Speaker 1: R and B Money. We are.
Speaker 2: Thank take about the child. We are the authorities on
Speaker 2: ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 3: My name is Tank Valentine and this is the R
Speaker 3: and B Money Podcast, the authority.
Speaker 2: On all things R and B. No, no, look, you
Speaker 2: have started.
Speaker 1: We got song right.
Speaker 3: That it's the highest level. I'm not gonna do along
Speaker 3: that you today. I want to get bright to the ship.
Speaker 3: Give it up for Sam Hook n the building.
Speaker 1: You got a songwriter name, a songwriter name?
Speaker 2: Did you name yourself? Sam Hook?
Speaker 1: And we're starting off.
Speaker 2: I'm starting there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's get to it. So I was doing I
Speaker 1: was in a singing group. We was like fifteen, sixteen
Speaker 1: years old. He was in New York in South was
Speaker 1: on park doing rap rap hooks for these like gangster niggas.
Speaker 1: A nigganame facing a nigga named grim Face and Grim
Speaker 1: so Grim was scarier to me.
Speaker 2: It sounds like young.
Speaker 1: I went in the booth because I'm sure that's Grim
Speaker 1: Grim Reap. Yeah, I'm sure, sure. Yeah. I went in
Speaker 1: the booth, came out and some was like, y'all Sam
Speaker 1: cooked this nigga, Sam Hook. I looked at him. I
Speaker 1: was like, I'm keeping that name and I'm blocking him
Speaker 1: on everything, like thank God, like he gave himself, like
Speaker 1: he's a he turned his life around. Today he's the
Speaker 1: big homie still. But I always thought I would have
Speaker 1: owed him some type of paper.
Speaker 3: So him on some like on some comedy on some
Speaker 3: comedy type. Ship was like, man, I knows he ain't
Speaker 3: no Sam Cook, niggas Sam Hook.
Speaker 2: Yeah, facts, he was like I heard it.
Speaker 1: I was like, this is every name he gave you,
Speaker 1: a cold name. Shout out to Grim.
Speaker 2: Do you ever give out that?
Speaker 1: Just just for check some not my credits read Samuel
Speaker 1: sam Hook, Jehane.
Speaker 2: Because it got expensive again.
Speaker 1: I read that more than anything.
Speaker 3: I was about to say, I leave with that. Hey ladies, Hey,
Speaker 3: it's always that, Hey ladies, Samuel Jean, bitch, Samuel John.
Speaker 3: Can I help you with anything that we got?
Speaker 1: Like the fourth member of the fojis.
Speaker 3: Here, Sam, Let's go back to New York man, let's
Speaker 3: go back there.
Speaker 2: We're going.
Speaker 3: Let's go back to the beginning, before before the gangsters
Speaker 3: held you hostage, before Grim held you hostage for hooks.
Speaker 2: How did you.
Speaker 3: Even get to a point where that was something that
Speaker 3: you knew you could do or where you started My
Speaker 3: older brother.
Speaker 1: He wanted to sing, and to me still to this day,
Speaker 1: it's my idol.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so.
Speaker 1: Legit. I see him in the mirror singing, practicing, how
Speaker 1: he looks singing in church, and I wanted I wanted
Speaker 1: he singing in high school. He's doing everything and he's
Speaker 1: getting the girls for it. And to me, his snigger
Speaker 1: was Michael Jordan. It's like he couldn't do no wrong.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to be like him. I would go
Speaker 1: to school and like sing to girls or you know,
Speaker 1: stuff like that. And it started unfolding to where it
Speaker 1: was like, I want to do this for myself.
Speaker 2: But when did you know you had a voice? Did he?
Speaker 2: Did he tell you.
Speaker 1: I practiced on girls. I could sing to a girl,
Speaker 1: and that was.
Speaker 3: That if she if she gave you a certain reaction,
Speaker 3: that mirror the reaction that your brother was getting, then
Speaker 3: you knew you had a little bit.
Speaker 1: It was quiet. Yeah, So it started young, started writing
Speaker 1: poetry and if I needed a song and sing right
Speaker 1: one and then you'd write one. Yeah, I didn't even
Speaker 1: look at it like a songwright. Now I needed a
Speaker 1: song to sing?
Speaker 2: And what what grade is this that you're just writing?
Speaker 1: Fifth grade?
Speaker 2: So you needed a.
Speaker 1: Song that I was with a crew, So we all
Speaker 1: practiced together in fifth grade, Yeah, fifth, sixth seventh, y'all
Speaker 1: was moving with an intention way too early. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's not way too early.
Speaker 2: But you got to grade.
Speaker 1: You have to find your advantages. Fifth grade, you have
Speaker 1: to find your advantage.
Speaker 2: I was fast, that was my advent. That was sure, girl,
Speaker 2: how fast you want to race?
Speaker 1: I don't know how that works for you. I think
Speaker 1: you had to get in your talent show first to
Speaker 1: really get to it. In fact, it's hard not to
Speaker 1: ask y'all when y'all started. But this is my interview, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is well, I've always been doing this in
Speaker 3: some form of fashion. I was in church achoired as
Speaker 3: a baby, so that's that's what mine started.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we are you know for me church as well?
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, But I think my question is, like in
Speaker 3: fifth grade, right when you're saying, hey, we have a crew,
Speaker 3: let's write these songs and all of these things, what
Speaker 3: are the things or who are the people that you're
Speaker 3: looking at to make you even desire to do that,
Speaker 3: The things that are inspiring you to go in that direction.
Speaker 1: It's whatever my brother liked, I liked if he loved
Speaker 1: Brian McKnight, I love Roan McKnight. If he loved boy Man,
Speaker 1: I love boys Man. That was a great artist too.
Speaker 1: I don't think I ever found the passion for music
Speaker 1: because it wasn't right, and that was my passion. It
Speaker 1: was wanting to be like my brother. So I don't
Speaker 1: think I ever found the passion for it until like later.
Speaker 1: It was my way in. It was my language that
Speaker 1: I could speak other than doing dumb shit that that
Speaker 1: people respected.
Speaker 2: What about high school do you do? You do you
Speaker 2: find something.
Speaker 3: That that that gives you a little bit more confidence
Speaker 3: in terms of standing outside of your brother and believing
Speaker 3: it's more you than high school.
Speaker 1: I was a knucklehead, so it wasn't music. We would
Speaker 1: practice it. So I was born in Brooklyn, raised in
Speaker 1: Long Island. So my team we had it was four
Speaker 1: of us. Team was called Gemini three Geminis, but we
Speaker 1: lied into it. All four of us was and those
Speaker 1: are my brothers still to this day. After school we
Speaker 1: would go practice, go right. But then it was like
Speaker 1: a whole other side of me just doing dumb shit.
Speaker 1: So high school was mostly doing the dumb shit, practicing
Speaker 1: in my group and then going out to Brooklyn and
Speaker 1: doing like talent shows and shit like that.
Speaker 2: Did you win any those sound shows?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, we was like one twelve.
Speaker 2: Is that money involved?
Speaker 1: Short shit? Like yeah, three five hundred dollars type thing?
Speaker 2: And what are your what are your parents thinking at
Speaker 2: this time?
Speaker 3: Are they are they seeing you and being like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is special or are they just like, Okay, this
Speaker 3: is just kind of his brother did it, He's gonna
Speaker 3: do it. And I'm just asking because did your brother
Speaker 3: ever do anything professionally?
Speaker 1: He definitely started to okay okay, and then had a
Speaker 1: baby and you know, turned into a farther money into business.
Speaker 1: But my parents support wise, they didn't think it was
Speaker 1: real until I moved out. So I moved out sixteen
Speaker 1: years old and it was like I remember, oh, so
Speaker 1: shout out to my nigga los So, a person I
Speaker 1: grew up in church with in Brooklyn changed my life.
Speaker 1: So he was one of the first people to believe
Speaker 1: in me with his own pocket. That's your first investor,
Speaker 1: first investor, first like promoter, first manager. That's my brother.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I owe him like crazy. So he lived in Jersey,
Speaker 1: but we'd always travel to Brooklyn. We in Brooklyn all
Speaker 1: the time for church, and so he started bringing me
Speaker 1: out to Jersey. That's where I would meet like people
Speaker 1: related to why cleft and I'm fifteen years old, sixteen
Speaker 1: years old meeting everybody he knows in Jersey. He had
Speaker 1: attended high school with jay Z's nephew colleague, who ended
Speaker 1: up passing away, and colleague was starting a group called
Speaker 1: G and B Getting Money Boys. Right, College's best Friends
Speaker 1: was back in Brooklyn and the star Korean study Los
Speaker 1: introduced me to Korean Star in study. So now I'm
Speaker 1: in New York and I got a team in New
Speaker 1: York and I don't got to travel out to Jersey
Speaker 1: so much. I'm part of GMB sixteen years old. The
Speaker 1: group was over by the end, and they have me
Speaker 1: going to tom Square singing for girls, you know, sing
Speaker 1: on the train like they would put me through practice
Speaker 1: to be a singing artist development. And so I'd always
Speaker 1: be in Brooklyn mccooran study, always being Brooklyn mccorean study
Speaker 1: and college. Before he passed away, he got his girlfriend,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say a name. He's got his girlfriend pregnant, right,
Speaker 1: so while she was pregnant, Korean study who was like
Speaker 1: god going to be the godfather. They'd always be with her,
Speaker 1: taking care of her. So I show up and we
Speaker 1: all became crew and it was like GMB. One day
Speaker 1: we at Danielle's crab and a lady walks in and
Speaker 1: I think I was sitting too close to Danieller. So
Speaker 1: Danielle was full blown pregnant, so she ain't know what
Speaker 1: Tommy was. She never seen me before, so she's like, yo,
Speaker 1: who's this. I'm like, I'm saying, who are you right?
Speaker 1: And she was like, I'm Annie on Annie to you,
Speaker 1: So I didn't know what was going on. Who that was.
