The making of GOLD was an awesome story. I was dealing with so much at the time and music became my way to escape the stress of negative obstacles with bad energy that kept trying to hold me back.
After the breakout success of GLEEMING the pressure was on to not just be a one time fluke or lucky that happened to you situation. If you want to make it in this business on the creative side you have to be your best competition inorder to push yourself each and every time. Nobody ever speaks about the pressure or psyche of a producer or beat maker that caught a taste of success. Your next move has to be bigger than the next if you want to make it out here period.
Between that energy and the goal to push foward had to add up. So here I was in my 1 bedroom studio in Jersey City pushing that understanding into sound. I didnt want to use the same sounds from GLEEMING I instead wanted to use something bubbly something different as a main lead. I had a roland integra at the time and began to play around with some sounds. Once I created the main lead I filled the rest with lush accents and vocals stabs as pauses to create an atmosphere. I really came into this track with the idea I had from a previous track that had made with a future sade like sound. I remember I used to email a friend of mine former RCA President of A&R Derick Thompson and he used to critic honestly my first beat attempts. When he heard the sade inspired beat I made he actually liked it and that ok gave me a guideline towards the next. That is how I began to create the track for GOLD. it was actually a sonic answer to a previous track I made. This one was better and I knew we had something. Sent it right out via email to ALYST and had a great talk on the phone. Next thing a couple a days later he dropped the vocals to the beat and we made GOLD.
I loved this track because it had energy and everyone I played it for felt the same. Now the next step was to put the right visual to make it all real. At the time I got lucky and won a small business contest with COMCAST to air a commercial for 3 months for free in my local region. This was awesome news for AFFLUENT RECORDS so of course we took the op to make a debut commercial for ALYST.
I immediately began to resource and visualize what would occur. Part of being successful in this business is realizing you cant do everything yourself. Part of the success come from the team you put together to work with you.
I grew up in downtown manhattan and growing up with alot of kids from different neighborhoods all around me, I always looked for all the diamonds in each neighborhood and was always well liked and connected. That in mind is how I began to put this together because I joined forces with an old school friend of mine who specialized in photography. My man Joesph had the best most vivid photos. I saw his craft first begin taking video models pics and then began filming events. Being that we knew each other I would call him from time to time for his photo services for artists that I had.
The difference this time is that I needed not pictures but the ability to create a commercial. So here I go with my past experience at DEF JAM “making it happen” ideals and ask Joseph if we could create a commercial that needed to air on COMCAST. He was open and I went to check out locals but nothing was inspiring me until I saw Above the Rim movie on tv and it hit me it all starts in center court. So I went out to look for basketball courts to film the commercial. On a freezing day the team went out and filmed what we could. The whole thing was in the edit and J is a king at that. He sent me the video pieces and I told him what to clip to use. I purchased a basic mac app and took what we had created the final. It all came out HOT and J did the specs and we sent it to COMCAST. Needless to say they loved it and ALYST & AFFLUENT RECORDS got promoted during the holidays which was awesome.
Being that happened and I incorporated the GOLD beat into the commercial it set us up to create the video. Again inspired by my past I began to get a vision of the Death Row album where the artists had the face and torso pictured only behind a black background. That vision I said we can create into a video so I reached out to Joseph went to his studio in QUEENS and began to get to work.
We blacked out the apartment/studio setup in a small space and had ALYST dressed in all black and create a video where it was focused on his emotions and upfront face and hand gestures behind all in an all black background. Here ALYST pushed to connect with his emotion and character. He totally hit it out the ballpark and turn it into a homerun. Giving him presence with a black and white type of color frame to his face and torso which made it look very classic. Joseph edited it down to perfection and it was done.
I hired Dani Cortez as a pr and she sent out the single to various blogs and magazine sites all of them gave us the best reviews and pushed the single even further.
Again special shout out to DJ Enuff who also debut the single on HOT 97. That was beautiful and always grateful for his loving support.
I sent the video out to a video promotions company online and after several calls to them we finally got a placement to debut the video GOLD at Footlocker stores nationwide in their stores on daily rotation for the holidays. It was awesome and so proud because we all put this together out of nothing to become something bigger than we thought. Great second single and it gave me the room sonically to push for the next.
