So this period… oh boy let me tell you about this period. So, Adam and I began working on The Basement after our 2011 demo tape Operation: RoughCuts. This was a 6-song tape we did in high school with another rapper friend of ours, Persona. Eventually upon graduation Persona moved onto greener pastures and decided to leave rap behind (although he continued to beatbox for an acapella group throughout college).
So, Adam and I had all these beats. I had just moved to New York in 2012 for a semester, and Adam was going to Yale. That’s when we started to record The Basement, our debut mixtape. I used to practice in my little apartment room shouting into the mic, with my roommates one room over watching TV thinking “what the hell is this gonna sound like?”
I kept recording, throughout the Fall of 2012, and that’s when we shot the Oaktree video in Central Park. Shout out Matt Westrich, a great videographer. 2012 came and went, with Pro Era’s late great Capital Steez sadly taking his life in December of 2012. It was weird I was in New York for that… made me feel more connected to it all. I remember seeing Joey Bada$$ and Capital Steez at a Brooklyn College event in October of 2012, they put on a dope show! But weirdly enough Steezs’ verse on Survivor Tactics had the backing track for his vocals, and that seemed to really upset him on stage… he just seemed angry.
So, in the beginning of 2013 I move to LA to start my time at USC. This was a crazy time because it was like February and 80 degrees outside. I had never seen anything like it! I joined a frat and kind of got distracted from recording and working on The Basement for a while. It wasn’t until my sophomore year (2014) that I had gotten back into recording, going to the USC music practice rooms with all my equipment to record my verses. This process proved frugal, and although it was fun (tripping mushrooms in the booth), I scrapped most of the thousands of files I had laid down.
The Basement was not complete until 2016, finishing up the verses over the same beats from 2012 while Adam was patiently waiting on the East Coast. I called these the Blue Room Sessions. I had just moved into a new apartment and my only furniture was a big blue Love Sac. I recorded in this apartment from 2015-2016, and once I felt like I got the takes down (after four years) I bounced them to AB on a flashdrive. Sadly, that was the last time I ever saw AB, weirdly enough. It’s like our job was complete.
I moved back to Evanston in 2017, and 2018/2019 got the tape mixed by Sam Hudgens (great musician, check him out). The tape first dropped May 22, 2019. That’s the story of The Basement, an archive of my college years and a musical document of my coming of age. Shout out to AB for the collaboration, love you bro hope to meet again.