Speaker 1: She had bags in the hand, she walked to the
Speaker 1: back of the house. Cory Study is like, yo, bro,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's whole sister. So that day we all
Speaker 1: end up eating hot dogs I'm way too young, drinking
Speaker 1: Heinnekens with chilling making jokes. I'll sing for Annie, and
Speaker 1: we all like chilling right, Corey and Studied made me
Speaker 1: sing for anybody that walked in. It could be somebody, grandmother,
Speaker 1: they could be you know whoever. If they knew that person,
Speaker 1: then I had the talent. They showed it. So at
Speaker 1: the end of the night, Annie was like, yo, Dan yell,
Speaker 1: I love him, invite him to the baby shop, and
Speaker 1: so that baby shower. A few months later, I went
Speaker 1: to the baby shower my parents. I got my parents
Speaker 1: and get me like a family bible, you know, in
Speaker 1: scripted with her name on it as a gift. I
Speaker 1: went to the baby shower, and that's when I meet
Speaker 1: everybody that initially keeps like like changing my life. So
Speaker 1: it's all the It's Jay's nephews, mel Ro, It's uh
Speaker 1: Tata's son, Spanky nephews, Ravel, like the whole squad like
Speaker 1: and then they had my niggas JD. I wrote to me, Uh,
Speaker 1: everybody was in the basement and so uh Korean study
Speaker 1: like they always do. They was like Yo Sam sing
Speaker 1: and I had three songs on no beats, right. I
Speaker 1: had a song about weed, a song about shoes, and
Speaker 1: a song for girls. Right this shit you like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the song about shoes. The main lyrics like I like them,
Speaker 1: like I like my shoes clean, but never tats. And
Speaker 1: so when I was seeing that ship, they.
Speaker 2: Went crazy, Yeah I.
Speaker 1: Like them like I like my shoes clean, but never
Speaker 1: tied to loose. Right, So it was it was and
Speaker 1: then the weeds so and they went crazy over I
Speaker 1: started selling we like twelve years old, so everything that
Speaker 1: I was singing about was really yeah. So they all
Speaker 1: took a liking to me. We all chilling, we all
Speaker 1: laugh and we in the basement. All the grown ups
Speaker 1: is upstairs. It's like, yo, you want to be down
Speaker 1: with NBH. I look at Core and study like we
Speaker 1: GMB the niggas like Nigga say yes, And so I
Speaker 1: said yes. And that was the last time I went
Speaker 1: home to live with my parents. So it was eleventh
Speaker 1: grade and I stayed in Jersey. I was already always
Speaker 1: going out to Jersey the lowest crib and sleeping over
Speaker 1: his mom, calling my mom like Yo, what's Sami doing
Speaker 1: over here? Or just so you know Sammy's okay, you say,
Speaker 1: if he's over here. But that time was that's the
Speaker 1: last of it. And so I was sneak into mel
Speaker 1: and Ral. They would sneak me into their crib and
Speaker 1: have me inside the crib because I had nowhere to go,
Speaker 1: Nigga out here homeless with like anouncer and a half
Speaker 1: selling dubs. You see I'm saying, so I would just
Speaker 1: make sense every time anybody see me, I'm helping I'm working,
Speaker 1: I'm helping. I'm working. Los is helping me out. And
Speaker 1: if I need to close, Los got me. If I
Speaker 1: need the money, Lows got me. Loos would go to
Speaker 1: work to support my dream. Yeah, that's my brother. And
Speaker 1: so it took like two three months for on Mickey
Speaker 1: now Uh Meli's mother uh to come downstairs. And I
Speaker 1: wasn't making no sense. Now I'm lagging mad comfortable.
Speaker 2: Now you up.
Speaker 1: She looked look at in my face. She's like, Sam,
Speaker 1: where do you live? I looked at her in her
Speaker 1: crib and said here, So everybody starts dying laughing, and
Speaker 1: she was like, nigga, how old are you? And I
Speaker 1: told her my age. I'm like, I'm might be seventeen block.
Speaker 1: It was like, you understand what we can get in
Speaker 1: trouble black And then they found me, you're not going
Speaker 1: to school at this point either. Now I'm waking going.
Speaker 1: I'm waking up four and five am, taking the New
Speaker 1: Jersey Transit to the Path Train to the UH or
Speaker 1: the Path Train to UH Penn station in Manhattan, or
Speaker 1: Jay Train all the way to Jamaica Q four or
Speaker 1: the Dollar in to my neighborhood and going to school
Speaker 1: and night school because I was left back in everything.
Speaker 2: You're a hustle right now at sixteen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy. They found me a room to rent
Speaker 1: at that age, and my man Boge, it was our barber,
Speaker 1: his mother rented me a room for five point fifty
Speaker 1: So sixteen years old, twenty years ago. This is when
Speaker 1: my bills started. And uh saying he at the street
Speaker 1: money that and lower. I'll never take him out the store. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I fucked my reup up, I'm good for that.
Speaker 1: At that end, we've all yeah, I just had really
Speaker 1: really forgiving big home. But man, this man makes sure
Speaker 1: I can Yeah, I mean I could get back. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: looking it off.
Speaker 2: That was it.
Speaker 1: It was selling bud and relying on lootse and then
Speaker 1: relying on the squad. Everybody took me in like yo,
Speaker 1: they needed to because I'm the only one there without
Speaker 1: so their mom say you had to go after that
Speaker 1: day immediately, But that same day they that same day
Speaker 1: somebody was like, I think Bow's mom is renting the
Speaker 1: room and that was it, and I moved in over there.
Speaker 3: How far was she from where you were already standing blocks?
Speaker 3: Oh okay, got it, gotta got it.
Speaker 1: Blocks for kids right, whole neighborhoods for us today, Like
Speaker 1: I would never walk that today, but I was trooping.
Speaker 1: I ain't learn how to drop since until I was
Speaker 1: twenty four out here, but they made sure that you
Speaker 1: stay close because yeah, I was true, I was true.
Speaker 1: He's in the sky to make sure he's me and
Speaker 1: rote to me. And there was a female artist who
Speaker 1: after I got evicted from Boscript for not paying the rent,
Speaker 1: her and the family, Alexis Kiki Ak. She and her
Speaker 1: mom took me into their crib for like eight months.
Speaker 1: My man Monty had my clothes on his porch the
Speaker 1: whole eight months. Like I was getting taken care of
Speaker 1: by my crew. That's incredible. And we would be in
Speaker 1: the studio, we rinding, Oh everybody's kids though, yeah, everybody
Speaker 1: is two thousand and six, eighteen years old. So I
Speaker 1: turned seventeen there, turned eighteen there, and then mid eighteen
Speaker 1: or before that. So like my first meeting in life
Speaker 1: is the whole crew is like, yo, we're going up
Speaker 1: to the whole script. We're gonna perform.
Speaker 2: Fans.
Speaker 1: They gave us like a day's notice. We all pulled
Speaker 1: up before that. Hol's nephews would my space was lit
Speaker 1: for us because whole nephews would get the rocker feller change.
Speaker 1: We all be able to my Space picture it up
Speaker 1: or do a performance with rock chains all. You couldn't
Speaker 1: tell me I didn't have a contract nigga, especially in
Speaker 1: my neighborhood niggas I was out. I was that nigga
Speaker 1: and so. But the truth that was really happening is
Speaker 1: we barred in these changs and were stunted. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: first meeting was at whole script. So me wrote Timmy
Speaker 1: Jay Dot, I don't want to leave nobody out, the
Speaker 1: whole crew. We all we all went up there, We
Speaker 1: all formed our songs. I only had one song recorded
Speaker 1: that we played for him that day. And then I said,
Speaker 1: they want me to sing a cappella. I sang now
Speaker 1: a coppella and whole tap my ma and Manti like
Speaker 1: he got it. And so that day was like inspirational,
Speaker 1: but it was like Yo, at the end of the meeting,
Speaker 1: it's not like we got signed. Hope said, y'all don't
Speaker 1: do nobody no favors. He was like, so, don't think
Speaker 1: you about to get a favorite. Let you name reach mine.
Speaker 1: I throw your boone exact verbata and so I remember
Speaker 1: being in there like one, I'm looking around like this
Speaker 1: is what could happen if you really really grind. And
Speaker 1: then two, I'm like, yo, where did this nigga? There
Speaker 1: was a secret door that somebody who worked for him
Speaker 1: came out of with pizza. It's like, we in this
Speaker 1: room right now, and you didn't see a door some
Speaker 1: way somebody came outside with pizza. And so I remember
Speaker 1: just looking at it like, you know, being inspired, but
Speaker 1: also saying being hungry, like yo, he said, let our
Speaker 1: name reach his, you're gonna throw some bomb. And so
Speaker 1: grind time for us. It was like, yo, it's time
Speaker 1: for us to turn up. One, I'm outside like I'm
Speaker 1: living in somebody's basement. It's not easy for me and
Speaker 1: my parents. I love my parents to death because they
Speaker 1: don't play that one spoil uh you know, one spoiled?
Speaker 1: What do they say? One rotten apple and a bunch.
Speaker 1: So at the time I would be against them. I
Speaker 1: was like my dad's arch nemesis and everything you don't
Speaker 1: want for a son if you're a pastor, you know,
Speaker 1: or especially if you're past pastor. Today is my best friend.
Speaker 1: But back then I was just arch nemesis, like I
Speaker 1: was not the one, and so I wasn't going back there.
Speaker 1: So it was like, yo, it's either up or or
Speaker 1: like I I got nothing else to do college. I
Speaker 1: never even thought about that shit. So we kept on grinding,
Speaker 1: kept on grinding. The group started to like grow up
Speaker 1: and grow out of being a group. So I moved
Speaker 1: to Lower East Side, Manhattan, sixth Street and Avenue D.
Speaker 1: We was renting a we were subletting, the cribbing the
Speaker 1: projects right and my man, my brother's older my brother's
Speaker 1: man's had me paying the whole rent, but he was
Speaker 1: telling me that I was paying half. I'm not eighteen
Speaker 1: years old. So when I found out, I was heeded.
Speaker 1: So I take a Greathound out to Georgia and that's
Speaker 1: my first time, second time going to Georgia to visit
Speaker 1: my older brother. He was out in Augusta, Georgia. And
Speaker 1: while I'm out there visiting my man, fifth a trive
Speaker 1: who from high school moved to Atlanta. He was two
Speaker 1: hours away in Atlanta from Augusta. He calls me, He's like, yo,
Speaker 1: you gotta see Atlanta. And I've never been in atl before.
Speaker 2: What year is this?
