Everyone knows as an artist you have to diversify you have to be fresh at all times. Yet no matter what for you to really impact you have to make that buzz go on fire. Posting music on the internet is the common outlet where artist hope to get discovered or added to a popular playlist in the hope the execs see them.
I grew up understanding a different formula one that is very clear. Simply if your record doesnt bang in a club its in no way going to have the momentum radio looks for to add you into regular rotation. You need to “Move the Crowd” the way Eric B & Rakim said. Your song has to get people excited and felt. You need a club record. For urban artists these days thats not as easy.
On ALYST next single this was the main next step create a catchy simple melody record thats bright enough and moves for the clubs. At the time on Instagram LL Cool J was announcing his new album he was working on for DEF JAM. LL to me like many is one of my favorite hiphop icons. His career and hits speak for himself his passion and energy is from another world when he hits that stage.
One of my favorite moments in my A&R career was working on the MR SMITH Album on DEF JAM. I was young in the game and was blessed to have been brought in by Chris Lighty into his company Violator. At the time Chris was the head of A&R at Def Jam and Lyor assigned him the task of creating LL’s next hit album. This is where I learned a lot of what I do today. Here is where I worked with a lot of top producers and recording studios. Everything for LL was top level because of who he was and what he achieved. So many stories and so many good times with the Violator & Def Jam family at the time enabled me to understand creation process and execution. I am eternally grateful for Chris Lighty and Mona Scott who took me under there wings and gave me my first plaque.
For years my mom never knew what I did for work. I always worked at retail stores or in the neighborhood so she never saw me do anything big until I started coming home with the plaques of the artist projects I worked on and finally she would say yeah he works in music lol.
Fast foward years later and LL has one more album to deliver to DEF JAM so when I saw the post immediately I went to it to create a track in todays aspects that would be a hit for LL. I guessed I was so inspired that the same night I actually came up with something hot. I flipped some synths and chopped some sounds into the MPC and played everything out. The final results was a hot beautiful progressive energy track that would make LL explode.
So here I am ready to go into shopping it when the flash hit my mind why not give this to ALYST see what he can do to it and maybe I can send that to LL when I get it back. So thats what I did why you ask because if I am working with a client I have to give them the best ops I can thats how I live and thats what I did. ALYST took the op and took it to the top. The track came back so HOT I didnt even send it out to LL I just made it ALYST next single. The track spoke for itself.
Again ALYST understood the message about feelings and emotions but yet place that with the right cadence and beat and OUT MY FEELINGS came to be.
The video was filmed at Jersey City’s FILM FACTORY. I choose to shoot there because I saw the vision for the video as reflections of feelings as the theme of the song. So inspired by Hype Williams use of colors I had this video shot in the same aspect. With each feeling was a different color tone. The song and video came out amazing.
