Song pages
Side 1
Presenting Declaime as the…
Poet of the Mic
God Bless, Less Stress, Mmhmm
Oceans Drowning
Rhythmic Tide
African Drums, the Heartbeat of the Earth
Side 2
A Trillion Neurons
Inhale the Calm, Exhale the Shade
O, the Key!
Ode to My Ride or Die
Raising the Vibration (Love Will Pave the Way)
Overview
After working on “Poet of the Mic,” Declaime wanted to keep working with me. I had no intended hip-hop direction – I have no bona fides there, and my use of the term “bona fides” probably gave that away – but I gave him all my existing instrumentals if he wanted to use them. I didn’t think I’d left any room for vocals in my work, but he found them! And because he thought my lyrics for Quality Mirrors were poetic, it led him to a poet persona that he kept through the album.
With few good vocal productions to my credit, I had to learn a lot on the fly if I was going to make an album filled with them. I also had to reconceive my songs so that they were centered on a vocalist instead of layer and arrangement reveals like they usually are. I did that largely by tightening or loosening Declaime’s vocal timings in the opposite direction of the instrumentals. If the song was big on precision, I could use him to humanize the feel. If the song had a lot of give already (like on “Desert Scorpion” with its abundance of acoustic instrumentation), then I tightened his timing so he held the song together better (as, in that case, it became “Rhythmic Tide.”)
From what I can tell, most poetry albums are poem-first. Somebody has made a poem and then a jam session happens for as long as the poem needs. Him writing poems to the music, in a more traditional rapper/topliner style, not only makes the poems more economical; it also means they were inspired by the different feels of the songs, giving the album a lot more genre variety than usual. I’m hoping that’s enough to make this effort feel fresh. It feels fresh to us, anyway. (As does the artwork, which was made by Sun Rizla in the style of a ’70s self-help book cover.)
Some press about it
Somebody should absolutely review this album.
First song: Presenting Declaime as the…
restlessmosaic.com 