Speaker 1: Two thousand and seven? Yeah, yeah, right, So into two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven or something like that, he drives two
Speaker 1: hours to pick me up. Me and this nigga is
Speaker 1: like third grade sandbox and he had already found ways
Speaker 1: to like he was today, he's killing it. He got
Speaker 1: a company called Millie Murchers. All over Atlanta. He's doing
Speaker 1: his thing. He was already en route to be in
Speaker 1: one of the the illest hustlers like back then, you
Speaker 1: know a g he had he was he'll hand out
Speaker 1: all AG's fly. He had all accounts for all the
Speaker 1: club's a g O H Jacob Yorick he was. So
Speaker 1: he had a way already out there. So he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show you the A.
Speaker 1: I'm competitive and ship. So when we two hours away
Speaker 1: from Atlanta, I'm like, I think I want to show
Speaker 1: him something too, Like I don't want him just to
Speaker 1: stun on me. So I called at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: Vaughn Vaughan Smith. I called Vaughan and he was my manager,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, Yo, you know anybody in uh in
Speaker 1: the A. He's like yo, gino, he's he's he's running.
Speaker 1: He's uh the engineer for Neil go up there. I
Speaker 1: had already been around Neil because you know, being around everybody.
Speaker 1: I was around up Top and around those days is
Speaker 1: when Neo got signed. So I called Gino. Gino already
Speaker 1: knew him from from Brooklyn. He had a studio on
Speaker 1: J Street. So I called Geno. I'm like, Yo, what
Speaker 1: you doing? I'm about it being the A. So he
Speaker 1: he tells me come up to Neo's studio. Everything travels
Speaker 1: about to show me. It was like, nah, nigga, I
Speaker 1: just beat you. I'm going to Neo shit right right.
Speaker 1: So we go to Neo shit and and Gino's like,
Speaker 1: Gino's like, Sam, you need to stay here. Second he
Speaker 1: said it, I said, I am staying. I was already
Speaker 1: getting double charged for the projacks up top. I don't
Speaker 1: speak Spanish, and everybody in that neighborhood it's like I'm
Speaker 1: trying to order eggs. Don't even know how to say nothing.
Speaker 1: So it was like, your fucking I'm just stay out
Speaker 1: there now. I know that I learned the hallway. I
Speaker 1: tell you off camera, okay, so we get out there, Uh,
Speaker 1: we tell you to stay yeah, And I said, fucking
Speaker 1: I'm staying. So now when we leave there we seen
Speaker 1: the plaques like it was only a year or two
Speaker 1: later since Neil came out, and it was already a
Speaker 1: hallway full of plaqus.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Neil got cracking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if my man is in there, if you don't notice,
Speaker 1: like every time somebody had something, I was ready to leave.
Speaker 1: Know he's ready, no mad, Yeah, wherever I'm going, whatever
Speaker 1: the opportunity is, because it's not like I got a
Speaker 1: fullback plan. My fullback plan and my idea as to
Speaker 1: how to ever get fed was pick up a pack
Speaker 1: and so imagine what I would have been without this
Speaker 1: talent guy game.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I'm sitting down at Travs crib the first night
Speaker 1: and he's renting a room in this big ass house.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yo, TRAYV, you're doing it and this is
Speaker 1: back when you could craiglist a roommate type thing. And
Speaker 1: his roommate calls him out, the person he's renting from
Speaker 1: Colls Mount and said, yo, I ain't tell you you
Speaker 1: could have niggas up in the crib and the walls
Speaker 1: paper things. So he probably thought because the doors closed,
Speaker 1: I didn't hear it. So I heard it, and I
Speaker 1: didn't want my nigga to be in any type of
Speaker 1: pickle or just be slowing them up. I probably knew
Speaker 1: a girl or two in that land. I call a
Speaker 1: girl same night, she can't pick me up. The way
Speaker 1: Travis tell the story is the next time he saw me,
Speaker 1: it was a few days later. I already had an apartment.
Speaker 1: The way it really happened, I called my dad, said,
Speaker 1: your dad, I found an apartment for seven hundred and
Speaker 1: ten dollars on seventeen p Street Street, Midtown. Mindre, I
Speaker 1: didn't know what goes on at nighttime on them blocks
Speaker 1: in Midtown. It gets crazy, so but fuck, it was
Speaker 1: the cheapest thing I could find and moved in. The
Speaker 1: only friend I had out there was my man Drave.
Speaker 1: I had my man theon that left since high school.
Speaker 1: He lived in like Beuford, far a little far away
Speaker 1: as far that. I had a rocker where Snorkel that
Speaker 1: my man Mail gave me and the inside they had
Speaker 1: first I was sleeping at So I'm living in the
Speaker 1: studio apartment. I don't have nothing but the eight hundred
Speaker 1: dollars my dad gave me. I spent seventeen on moving in,
Speaker 1: so I got ninety dollars.
Speaker 2: You see what I'm saying, I do.
Speaker 1: So the only thing I could think to do is
Speaker 1: like look around, find a pack. So I'm back then.
Speaker 1: You know, apartment buildings had what do they call it,
Speaker 1: like business centers? Yeah, yeah, and if you lived there,
Speaker 1: you could just so I'll be on my Space and
Speaker 1: make sure that anybody, especially girls like they could see
Speaker 1: that my MySpace picture had the Rockefeller chain, So I'll
Speaker 1: just leave my shoulder over so they could always see.
Speaker 1: And then so I've seen this one dude. I won't
Speaker 1: say his name, but he was getting money in the
Speaker 1: building and I keep seeing him. He ended up being
Speaker 1: my plug. He put me on, and then he also
Speaker 1: taught me how to do things beyond just the weed
Speaker 1: that I was used to doing, like selling wise, and
Speaker 1: he got me into a world. Now it's like I'm
Speaker 1: getting chicken and I'm going to see Geno at the
Speaker 1: studio and you know, and that went super sour. So
Speaker 1: my main them that I brought up earlier. We sold
Speaker 1: candy in like fourth grade. My man, my man's old
Speaker 1: little sister, Tracy. She she dated the security guard at Walgreens.
Speaker 1: We give him twenty dollars, he'll let us go. Still
Speaker 1: old candy. We got to wake up early though he
Speaker 1: was the night time.
Speaker 2: To wake up earlier.
Speaker 1: Fourth grade, we sold candy. We would go bag up
Speaker 1: the candy into fifteen dollars bags, divvy it up, give
Speaker 1: people bag, telling him to send us back, you know,
Speaker 1: twelve dollars or ten dollars, you know. And so my
Speaker 1: man Theon, his cousin out in London. He had an
Speaker 1: og cousin out in London. So his cousin out London
Speaker 1: got HI my cell phone back then when we was kids.
Speaker 1: And the first day that Theon got to sell, his
Speaker 1: cousin wanted to talk to me. He was like, Yo, bro,
Speaker 1: I love how you're working with my little cousin. Yo,
Speaker 1: you got him. You got him really out here like
Speaker 1: getting money. Like I love what you're doing with him,
Speaker 1: you know. And so I felt I knew he was
Speaker 1: a gangst in London. I'm like infatuated with thugs at
Speaker 1: this age. It was like my parents are super like
Speaker 1: I was super sheltered. So in church, I loved the thugs.
Speaker 1: In school, I loved this like my boy, yeah exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: So I brought that up to say that we always
Speaker 1: stayed in touch with him until the I moved to Atlanta.
Speaker 1: So now that thea's I'm back in Georgia. Deanna took
Speaker 1: a couch out of his mom's uh garage that she
Speaker 1: wasn't using. That was my best. He brought me a
Speaker 1: little TV, a little CD player and then I played
Speaker 1: my BCDs on that and I was in the spot,
Speaker 1: trapping my way out, just trying to stack right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Period. And so my first trip to London is because
Speaker 1: when I got when he put me back on with
Speaker 1: you put me back on the phone because his cousin
Speaker 1: was like, yo, how you how you even getting around?
Speaker 2: Like yo?
Speaker 1: I was mad proud to tell him I'm a road
Speaker 1: star now trapping blah, really proud to tell him that.
Speaker 1: He gets scared for me, and he's like saying, if
Speaker 1: you're gonna do that, come out to London, right and
Speaker 1: I'll teach you how to do it the right way
Speaker 1: when I get out there, top boy. And I was
Speaker 1: working out in London for three four weeks learning how
Speaker 1: to be a top boy in London. And when he
Speaker 1: sent me back, I got really nice with it in
Speaker 1: Atlanta and so all this happens lo and behold my
Speaker 1: plug and the robbing home of the finests. So now
Speaker 1: you robbing me, I get better out of him than him.
Speaker 1: He violates, and so now I got no plug, got
Speaker 1: no money, and I'm shook because I'm not built for
Speaker 1: no wild shit that I was going through. And you
Speaker 1: were how old at this point, nineteen eighteen nineteen, and
Speaker 1: so Gino keeps calling me to the studio. He keeps
Speaker 1: calling me to the studio. My man, mister Tango's son
Speaker 1: became like my brother, and so he starts bringing me
Speaker 1: to the studio. One day they set up the meeting
Speaker 1: because I'm fucking homeless at this time. I'm living in
Speaker 1: I got evicted in Atlanta. Everything went shot, goes bad.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: Mister and Gino set me up a meeting with Tango,
Speaker 1: ne Yo's manager. When I just got there, you know,
Speaker 1: a skier, a skier found he was playing some producers
Speaker 1: that he had from Amsterdam. Tango looked him dead in
Speaker 1: the eyes, thatt them niggas suck. And I'm sitting here
Speaker 1: one I need to make it today because I'm I'm
Speaker 1: sleeping in a vacant crib and the bluff with for
Speaker 1: my boys. We turned the lights on, but it's vacant.
Speaker 1: So I need to make it. I didn't know what
Speaker 1: making it looks like and how fast it takes to
Speaker 1: get it back. So and I'm scared because the way
Speaker 1: Tango just spoke to this nigga, I never seen somebody
Speaker 1: get violated like that. And so now my hands is
Speaker 1: shaking and it's time to sing. He's like, Yo, you
Speaker 1: got music. I didn't have nothing to play. So he's like, YO,
Speaker 1: sing something I didn't realize. I never learned someone else's
Speaker 1: song in my life. I could have sang you every
Speaker 1: Day Struggle by fifth or by Biggie, but I couldn't
Speaker 1: sing a whole song from anybody in music because you
Speaker 1: were writing your own song. Yeah since fifth grade. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I said I got my own songs. I thought
Speaker 1: I played the same way I'd always played it, sing
Speaker 1: my own song and win. Not for a person who
Speaker 1: manages the best songwriter in the world at that time.
