.O.D.
In January of 2007, my friend Nick of Men, Women and Children made the beat for “White Kids Aren’t Hyphy” and I produced the rest of the track with Mike Sapone. We also did a few other tracks, one titled “Everyone’s a Little Bit Gay”, which had a sample/interpretation of the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Soul to Squeeze.” We also did a track with Chris Ayer called “Nerds Give Nerdcore a Rad Name”, which was an interpretation of Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”. What’s up expensive samples?
Then I went on tour with Suburban Legends and Patent Pending for most of February 2007 and the first week of March. I came back and saw the Mountain Goats in San Francisco with my friend Calvin, and did something for Live 105 in San Francisco to promote “White Kids Aren’t Hyphy.” I went to LA and worked on a few tracks with some friends. I did a song called “The Missing White Girl Syndrome” and redid “Everyone’s a Little Bit Gay” with my singer/songwriter friend Rob Seals (who worked on my last CD), and worked on a song called “Dudes Don’t Text Dudes” with my Stanford friend Julian Wass (who also did the bonus track for the Japanese version of my last CD). The songs were fresh, but they didn’t quite have their place on the album yet.
I went to SXSW to play the AbsolutePunk showcase and film something for Current.TV, then I flew back to New York to get ready for my tour with MC Frontalot. I recorded a song called “Friends Don’t Let Friends Watch Lost” with my friend Mike Russo and his band Teenage Girls. I toured all of April with MC Frontalot and his band, did a presentation for my friend at UCLA’s literature class, then flew directly back to the UK for the spring tour with Wheatus, Punchline, and Army of Freshmen. I recorded lyrics for a song called “All Your Dead Horses” by my friend Lee Smilex’s punk band in Oxford. I also did a track for my friend Seb’s band, the Keyboard Choir, and they just release it. More info on their site!
I came back and went to live in a cabin by Lake Tahoe for a month. The idea was to be there all summer and finish the record. I spent most of my time listening to old-school hip-hop records and printing out the lyrics and taking a highlighter and a pen and doing a “scansion” of albums like “Illmatic,” “Criminal Minded,” “the Chronic,” “Paid in Full,” etc to try to analyze how the masters of hip-hop wrote their rhymes. It was interesting to look at those songs like that… to really have time to analyze the rhymes and get excited about the technical side of lyrics and hip-hop. It was productive in its own way. I watched too many DVD’s by myself in the cabin, and occasionally went down to Lake Tahoe to swim in the freezing lake for inspiration… I started reading books after books about Buddhism and told myself that I needed to make a Buddhist concept album because I felt like the Buddha was trying to talk to me directly… that’s what being a lone for a month might do. I spent aweek making a diagram about how each song I was going to write for the album would tie into the teachings of the Buddha, i.e. the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. I started meditating to clear my head of all of the voices that resonate in it… who was I and what was I trying to say with these songs??
And then I had an idea. I would go to Thailand and become a Buddhist monk. I was going to go in July and August, partly because my manager told me how fresh Southeast Asia was. I started planning the trip, booking hotels and travel insurance and everything, until I realized that the night before, I hadn’t actually booked my ticket, I had just “reserved it” on the United Airlines website and when I called to confirm it was too late. It was time to put enlightenment on hold. I had a record to finish. The plan was then to put the trip off until September and keep working on tracks.
Brendan Brown from Wheatus and I had been talking on the phone about producing tracks. We both had time so I flew back to New York to stay with him in Long Island and finish the album. He met me at the airport on a sweaty Saturday July night and we went to his studio and got right to work. We worked for like four straight weeks on tracks and wrote about fourteen songs. It was busy but fun. We did a few of the songs with James Bourne, the great-hook-writer of Son of Dork. The songs ended up sounding more acoustic that other jams I’ve worked on before, which was cool… so we decided that a few of them would go on my CD and the rest we’d keep working on and release as a separate project later.
