I had been hanging around with Nfa Jones
from 1200 techniques at the time, meeting him through monthly soul gigs
and thought he would be a great addition to the album, listening to the
sound of his voice and discovering he could sing really well, he work
well with friend and touring companion Dylan Smith from the band Direct
Influence. The day of the recording Nfa and Dylan, I had a call at work
at about 1pm from Dylan saying he had finished work and wanted to get
some drinks, but I couldn't as I was at work until 4.30pm and could not
get out of it, so I basically had to beg him to not go home as the track
would not sound anywhere near as good if he was not there and Nfa was
moving to Lion, France the week after so we could not reschedule. Dylan
agreed and came down from Traralgon, got some lunch and picked me up
from work, we grabbed a slab and headed out to the studio. When we
arrived at the studio we were met there by Choi who was setting up at
the time and Dylan started putting down a couple of ideas when Nfa
showed up. Nfa had spent the day writing for the track and the hook came
from two different ideas Dylan and Nfa had, which were put together
worked fantastically their harmonies were like nothing else. Nfa put his
verse down when the hook was finished and was quite proud because I got
a name drop! 'Devine mind's think ahead so get ready'. Nfa has a
different style of doing back ups which he sings instead of doing
straight vocal lines, which I thought was cool. Dylan jumped up next and
started beat boxing which was a really good idea and I thought we would keep it in.
Dylan started on his verse but due to time constraints weren't able to
finish his verse. The guys left and Choi and I spent some time editing
the track and when I decided to leave I called a cab and he quoted me
one hundred dollars to get to the city from Ferntree Gully to the City
so quite inebriated so I told him that was bullshit and caught a train
home.
A couple of weeks later I was able to get Dylan back in the
studio, as
he had not got the chance to finish his vocals at the first session and
had rewritten most of his verse and we had a lot of fun with his adlibs,
which are still in the mix. For the third vocalist on the track I had a
massive think about who it could be, researching and doing a lot of
listening to who would complement Nfa and Dylan and in the in decided on
my favorite member of 'The Herd', Ozi Batla. I had Ozi through Mista
Savona and he was glad to jump in, and recorded his verse up in Sydney
pretty much straight away, which was lucky as he was hospitalised two
weeks later from falling off his bicycle, punctured his pelvis, broke
his jaw and lost a couple of teeth. With Ozi's verse in hand and Nfa
back in town, I grabbed Nfa and we trekked out to Choi's to arrange the
track and Nfa to do a couple of back ups. Thinking Dylan had a really
good idea with beat boxing in the introduction I decided to get ex band
member and Australian champion Scott 'Mech MC' Gould, to redo it as I
had him coming down to have a go at the song 'City lights' as well. I
met Scott in the city one afternoon where we fulled ourselves with
whiskey then headed out to the studio, unfortunately 'City Lights'
didn't work out the way I wanted, but we still left parts in, but Scott
ended up putting down twenty minutes of beat boxing and was one of those
moments where everyone pulled out their phones and filmed it, I am
quite surprised none of it made it on to Youtube. Even though I would
have loved to keep the twenty minutes on their Choi and I cut it down,
and the track was complete.
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