Speaker 1: My songs was and shit to what Neo was coming
Speaker 1: out with. So I sing my voice shaking, I sound nuts.
Speaker 1: Tango looks at me like this nigga sucks too, right,
Speaker 1: and I know Tango, so I see, Yeah, it's exactly
Speaker 1: how it is how you're gonna get it and and
Speaker 1: I love him for no fluff facts. His son is
Speaker 1: the exact same way you ain't. You ain't And you
Speaker 1: could get react a certain type of way to it
Speaker 1: until you realize that you rather find out the truth
Speaker 1: now than let somebody watch the take time bombing, so
Speaker 1: to save my ass, Geno, Right, Geno's like, but he
Speaker 1: could write though. Tango's response, he looks a skinned like Yo.
Speaker 1: Them producers suck, he sucks. Put them in the studio
Speaker 1: if they exact words. Bro, I'm talking About'm getting like
Speaker 1: I'm already broke, homeless nigga. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: it's like I just heard that I sucked, and I
Speaker 1: know I sucked. My voice was shaken even on this podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm nervous. So I was finding out that the Spotlight's
Speaker 1: not for me, okay, you know, but not knowing that's
Speaker 1: what I was finding out. I was just always trying
Speaker 1: to because you were you were being you were being
Speaker 1: pushed pushed as an artist. Yeah, yeah, like that was
Speaker 1: the only thing. Yeah, right, you know what I mean, Like, yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: he completely just tore that down. It was quite for
Speaker 1: that forever, right. Geno's like, nah, but he writes though,
Speaker 1: which was to me a lie because it's I didn't
Speaker 1: write for anybody else ever in my life. So he
Speaker 1: said it in a way that implies that you were
Speaker 1: right for someone else, period, and so that wasn't the fact.
Speaker 1: But I looked at him like, yeah, double down like anything.
Speaker 1: I don't care if it was mopped the studio, Yeah
Speaker 1: that he mops. Yeah, I would did it. I needed
Speaker 1: to stay right.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: A Skier was already getting shit done. He was already scared.
Speaker 1: But it's just those producers Tango wasn't fucking with or
Speaker 1: Skier who's so hungry and taught me. He taught me
Speaker 1: one of the dopest things. He was like saying, you
Speaker 1: got to learn the kit. I was like, what's the kid?
Speaker 1: He said, keep in touch. That's the kit for every
Speaker 1: relationship that you find value in. When you when you're
Speaker 1: saying by, think of the next time you're gonna follow up,
Speaker 1: think of the intention for the next phone called you know,
Speaker 1: or even state if it's a really important, state, this
Speaker 1: is when we're gonna speak again. And that's helped me
Speaker 1: a lot, even if I don't tell you when I'm
Speaker 1: gonna reach out to you again. I can write it
Speaker 1: down and keep my promise. So he comes up to
Speaker 1: me hungry, like yo, and he fucked with his producers heavy.
Speaker 1: He comes up to me, He's like, yo, if I
Speaker 1: put you in the studio, how long would you stay?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: I said, Yo, seventy two hours or something like that. Right,
Speaker 1: this is grind. This is a different error when niggas
Speaker 1: really grind. He calls an engineer and tells money to
Speaker 1: seventy two hour session. Sit Mike track Guru Johnson. He's
Speaker 1: today Chuck Harmony's partner and he was the engineer for Chuck.
Speaker 1: He calls uh, track Guru Gruz, agrees to do it.
Speaker 1: It's either forty eight hours or seventy two hours. Agrees
Speaker 1: to do this session on the first call. So now
Speaker 1: he drives me up how Old Military's studio and I'm
Speaker 1: in his studio right, and me and track Guru in there.
Speaker 1: He leaves us there with the BTCD from his guys.
Speaker 1: And I remember in that session, me and Guru, I
Speaker 1: was trying. I was trying to make phone calls and
Speaker 1: see how far he was from a customer. I didn't
Speaker 1: know how to drive, so I would I think I
Speaker 1: asked him to bring me somewhere so I could sell
Speaker 1: a fifty or something. I needed the money, and he
Speaker 1: was like, yo, bro, you got this opportunity. You don't
Speaker 1: need to be doing that. And he shit on me,
Speaker 1: made me feel real small, and I was super New York,
Speaker 1: super proud, super hard headed, and nobody could tell me nothing.
Speaker 1: We bicker and I had to listen to him because
Speaker 1: it's like, without you, I can't get a ride. So
Speaker 1: you said, no, I got I'm gonna stay in the studio.
Speaker 1: Shut up. And the way he was was like a
Speaker 1: big brother for those two three days that was in
Speaker 1: the studio. In my first songwriting session for writing for
Speaker 1: other people, three songs of which one of them is
Speaker 1: my first placement. So my first session, my first placement,
Speaker 1: I was writing like my life depended on it, right,
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's not like I got like a major
Speaker 1: hit out of it, but that's the life changing thing.
Speaker 1: So it's J. J. Holliday his second album, I land
Speaker 1: a ballot on there called Forever Ain't Enough, Right, and
Speaker 1: I wrote it about like my high school, like the
Speaker 1: girl that I loved right after high school.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: Legit, now it's like, yo, we got something to bring
Speaker 1: up to tango. Tango was the way out. It's like
Speaker 1: if I knew a way, it was the way in
Speaker 1: front of me. Is like he was there. That's the
Speaker 1: way a skier places the record. So I'm saying it backwards,
Speaker 1: a Skia places the record on Jay Holiday. Now that
Speaker 1: I got a placement, this is something tangos you want
Speaker 1: to find. This is all happening super fast. Though it
Speaker 1: sounds super fast, it probably took a month or two.
Speaker 1: I mean, listen, there are people in this I was
Speaker 1: having this conversation the other day. There are people that
Speaker 1: still don't have a place, that have been writing songs
Speaker 1: for years and years and years. So that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, my first session, Yeah, first session. A month
Speaker 1: goes by, you get your first placement, Like that's that's God. Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was raised in the most God fearing family and
Speaker 1: I did everything to go against what I taught at home.
Speaker 1: And bro, when I tell you, every bullet that flew
Speaker 1: since eighty eight never hit me, and we've been in
Speaker 1: situations where it could have. At that time, I didn't
Speaker 1: know how to respect God or love him correctly. I
Speaker 1: would call him when I needed them. I was like
Speaker 1: a bad kid with good credit. You know, he just
Speaker 1: keep getting running up the credit line.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: Tango ends up offering me a a management in a
Speaker 1: publishing deal. I signed that shit blindfolded, like I'm off
Speaker 1: the first record. The day I signed my deal, I'm
Speaker 1: sitting at Tango's office. He's right across from I signed
Speaker 1: that ship because this is something your signature you think
Speaker 1: like this is you think you got background music or
Speaker 1: some shit like that, Like, Yo, this is the day
Speaker 1: you about to pursue the happiness. Clap up the street, listen.
Speaker 1: I signed the deal. He looks at me, said, what
Speaker 1: you think Balloon's gonna come out?
Speaker 2: This s guy?
Speaker 1: Get to work, nigga, and thank God for that. Got
Speaker 1: to work. I got to work. Yeah, I got to work,
Speaker 1: and I was sleep in the studio. Mister would let
Speaker 1: me crash wherever he crashed, wherever I had to sleep.
Speaker 1: I thought that I'd get a crib after that, but
Speaker 1: it's like, yo, get to work, go earn. It's not
Speaker 1: You're not coming in here to just take put something in.
Speaker 1: And I got to see Neo Yo a few times.
Speaker 1: When I was down Neo with I could call Neil
Speaker 1: like bro I ain't eat yesterday. You think you hold
Speaker 1: me down, Neil will be like, be right there, come
Speaker 1: to the studio thinking about to give me two three
Speaker 1: hundred drop five racks on me. Wow, shit, neo. Nobody
Speaker 1: could say nothing to me about that guy, and a
Speaker 1: few people about you guys, but legit a few times,
Speaker 1: making sure you were straight. And then when I'd be like, yo,
Speaker 1: how am I gonna pay you back? And when I'm
Speaker 1: a god I got you one day back, he'd be like, Yo, bro,
Speaker 1: be great. I didn't give you that as a debt.
Speaker 1: I see it in you be great. So that's my brother.
Speaker 1: So going through all these things, it's part knucklehead legit,
Speaker 1: ungrateful for the family that I came from, and just
Speaker 1: going against all these greens. I start grinding it out,
Speaker 1: grinding it out for some reason or another. By two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, we get the whole team flies out
Speaker 1: to New York to LA for the first time. So
Speaker 1: I land in LA with meeting people. This is all
Speaker 1: the traveling you've done at this point. You've only been
Speaker 1: from New York to Georgia, New York, Jersey or Manhattan,
Speaker 1: Georgia and now LA for the first trip. First trip,
Speaker 1: so we're moving around, were moving around. We end up
Speaker 1: staying there for like a month or two. And on
Speaker 1: the last day of the first trip, I won't say
Speaker 1: their names, but my two homies they both had a
Speaker 1: crush on this this one girl, right, and they said,
Speaker 1: you're about to call it to the studio. She had
Speaker 1: an internship at Depth Jair and you know, you know
Speaker 1: back then, you meet an intern in Depth Jay and
Speaker 1: she in the building, you think it's lit. So she
Speaker 1: comes to the studio. We work in a record plant
Speaker 1: and she pulls up to the studio when I tell
Speaker 1: you my competition, and then I just wasn't that nigga.
Speaker 1: I was. I wasn't the best friend you could have
Speaker 1: because I knew two of my niggas like the girl.
Speaker 1: When I saw I said, okay, I got it. Yeah, facts,
Speaker 1: So I've seen her and I caught her in the
Speaker 1: whole way, you know, the bat the long hall way
Speaker 1: to the back. I caught her in the whole way.
Speaker 1: I smiled at it, and I just grabbed her phone,
Speaker 1: put my number in it and said, text me. She
Speaker 1: texted me, So now I'll go back in the room,
Speaker 1: act like nothing ever happened. Super Snake vibes snake right.
