All Over the Map
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Rhonda Baraka
Lyrics Born steps aside from his lonely sampling ways to be Everywhere at Once with a gang of musicians and influences running the gamut from Timbaland to The B-52’s
TWO (OR MORE) PLACES AT ONCE
On Everywhere at Once, his second solo offering, Lyrics Born is definitely all over the place, shamelessly indulging his many musical influences and tastes and somehow finding a way to meld them together. “I definitely wanted to pursue a lot of different styles on this album,” he says. “The title Everywhere at Once is kinda where I was coming from musically. I knew it was gonna be all over the place, and I knew I was gonna explore a broader range of topics and emotions on this album than I had in the past. Production-wise, I knew I was gonna do it differently than I had done in the past. I just wanted to take it further than I had ever done before, and as I listened to what all my peers were doing, I wanted to take it further than what I heard other people doing, as well.”
The influence of Lyrics Born's musical heroes is also everywhere. “I was referencing so much music when I made this album because I was really trying to connect in specific ways,” he explains. “I was listening to everything from Curtis Mayfield to The B-52's to Devo to New Edition to Timbaland to the Black Eyed Peas to old-school hip-hop like Jungle Brothers. I was just trying to tie it all together.”
Tying a variety of mismatched pieces together into one uniform sound wasn't an easy task for Lyrics Born. “I was aware of the fact that a lot of people, particularly recently, are trying to tie in all their influences and tie in a lot of music, which I think is great,” he observes. “I think the number-one challenge is, how do you bring all these styles together and still make it cohesive and make it a good, solid listen all the way through? I think the key to that is really in the sequencing. One has to follow the other one in a way that feels right. When you play live, you have to put all these songs together that you've done over your entire career, and you've got to string them together in a way that makes the show make sense, so I just bring that logic to the album-making process.”
By daring to be everywhere at once, Lyrics Born assumes what many artists and label executives dare not assume: The audience is not one-dimensional; listeners can actually listen to and appreciate songs that are drastically different from one another — all in one sitting. “I've been waiting for this day,” he enthuses. “People are so varied in their tastes, and they're not afraid to express it anymore because of the way everybody listens to music and because of the way everybody acquires their music. It's not coming from any one source anymore. People are getting information everywhere, and that sort of ties in to the theme of the album. I think it's a great time in a lot of ways. I think it's a very challenging time, a very difficult time for music, but I still do feel that it's very exciting at the same time because we are everywhere at once.”
ALONE AGAIN…OR?
Lyrics Born is the first to admit that he faced challenges while recording Everywhere at Once, the most prominent of which was using live instrumentation. His debut solo release, the 2003 Later That Day… (Quannum), which spawned the hit “Callin' Out,” was largely sample-based. “Back then, it was me all alone with thousands of records and an MPC, but on this album, I barely touched the MPC. We did everything in Pro Tools, and it was using all live instruments. We looped instruments and we looped the musicians, but I wasn't lifting any samples.” Instead, he says, he brought in an array of artists, musicians and producers, among them Poets of Rhythm and Joyo Velarde, as well as Jurassic 5's Chali 2na and producer/singer/musician RJD2. “It was interesting because a lot of the technology has changed from the time I did my last album,” he says. “I was using a lot of synths, a lot more drum sounds. It was just a brand-new experience in a lot of ways.”
With 18 solid tracks, the set is about as diverse as they come, each song creating a vibe and an energy all its own. Lyrics Born says his favorites are the single “I Like It, I Love It,” the Devo-inspired “Do U Buy It?” and the introspective “Is It the Skin I'm In?”
“‘I Like It, I Love It’ is a real supercharged Lyrics Born song,” he says. “When I hear it, it's a sound that I'm very comfortable with. ‘Do U Buy It?’ is the exact opposite. It's something new that I've never done before. It's funny to me. When I listen to that song, I kinda laugh a little bit. As for ‘Skin I'm In,’ I'm not sure if — from an Asian-American perspective — there are too many songs like that.”
Lyrics Born says by far the most challenging song for him to record was the emotional “Whispers,” which recounts the story of a close friend's death. “It was really hard to write the song because that's your best friend,” he says. “But once I kinda got over the emotional hump and decided that I was indeed going to do this, it kinda wrote itself.”
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