One night, Brendan and Missy from Wheatus and I went out to hang out in Northport, and we sat on the docks down by the water. We talked about religion and philosophy and death and inspiration and looked up at the stars. It was one of those summer nights you don’t forget. The rest of the summer I toured with the Aquabats and did a bunch of college shows.
Fall came. I wrote a track with Joe of Patent Pending. I went to Medieval Times on my birthday with my friend Rob and a bunch of our other homies… it was like a celebration for our friend Brian’s upcoming wedding. It was a surreal night. We came back to their house that night and listened to Megadeth and Slayer. Brian is an old-school Jersey metal head and he rips on the guitar. I came back to California and worked on some music with my Santa Cruz producer friend Ryan Lotz. We finished the music on a track that will probably make the album… it has a dance feel/with a Chemical Brother-esque break beat. He has a lot of parties at his commune in Santa Cruz, and I did some shows around there (one of which was shut down by the cops for being too noisy and going until really late). I drank a lot of Red Bull that month.
I went back to New York for a week and worked on some music with my friend Adam McLeer of the Lordz of Brooklyn. We did a disco song about Perez Hilton called “More than a Blogger”, and worked on a few beats… one being a sample of Fugazi’s “Waiting Room”, and another a really cool/funny southern sounding mash up with a Lynard Skynard riff. We had a lot of fun talking about all of the old-school hip-hop guys he’d done shows with and what it was like to tour with Wesley Willis and Sublime. His kids would run down the stairs every few hours and ask how the tracks were coming. There is constant activity and insanity in his Brooklyn home. i think there’s a show on Fuse about him and his family.
I went back to the UK to DJ my British promoter friend’s wedding. I did a few weeks of shows beforehand with my friends Last Letter Read. They are a lot of fun and my friend DJ and I rode with them for the tour. There were a lot of good memories, some of which were captured on my video blog and their video blog.
I came back home. I flew back to the East Coast for some more shows, including one with T-Pain and one with Lucky Boys Confusion. I caught up with my old friend Nate from college. I worked on some new tracks. I learned Logic Pro. I made a video for “White Kids Aren’t Hyphy” with my friends Tim and Odin. I did vocals for my friend Richard’s track for a school project. I played a few local shows and hosted the countdown for the local New Year’s Eve festival in Monterey.
I did a lecture about hip-hop to the Stanford English department in January and did one at UCLA later that month. I moved to Hollywood a few weeks into the year. I’ve been hanging out with Jus Rhyme of AR-15 and am starting to get involved with social activism stuff in LA area. I now live with my cousin, his dog Olive, his cat Dulce, and his two roommates, and I set up a small, portable recording studio in his house. I set up an M-Audio recording interface and am doing all of the new tracks with Reason and Logic on my MacBook Pro. ProTools took too long to become compatible with Leopard…. so…. peace ProTools!!
That’s what I’ve been up to. I’m going back to New York to finish a few more tracks for the album, and we’ll have about six total that will be completely done. I’ve been talking to Mark Hoppus about making a guest appearance on my song about global warming, as is my new friend “Weird Al” Yankovic. I’m also working on some new stuff with my BFS homies and am going to finish up a few of the tracks I did with Brendan. We have a song we did with Chris Ballew of the Presidents of the United States of America and I’m still talking to P.O.S. about doing an anti-corporate type track. MC Frontalot and I are going to drop rhymes about old-school versus new school video games on a beat that my friend Nick from Men, Women and Children did. He also wrote a T-Pain R&B club type parody track for me that we’re going to finish soon. I’ve been working on some tracks with Gaby, MC Frontalot’s keyboardist, as well as nerdcore-producer-extraordinarie, Badd Spellah. I’m also working on a promo for G4.
I used to wonder why it sometimes took bands years to make an album. Now I understand why. When you compltely immerse yourself in the creative process sometimes a year can go by and it feels like a week. But I’ve never been as excited to be working on an album in my life. There are so many talented people who have been contrbuting and it’s going to be very different and fun. Look for it later this year.
- Lars