Speaker 1: So I'm texting, I'm like, yo, I leave tomorrow. Tomorrow's
Speaker 1: like tonight's my last day. I need to speak to you.
Speaker 1: Something in me wanted to notice girl that night, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't about hitting or nothing like that. So I
Speaker 1: was like, Yo, this was back then. I didn't know
Speaker 1: how to drive. I said, this is what you're gonna do.
Speaker 1: You said, hug. Everybody say if you leaving, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: act like I know you're leaving too. In fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna meet you around the block right or Santa
Speaker 1: Monic or whatever block that is by a record plan
Speaker 1: and we gonna dip off and I just want to
Speaker 1: talk to you. I didn't know her from scratch, but
Speaker 1: something in me wanted her. So exactly what we did.
Speaker 1: I duck off, acting like I had something to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And she drove us to Luca Lake to it drove
Speaker 1: me to to Luca Lake where I was staying. She
Speaker 1: had so much respect for herself she wouldn't go up
Speaker 1: to the spot, so I'm like, it's definitely not a
Speaker 1: hit mission. We sat in front of the spot, in
Speaker 1: front of her car and fell in love all night,
Speaker 1: just talking. Now I'm pissed. I get back to Atlanta. Atlanta.
Speaker 1: You know Neo's crew niggas. All you're getting is tough
Speaker 1: truth all day. The niggas is treated you like yo.
Speaker 1: You know, like yo, Sam, you know, get the shit
Speaker 1: done or That'shit's not it. And then I got this
Speaker 1: girl in LA that I'm caring about more than the music,
Speaker 1: and the people give me an opportunity. I get back
Speaker 1: to La Atlanta and I miss her like crazy. So
Speaker 1: it spends eight months texting this girl, calling this girl,
Speaker 1: texting this girl, calling this girl. I write a song
Speaker 1: called Hustler for Kerry Hillshare and that gets me a
Speaker 1: flight out to LA again. So to me, it was
Speaker 1: just a way back to her.
Speaker 2: Everything was all you see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So they had me in hotels for a minute. Manny
Speaker 1: and DJ. Those was the people who like Manny DJ Ethiopia.
Speaker 1: Those were the people when I first landed as a
Speaker 1: writer in off of like somebody else's time, like as
Speaker 1: a writer on my own strength in LA. They took
Speaker 1: me in bro and treated me like family. And so
Speaker 1: they'd have me in hotels for like two three months
Speaker 1: for the first time. So she would be with me
Speaker 1: in all the hotels, and so it was like, Nigga,
Speaker 1: we can't. There's not another budget we could put you over.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna rap niggas budgets for some reason, like on
Speaker 1: the hotel. So it's like, we can't do this, and
Speaker 1: so Chuck Comedy let me sleep on the couch at
Speaker 1: the studio for three weeks. I remember having forty two
Speaker 1: dollars in my pocket, and it's like he knew I
Speaker 1: was broke, but didn't treat me that way every time
Speaker 1: he ate I ate dog. I had sixteen dollars left
Speaker 1: after three weeks, and I came in there with forty
Speaker 1: two dollars. So that's how much he took care of you.
Speaker 1: So shout out to Chuck. That's smart. Like I got
Speaker 1: so many people.
Speaker 2: To think that, no, you have angels, brother.
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
Speaker 2: Bro.
Speaker 1: So me and her finally get an apartment, and you
Speaker 1: don't go back home. You don't go back to stay Bro.
Speaker 1: I stayed.
Speaker 2: I should be the name of your book. I stayed.
Speaker 3: Just go through all the progression of where you never left.
Speaker 2: This shit is great.
Speaker 1: Whatever it's said on the move, you're on the move,
Speaker 1: and I don't lose love from where I left either, right,
Speaker 1: So everybody that.
Speaker 2: You don't burn those bridges.
Speaker 1: Even though we were learning these keywords in the wind,
Speaker 1: like love, loyalty, respect, honor, we learned them the wrong way.
Speaker 1: We learned them in the wind. When I switched my
Speaker 1: life over start taking God seriously, those same still you
Speaker 1: can learn them rooted now. I still love them, still
Speaker 1: honored them. Made some people I may not be able
Speaker 1: to see no more because our lifestyles are different, and
Speaker 1: I've noticed things in myself that I can't risk being again.
Speaker 1: But those words still stay in the same when when
Speaker 1: I'm when I'm rooted. Yeah, so now you're in la
Speaker 1: la something. Yeah, two or three probably have. I had
Speaker 1: one with Neo on his album Okay Okay, and that's
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of placements ago, but I land
Speaker 1: here with that one song. Ethiopia shows Me Love, Carrie
Speaker 1: shows Me Love, DJ and more Milly Manny. They showed
Speaker 1: me love and they taking care of me as best
Speaker 1: as they can. Now I'm back being a dickhead, like Yo,
Speaker 1: money's low, what can I flip? My girlfriend won't deal
Speaker 1: with somebody who traps. So we're arguing because in order
Speaker 1: for me to stay with it. I'm looking at her
Speaker 1: like I'm forgetting that.
Speaker 2: Yo.
Speaker 1: You could go get a job, you could go take
Speaker 1: a class, you could go you know, you could go
Speaker 1: bea You're reverting. I'm mad at her because she's not
Speaker 1: letting me do yeah. Yeah, So we start arguing. I
Speaker 1: land my first check in LA instead of saying yo,
Speaker 1: me and her finally got it. The people who slept
Speaker 1: on the couch together. I would go cheat on her
Speaker 1: with girls who thought that little check would never run
Speaker 1: out right, end up getting caught. Uh, we break up.
Speaker 1: That's the short of it. And now I'm out here
Speaker 1: dolely more connections whatever, and I gotta figure shit out myself.
Speaker 1: So me and my old assistant we moved together right
Speaker 1: in North Hollywood for a year. It's gotta be two
Speaker 1: thousand and ten to eleven. And during that year, mars
Speaker 1: from fifteen hundred to nothing, and I would work with
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred en nothing in Englewood when it before the
Speaker 1: studio was the building, before the building was the school,
Speaker 1: like they were still the type of people they are today.
Speaker 1: It's never switched. Big brothers and advisors and just good
Speaker 1: hearted like people and talented so Mars calls me up.
Speaker 1: I mean people that would literally give you the plug.
Speaker 1: Mars calls me up and says, yo, pull up to
Speaker 1: the studio. I'm working with Chuck. I didn't know who
Speaker 1: Chuck was. I'm from the East, so if you say
Speaker 1: chucks me, I have no idea who that is. Pull
Speaker 1: up to the studio. My assistant drove me to the studio.
Speaker 1: I get there, I'm wearing like a Mets jersey, the
Speaker 1: blue joint and the Mets hat. And I walk in
Speaker 1: there it's bloods everywhere. And mind you, I'm from New York.
Speaker 1: I'm not a gangster, and I don't really like all
Speaker 1: I knew about La was what I heard. So I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm out of pocket right now, you know. So Mars
Speaker 1: introduces me to the game. Who is Chuck? And while
Speaker 1: we're in the studio the first day, the way game
Speaker 1: is very similar to like tango. So I was used
Speaker 1: to the language where it's like cut and dry. Showed
Speaker 1: me what you got, prove it kind of energy, and
Speaker 1: by that time it's like I was already in sessions.
Speaker 1: Mike Karen had me in so many sessions. He saw
Speaker 1: something in me would put me in the studio like crazy,
Speaker 1: forever grateful for it. And so by that time I
Speaker 1: already been sparring for so long that I knew that
Speaker 1: I could facts, especially in front of who dude. I
Speaker 1: can't be on stage and do it, but that studio,
Speaker 1: I know I could be in there and impress whoever's
Speaker 1: in the room. So we start working. Chuck takes a
Speaker 1: life making to me. Mars is always looking out making
Speaker 1: sure that he calls me for this. I ended up
Speaker 1: going to the studio niggas every single day for like
Speaker 1: three four months. The niggas that I was so scared
Speaker 1: of when I got there. I'm talking about niggas with
Speaker 1: like tattoos on their forehead. I ain't understand the language.
Speaker 1: It was like, Yo, these niggas is geez. After a while,
Speaker 1: I'm sitting down with my man, uh, watching fucking SpongeBob
Speaker 1: and laughing. Gangster is the same everywhere, And I'm the
Speaker 1: little homie that always got big homie love. I think
Speaker 1: God always positioned me to have really, really, really graceful
Speaker 1: and uh like great teachers in my ogs. So meeting
Speaker 1: the crew, they become my crew. I'm with them every day.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Mars. I'm with them every day and Chuck
Speaker 1: inviting me in like a little bro that he just
Speaker 1: has to look out for for some reason. I'm on
Speaker 1: all his mixtapes since we met. And then I get
Speaker 1: comfortable like I always get, and I'm working with Mike
Speaker 1: Caaren a lot. And back then it was like those
Speaker 1: four line paramour kind of hooks where it's like or
Speaker 1: like the could you believe that playing like those types
Speaker 1: of hooks, them full line big Bruno type hooks was popping,
Speaker 1: And so I had one that I was trying to
Speaker 1: get on like Loope at Atlantic, but it wasn't placing.
Speaker 1: And so Chuck was working on him the record and
Speaker 1: everything was super gangster and I loved it, but it
Speaker 1: was like, yo, but you know that these full line
Speaker 1: hooks working right now? Yeah, So because I kind of
Speaker 1: said it to him in the room, you know, I
Speaker 1: should have probably pulled them aside, because I said, he
Speaker 1: was like, nigga, what you talking about? So you got
Speaker 1: one of those? And god, I had one. I pressed
Speaker 1: play on pot of Golds for him and mind you
Speaker 1: just like him And in the scope, they wasn't going
Speaker 1: to release the record until they found the records released
Speaker 1: and so that record I played in that song and
Speaker 1: he wanted to go against it because he tested me
Speaker 1: in front of everybody. He was like a couple of niggas,
Speaker 1: like niggad ass hard. I was like Jeesus. So that
Speaker 1: record within two or three days, he did his versus
Speaker 1: two three days, he plays it for Jimmy Ivien. Jimmy
Speaker 1: Ivien unlocks his budget, and then after that they had
Speaker 1: Chris Brown on it a few days later. A month
Speaker 1: later it was out. And the reason I love him
Speaker 1: a lot of people work with a writer and you
Speaker 1: kind of never hear them say thank you in public
Speaker 1: or even in person. He would find cool ways to
Speaker 1: pay me back, Like he'll go on his Twitter and
Speaker 1: say yo shots to Sam Hooks. It's the hardest writer
Speaker 1: and lo and behold. You know, I may not be
Speaker 1: what I was doing before, but brown papers still look
Speaker 1: good to me. So a whole bunch of people from
Speaker 1: other countries will reach out, Can I get a hook?
Speaker 1: Can I get it? I'm out here, Wilin Hooks left
Speaker 1: and right. It really became what happens when a person
Speaker 1: of you, guys like Stature, even what you're doing right now,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be people who see this. They they believe
Speaker 1: in the story, or they believe in my work at
Speaker 1: their go my talent and they're gonna reach out. This
Speaker 1: is love, bro, But it doesn't happen with mad people.
Speaker 1: I've sold independently in major, put together three hundred fifty songs, bro, shit,
Speaker 1: three fifty songs, yeah, independent in major. You know how
Speaker 1: many niggas shot me out? Less than one percent of
Speaker 1: that about one percent, it's like three or four niggas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. That's crazy because you've worked with a lot
Speaker 1: of people. Facts. It's not their fault. I'm not tight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but.
Speaker 1: I don't see what they gotta go through. They gotta
Speaker 1: it's too many people to remember. But when somebody has
Speaker 1: it in them to do it, that's the part.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Writers don't get thank God for tan't go again. I
Speaker 1: always got an upfront fee for record, unless it's my
Speaker 1: brother asking for it. It's my first record. I got
Speaker 1: a upfront fee. Yeah, so I knew how to ask
Speaker 1: for it the way they they would ask for it.
Speaker 1: I learned from these niggas how that make sure you
Speaker 1: get your bag up front, and so I enjoyed getting
Speaker 1: the indie bag because it paid. Now yeah, and guys
Speaker 1: like Game Game put me in this video. That's that
Speaker 1: that makes where I'm from be grateful for Game makes
Speaker 1: where I'm from be proud of me. And these things
Speaker 1: help when people are speaking about you when you're not there.
Speaker 1: If you know me, you know, I'm not taking a
Speaker 1: picture of myself and I don't know how to promote myself.
Speaker 1: These ways is the only ways people can find out
Speaker 1: about me good works and and love and respect. So
Speaker 1: I'm always grateful to Chuck for that Pot of Gold
Speaker 1: came out. It did well on that same album. I
Speaker 1: think it's that same album Me and you Just See
Speaker 1: No Evil with Kendrick and the next album. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so is that I knew you before that though? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would probably be too scared around you, bro. When
Speaker 1: I'm around greatness and like people that are up, like
Speaker 1: looking up to and listening to, I go right back
Speaker 1: to feeling like I'm a whole scrib is just mad scared.
Speaker 2: You know what? I remember?
Speaker 3: You know what I think because you did the demo right,
Speaker 3: did you? Okay, so I didn't believe that was your voice.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, because the nigga don't sing like you talk. No, no,
Speaker 3: not at all, not at all and I was like,
Speaker 3: who's who's Michael Lesk voice?
Speaker 2: I remember that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he has a higher pitch.
Speaker 2: It's something it's up there.
Speaker 1: Especially back then.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that that was my first time, only time ever
Speaker 1: working with Kendrick is with you. Me and you work
Speaker 1: twice so far, now is it twice?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: When we remix that's right. Yeah, yeah, I know you
Speaker 1: know when I worked with you.
Speaker 2: I remember.
Speaker 1: Me and Jay Valentine maybe two thousand and nine to ten,
Speaker 1: and we did it for you. Yes, yeah, it's for you.
Speaker 2: What's for you? This is for you?
Speaker 1: Uh, it's the it's the video where actually trying to
Speaker 1: which I don't shoot videos ali enough. It's a black
Speaker 1: and white video, which is crazy because the second black
Speaker 1: and white video I did turned out to be thank
Speaker 1: me for that at his spot? Remember.
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yo, it's an honor. I'm a proud little
Speaker 1: homie to have no Listen, bro, you've you've always answered
Speaker 1: the call, You've always answered my call, and for us,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those things like like you were
Speaker 1: saying even about with the podcast, this is my favorite
Speaker 1: pot thank you bro, period. This is this is why
Speaker 1: we we've done the podcast, right, because we want to
Speaker 1: celebrate the real ones and the people whose stories don't
Speaker 1: always get a spotlight on them. Yeah, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, Like it's and I think it's it's been
Speaker 1: cool for us because we don't look at our podcast
Speaker 1: as oh, we have to have such and such every week,
Speaker 1: because that's not what's the most important thing to us.
Speaker 1: Our thing is for people to learn the stories and learn,
Speaker 1: you know, the journeys and the different ways that people
Speaker 1: have gone about getting to their success, and just even
Speaker 1: your story, Like I know a lot of it because
Speaker 1: we really really friends in real life and we've said
Speaker 1: and talked and you know what I mean, I know
Speaker 1: your whole mindset of this shit. Like every time you
Speaker 1: say and I had to get back to the pack,
Speaker 1: I know that about you, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: So, but the.
Speaker 1: Casual fan, our listener or viewer doesn't understand that, you know,
Speaker 1: there are people who've had to because at this point
Speaker 1: you have three or four songs out placements, the whole shit,
Speaker 1: you're still looking for the pack at that point. Facts,
Speaker 1: because this business there's just snow guarantees in it. It's
Speaker 1: snow guarantees of when that next placement is coming. But
Speaker 1: the one thing that I've noticed with you all the time,
Speaker 1: and you kind of mentioned that you tapped on it
Speaker 1: was like you said it, I got three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty records so independent and on majors. You figured out
Speaker 1: how to get to the independent bag, which is very
Speaker 1: very important, which a lot of major yeah, and a
Speaker 1: lot of major label writers and producers they kind of, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't really do that because you know, my fee
Speaker 1: is this, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no no,
Speaker 1: this is my new pack.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: And I respect that because it also kept your ass
Speaker 1: from going to jail in fact, you know what I'm saying, like,
Speaker 1: which a lot of guys they take a lot of
Speaker 1: different chances getting back into the streets or getting too
Speaker 1: the streets that they've never been a part of, don't
Speaker 1: understand the streets, and now they fucked up instead of saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, this can be my hustle. And like
Speaker 1: I said, but I respect that. When I finally quit
Speaker 1: doing like anything wrong for the bag, I realized how
Speaker 1: hard it must be songwriters to get paper yeah. Because
Speaker 1: it was mixed. So it felt really good for a
Speaker 1: long period of time where it's like I know, we
Speaker 1: could go to the bowling alley, rent thirty lanes, we
Speaker 1: could do this, we could do that. But the one
Speaker 1: thing that I'll say to anybody who's young and listening,
Speaker 1: I don't glorify that shit at all. A life that
Speaker 1: you can't put on a calendar, you're plugg don't have
Speaker 1: a calendar or a schedule or structure. You know, you
Speaker 1: on his time, so you could never be on your
Speaker 1: own time. You're waiting here, you're waiting there. The things
Speaker 1: that are most important in your life that on your calendar,
Speaker 1: they shouldn't only be obligation. It's just fucking bills or
Speaker 1: when to ride to work or doctor's appointments. You could
Speaker 1: turn your life into a menu that you picked out
Speaker 1: if you do things that are allowed onto your calendar.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 1: I realized this. So all this time that I was
Speaker 1: doing all that stuff and having all these friends and
Speaker 1: having all that fun, one I'm definitely shunning because you
Speaker 1: ever you ever smashed the wrong short, you wake up
Speaker 1: the next day you feel like you can't pray. You
Speaker 1: see what I'm saying. So and then two I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's a married man, bro, Wow.
Speaker 2: Night, forgive me yo.
Speaker 1: My dad I never it was mad and titled, like
Speaker 1: I never built a relationship with my family because they
Speaker 1: could never know about my real day. So it's surface.
Speaker 1: It's like how you doing good? How you doing good?
Speaker 1: And so when I when I uh Lee and Roussell
Speaker 1: when they passed away twenty eighteen. The things that when
Speaker 1: you live a life that usually I'm never going to
Speaker 1: say I was two feet in when you want foot
Speaker 1: in one foot out. There's things that your big homie
Speaker 1: could tell you when you was eleven years old and say, yo,
Speaker 1: life no regrets. You'll live with no regrets. So you
Speaker 1: go home and you practice that. What do you pick
Speaker 1: up instead? Justification for all your bullshit? So everybody's memories
Speaker 1: in your lifetime is just you justifying your bullshit. You
Speaker 1: don't have no idea how they feel because you think
Speaker 1: you're right all the time. And yo, things that caught
Speaker 1: the short end of the stick in my lifetime from
Speaker 1: zero to thirty years old was yo, I never had
Speaker 1: a real relationship that I can be honest with my dad,
Speaker 1: like whenever you like, if I can't tell you about
Speaker 1: my whole day, I'm not being honest with you. So
Speaker 1: when Lee and Rasseau passed away. Let me tell you something,
Speaker 1: I probably never admitted it in person or to anybody
Speaker 1: or in public when they passed away. Leah was my artist,
Speaker 1: Rasu was business partner in with us for Leah. So
Speaker 1: and mind you, that's my sister, that's my brother, that's
Speaker 1: I love them. They had my house all week long.
Speaker 1: You know, we're together bowling, we're together, karaoke together, drink
Speaker 1: and we're got eating at my house all the time.
Speaker 1: So when they passed away, I remember the text threat, right,
Speaker 1: So I'm so quick to go public and say harpe
Speaker 1: and I love you and I'm feeling it. But I
Speaker 1: didn't know what I was feeling when I looked at
Speaker 1: the text threat. It's me curving every time they asked
Speaker 1: me for the last two three weeks or months, when
Speaker 1: they would ask me to do something productive. Instead, I'm
Speaker 1: looking at my text message that I made up to
Speaker 1: make them say okay, so I can go chill with
Speaker 1: a joint or chill with my niggas and do the
Speaker 1: wrong thing. Right, I'm looking at how I was avoiding
Speaker 1: them and giving them and thinking that I'm always going
Speaker 1: to be able to round back and make it right.
Speaker 1: You see what I'm saying, and I don't think I
Speaker 1: ever felt true guilt until I realized how fake of
Speaker 1: a nigga I was to them. It's like, if you
Speaker 1: ever think, like right now, you can believe the person
Speaker 1: I hand myself into you as but the surveillance is different.
Speaker 1: Surveillance sees me weary and sees me scared. Surveillance sees
Speaker 1: me panicked. That's spirit and adequate, you know, all the
Speaker 1: things that people don't show when they want their perception
Speaker 1: to be the true story. But so it's like I
Speaker 1: started really feeling guilt, Like, what did God see this
Speaker 1: whole time? He saw the way there, they saw me there,
Speaker 1: you see what I'm saying, But how do you look
Speaker 1: when no one's looking? I hated the answer. I hated
Speaker 1: started really just doing mass self work. And once you
Speaker 1: put that one string of guilt, you never felt it before.
Speaker 1: I look at it like tabs, like all the open tabs,
Speaker 1: thirty years of open tabs. It took a thousand days
Speaker 1: to close. I spent twenty nineteen twenty twenty one by myself,
Speaker 1: my engineer, and my assistant. Only two people I saw.
Speaker 1: I was so buried in guilt and grudges. And grief.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what how to handle, and I had
Speaker 1: to do like a remorse. We'll do it called men's tour,
Speaker 1: you know, and apology tour, like reaching out to people
Speaker 1: and saying, oh, I finally realized what effects I could
Speaker 1: have had on you. It's people that I'm like, yo,
Speaker 1: let's go do a stick up. You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: And we're fifteen, sixteen years old, we're doing stick ups.
Speaker 1: We think it's funny, but one of them go get
Speaker 1: locked up. It's not funny no more. And if he
Speaker 1: learned from me and my guys, you got a whole
Speaker 1: future that's different because of us, so different things that
Speaker 1: was happening. It's like, ya, I saw that this. I'm
Speaker 1: on the same story that Jesus Christ exists on, Michael
Speaker 1: Jordan exists on, Michael Jackson exists on, Barack Obama, Will Smith,
Speaker 1: all the people that I love and look up to,
Speaker 1: And I got a character in the same story that
Speaker 1: they're in. It never the story of history don't start over.
Speaker 1: So I got a character, and this is what I
Speaker 1: chose to do with it. I hated it, and so
Speaker 1: I spent mad time doing like unlearning the conversation we
Speaker 1: had at the crypt unlearning things, and I got I
Speaker 1: fell in love with time. Like tank, if I ask
Speaker 1: you how many hours there in the day, what you
Speaker 1: wanna say? I don't know how many hours? If I
Speaker 1: told you there was more than twenty four hours in
Speaker 1: the day, would you believe me? Exactly? I believe that too.
Speaker 1: I started unlocking that right now. If me and you
Speaker 1: and Jay's on a Tuesday together, there's at least seventy
Speaker 1: two hours on a Tuesday. And it's if this's seven
Speaker 1: point nine billion people are counted for on planet Earth,
Speaker 1: that's seven point nine billion time twenty four hours happening Tuesday.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, yo, we've been all focused on self,
Speaker 1: all focused on self. We can't even plan correctly. But
Speaker 1: how do big companies plan? They planning man hours? How
Speaker 1: do they break it down and how do they make sure?
Speaker 1: Like and then I was so depressed going through so much,
Speaker 1: I'm like, yo, if I felt like I was in
Speaker 1: a jail selling God said, yo, what matters to you?
Speaker 1: And my answer, if God is your CEO, You're gonna
Speaker 1: be like you do you matter? And then I said
Speaker 1: my family matters? And then I said my gift and
Speaker 1: the effects it has on history. And so it's like
Speaker 1: guys like, all right, cool, I'll let you out if
Speaker 1: you prove that to be your routine, your calendar, your
Speaker 1: checkoff system daily in chronological order. So you said I
Speaker 1: come first, boom, I need to see me come first
Speaker 1: from surveillance. So I need to see you pray on
Speaker 1: your knees, pray out loud, read your Bible, write the
Speaker 1: notes that you just learned, write the laws you found
Speaker 1: in it, and promise me something that you're going to
Speaker 1: do today from what you just read. I need to
Speaker 1: see you.
Speaker 2: Yo.
Speaker 1: You don't got no relationship with your family. You think
Speaker 1: you do because they love you and it's endless and
Speaker 1: it's un you know, unconditional, But what does yours look like?
Speaker 1: Have you ever gave them on conditional? Look? Do you
Speaker 1: even know how? So I put my dad first. I
Speaker 1: create a specially bro I put my dad first. On
Speaker 1: the specialet. Put my first. It was God, what time
Speaker 1: did you get here? Then it's pray. Then it's read
Speaker 1: your Bible. Then it's what is your takeaway? Then it's
Speaker 1: reach out to dad, reach out to mom, reach out
Speaker 1: to my older brother Danny, my older sister, and that
Speaker 1: my little brother Timmy my little brother Paul, nieces and nephews.
Speaker 1: It says Wednesdays because I ain't got every day for
Speaker 1: the youngest, but my siblings, my parents. You know, for
Speaker 1: a thousand days I reached out to my father every
Speaker 1: single day. Today, he's my best friend. I popped up
Speaker 1: on this calendar. Five am for me is eight am
Speaker 1: for him. So if you got to be at his
Speaker 1: job and shout out to my pops. He's the first
Speaker 1: Haitian funeral business owner in New York State history. But like,
Speaker 1: if I call him before he gets there, first few days,
Speaker 1: this is somebody who is used to expecting the worst
Speaker 1: in me. But I realized, like yo, dust settles, it
Speaker 1: turned into cement. So if you humble enough, you young enough,
Speaker 1: you grab the chisel. You don't give up until it's
Speaker 1: in the form you wanted in. You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So I chiseled away at my relationship with my pops.
Speaker 1: I did not give up on him for a few days.
Speaker 1: It was discouraging because I'm like, how you doing. He's like, well,
Speaker 1: I sent me, like what you need?
Speaker 2: What do you want?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Pops is stern, but he's mad understanding, but I
Speaker 1: also realized things like this, like how was your day
Speaker 1: is a beautiful question to ask intentionally, a sucky question
Speaker 1: to ask unintentionally. So how's your day? Good? Sucks? How
Speaker 1: was your day? Not?
Speaker 2: For real?
Speaker 1: Tell me about your day? What was your favorite thing
Speaker 1: you learned? What's the worst thing when you? I started
Speaker 1: requiring him to speak to me? I made him talk
Speaker 1: to me. Bro discouraged a few times and wanting to
Speaker 1: drop it, but I'm like, Nah, something that in me says,
Speaker 1: don't give up.
Speaker 2: Keep doing it.
Speaker 1: I call my pops every single day, by the day
Speaker 1: nine hundred. So what happens to you when you look
Speaker 1: through your days, find out what information is worth carrying,
Speaker 1: what information is worth dropping? You're clearing your cash all
Speaker 1: them open tabs. Like if nobody asked you how your
Speaker 1: day was for thirty days, you might not even ask yourself.
Speaker 1: So now you got thirty days open tabs, and your
Speaker 1: buffer can just start tricking off. You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I was requiring my pops, we lived seventy years at
Speaker 1: this point, to look through his days, and the first
Speaker 1: time in his life somebody's requiring him to say this
Speaker 1: is my favorite part.
Speaker 2: This is what I could do better.
Speaker 1: He got so used to doing it. One day, my
Speaker 1: sister texts the family chat. She's like, Yo, something's wrong
Speaker 1: with Poppy.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I'm like, what happened? I'm three thousand miles away. What happened?
Speaker 1: She's like, Nah, nothing like that. But this guy just
Speaker 1: asked me how my day was. Yeah, yo, but yo,
Speaker 1: little things like Yo, what are your assets? Bro? Like
Speaker 1: everybody want to talk paper or talk purchases. My biggest
Speaker 1: asset is my relationship with God, my relationship with my family.
Speaker 1: These two things I build on like their business I
Speaker 1: check off. You've seen it. I showed it to you.
Speaker 1: I checked these things off, like that's the start of
Speaker 1: my day is business. I make sure that I could
Speaker 1: check off that. I and then the days that I
Speaker 1: slack and don't reach out to on this spreadsheet, I
Speaker 1: could see, Yo, Sammy, you haven't checked on them for
Speaker 1: three days. You're not watering your flowers. So these things,
Speaker 1: to me is kind of became more important. And I
Speaker 1: could tell that even having that type of structure, that
Speaker 1: type of routine, changed my life and it leaked into
Speaker 1: my business. Now I have because of how depressed I
Speaker 1: was to get out of it. I leanked on god
Speaker 1: lengthd on family, created routines, created structures, and I'm starting
Speaker 1: to realize all things need structure. The reason the first
Speaker 1: few times I invest in artists it don't work. One
Speaker 1: I'm bad leader. Two I have no structure. Three I'm
Speaker 1: trying to carry anything on my memory. I'm gonna shut down.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna lose. You can't You're not a canvas for
Speaker 1: success in that type of thing. And so I've been
Speaker 1: in like these last I have every single day written out,
Speaker 1: so my journal runs all my revenue streams today, and
Speaker 1: I have one middle journal piece what we call central
Speaker 1: information or new information log where every information that came
Speaker 1: in from any direction, I put every log there and
Speaker 1: two people share it. Right had operations and assystem So
Speaker 1: when this is shared to that middle link, if it
Speaker 1: took me ten hours to go through something, but I
Speaker 1: got a team of five and it takes fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: to explain you see what I'm saying. I'm not spending
Speaker 1: fifteen thirty forty five you feel me, it's sixty on
Speaker 1: telling nobody else. I could tell it to the middle
Speaker 1: and they have a checkoff system for the company that
Speaker 1: checks the middle moves every lock to the department, set department,
Speaker 1: and I started just learning, like yo, this structural shit
Speaker 1: really works. It gives us a lot of time. In
Speaker 1: the day, I used to God gave me a big
Speaker 1: crew with but I had no direction, no good leadership,
Speaker 1: and I wasted time. So if my crew was ten
Speaker 1: people willing to give eight hours, there was a few
Speaker 1: days I could live in one day on a plan.
Speaker 1: But I didn't see it like that. And now with
Speaker 1: less people, you know, the people I'm blessed to have
Speaker 1: with today, I take care of the time because with
Speaker 1: like as an old to like lean Rossue, as an
Speaker 1: old to the old partners that I wasn't a good
Speaker 1: partner to, you know, as an old to the artist
Speaker 1: that I over promising, then to deliver it to like today,
Speaker 1: it's like everything is on the calendar, and if you're
Speaker 1: talking to me and the wind, I'm gonna write down
Speaker 1: what you just said to you at the it said
Speaker 1: to me at the end of the conversation if there
Speaker 1: was any importance in it, and texted to you so
Speaker 1: there's a thread that I could copy and paste into
Speaker 1: my system so my team can see what's going on.
Speaker 1: Full transparency. I studied eight hundred numbers, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I call all eight hundred numbers in my phone and
Speaker 1: I'm just studying, like asking why do they have their
Speaker 1: people that work for them answer questions like this? And
Speaker 1: the person who picks up the phone is like, how
Speaker 1: can I help you? When you finish helping me, you
Speaker 1: ask is there anything else I can do? Your business
Speaker 1: is asking for more work at all fucking times, and me,
Speaker 1: I get a bag. I don't need another bag now
Speaker 1: I need to go stunt. Nah. Business has to be
Speaker 1: up and running. There's somebody got to be at the
Speaker 1: door asking for business, and so learning all these things,
Speaker 1: and I could say I spent the last five six
Speaker 1: years just unlocking coldes, writing protocols. Because you can't leave
Speaker 1: your talents to your children. You can't leave your swag,
Speaker 1: you can't leave your personality, but your protocol. You could
Speaker 1: leave it completely short and give them a protocol to
Speaker 1: anything we learned that hasn't been written here, aid it
Speaker 1: in will be a college in fifty years. If not,
Speaker 1: we'll be it will be a college. Nobody knows. All
Speaker 1: of our children have access to protocol how tos whatnot?
Speaker 1: And then teach them how to refine it, because as
Speaker 1: time passes by, you can make it better. But I
Speaker 1: felt like yo, I in order to take my l's
Speaker 1: and turn them into things that I could be grateful for.
Speaker 1: The biggest things I'm grateful for is learning how to
Speaker 1: spend time with my family bro and how to to
Speaker 1: to see the wrong and doing the wrong thing, and
Speaker 1: how to be accountable and how to structure my day
Speaker 1: to where the things that matter happened and all the
Speaker 1: things I can't control don't bother me. And it helps
Speaker 1: with your stress. It helps with the things that we
Speaker 1: go through by making sure it's written out of you
Speaker 1: and shared to a team that you trust. Like kings
Speaker 1: and queens have a hand, they have a historian, they
Speaker 1: got to somebody in every department. We're kind of thrown
Speaker 1: into the world without even identifying the departments.
Speaker 2: No structure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you said, that's what it just comes down to.
Speaker 1: And then moving into a business like music is probably
Speaker 1: the least amount of structure you can possibly have in
Speaker 1: any actual business. And that is why most of the
Speaker 1: creatives get the you know, the bad end of the stick.
Speaker 1: Facts they have. It's like they'll go against it and
Speaker 1: their brain to explode, right if they got a caught
Speaker 1: that it affects your creative right. And that's why to me,
Speaker 1: you are also so important to this podcast and important
Speaker 1: for you to come here to talk about the business
Speaker 1: that you've set up while still being creative. Got you,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, because we try to. We
Speaker 1: try to explain it at times too, just from what
Speaker 1: we've done ourselves of becoming our own business and our
Speaker 1: brand and building it out and still being creative, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. But I think a lot of
Speaker 1: times it's kind of passable with Tank and I because
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, well, you know, y'all just go saying
Speaker 1: are you just going this? Or you could just go
Speaker 1: and you just and it's just, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: it kind of gets written off to me. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1: not to other people, but to me it does. It's like,
Speaker 1: I don't think they fully understand the scope of what
Speaker 1: we've had to do to literally be able to really
Speaker 1: survive this thing and create a brand like R and
Speaker 1: B money. This is not just off of talent. This
Speaker 1: is you know, this is real you know, meetings of
Speaker 1: the minds, you know what I mean. And you know
Speaker 1: we haven't implemented a structure like you. But I'm paying
Speaker 1: attention because that ship. Now we're going to ship. Those
Speaker 1: things that you've done are really really important to you know,
Speaker 1: to a business that holds no true structure. For real crier,
Speaker 1: it's the biggest way to love is if I we're
Speaker 1: all smart enough in this room, and some people outside
Speaker 1: the room may not be. But if we're smart enough
Speaker 1: to say, yo, oh, snap yo. I got five people
Speaker 1: giving me eight hours a day, I'm doing more than
Speaker 1: twenty four hours to towards the planet day. You know,
Speaker 1: So say JP Morgan got three hundred thousand people giving
Speaker 1: him roughly ten hours right a day for work inside
Speaker 1: of his structure protocol places that he can find. That's
Speaker 1: three million hours that he can find, a glitch on
Speaker 1: where to reprimand a space on where to hire, or
Speaker 1: a place to like something's done well. Time saved to
Speaker 1: him and his structure to where to promote three million
Speaker 1: hours eighty two hundred years a day he's living, but
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand people have a place to stay, food
Speaker 1: to eat, families, take people that didn't know what to
Speaker 1: do with their time necessarily yet can like I want
Speaker 1: to be one thousand hours by the time of forty.
Speaker 1: I want to be ten thousand hours by the time
Speaker 1: about fifty.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about these songs, gotcha, Let's talk about these songs.
Speaker 1: We talked about the business side of it. So how
Speaker 1: do you get to this space now? Because you're in LA,
Speaker 1: you're writing these records and you know you got album
Speaker 1: placements and you get your first single with Pottigo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's your first single?
Speaker 2: Correct?
Speaker 1: How does that lead to Trays? No, there's probably a
Speaker 1: few songs in between, but Trays nine Steel O'Brien from
Speaker 1: Ridiculousness for listeners. My brother, one of the first friends
Speaker 1: I made in La Legit like just would wanted to
Speaker 1: bring me up to people, bring me the drama, bring
Speaker 1: me to Rob, bring me to just to introduce me
Speaker 1: and like, yo, keep like they like. He's like, yo,
Speaker 1: keep saying I had a song called Smartphones that I
Speaker 1: have writ and then it was circulating trying to get
Speaker 1: placed and Steel logos and plays it for Trey. Doesn't
Speaker 1: I didn't know he did. I get a d M
Speaker 1: from Trey on Twitter. He's like, Yo, bro stel O
Speaker 1: just played me the Smartphones record, Yo, I need to
Speaker 1: cut this, y'all right, and so I called my older brother.
Speaker 1: My older brother was in time for that. I think
Speaker 1: we got him the stems immediately, and we went up
Speaker 1: to his crib in the hills. And first thing Trey
Speaker 1: does before we thought we was gonna go cut it
Speaker 1: with him, he's like, Yo, pull up, I'm abowt to
Speaker 1: cut it. When we get there, this shit's cut and
Speaker 1: it's perfect, and I'm like, yes, thank you Jesus. He
Speaker 1: plays it for me and my older brother, which is
Speaker 1: a dope moment because that friend ship turned out to
Speaker 1: be that, that relationship turned out to be a brotherhood
Speaker 1: of a friendship that I never ever ever stopped being
Speaker 1: grateful for. He the first person to give me eight
Speaker 1: or nine songs on the album.
Speaker 2: Hm. Shit, Yeah.
Speaker 1: We hung out, We played two K we played basketball,
Speaker 1: We chilled with girls. We chilled with the boys like
Speaker 1: with my with the homies pause, we chilled with the
Speaker 1: homies like but we was legit like always together his
Speaker 1: crew and mind you, up until this point, I was
Speaker 1: like lone wolf unless album chilling with all shorty and so,
Speaker 1: or unless I'm with my crew that we do the
Speaker 1: other thing with so to have a crew again because
Speaker 1: Neo's team never stopped being family, but they was in
Speaker 1: a you know. And so to have another crew again
Speaker 1: of young niggas just like myself, knuckleheads just like myself,
Speaker 1: it was like it was a blessing. So legit, we
Speaker 1: start off with smartphones, the label loves ith. Trey cuts himself,
Speaker 1: so it makes it easy. He could just pull up
Speaker 1: to his crib studio. You could cut the whole album.
Speaker 1: Were playing two K, listening to the beats, writing songs.
Speaker 1: We did cake, we did you Ain't Shit, Yes, no,
Speaker 1: maybe late night shit, mister still your girl, all playing
Speaker 1: two K, my nigga, Yeah, I'm kyrie.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the non record, Trey hits me. He's like, yo,
Speaker 1: I got Musta coming to the studio. But we had
Speaker 1: already known that we was going to go to the
Speaker 1: jay Z show, right, So when we all get there,
Speaker 1: Mustard was signed to Rock Nation, me and Trey was
Speaker 1: already going, and so all of us had in mind
Speaker 1: and like, yo, damn, we got this session today, but
Speaker 1: we want to go see the whole show. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So forty five minutes it took to write that song.
Speaker 1: It was It wasn't ever a throwaway. We heard the
Speaker 1: beat and it's just media. I think I went outside.
Speaker 1: I used to smoke a lot, went outside, smoke, came
Speaker 1: back in the studio and I was just joking around
Speaker 1: when I heard the beating, like oh, Nona right, And
Speaker 1: we just kept on playing around and tell the shit
Speaker 1: like we had to get something done and wrote the
Speaker 1: record and literally like twenty minutes, cut it in twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: Final vocals is still from the first day and popped
Speaker 1: out to the whole tour.
Speaker 2: So what y'all?
Speaker 1: Pretty much the demo turned into the record.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Trade is really good at cutting quick and cutting his
Speaker 1: own vocals. I think the only thing we did later
Speaker 1: was a bridge.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: I remember the text Thrad It was like yo yo,
Speaker 1: I think I still have it said. He's like, yo, bro,
Speaker 1: it's just a single. He tagged me and Mustard in
Speaker 1: the text. Start were just like yo, let let's go.
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I'm still I was still mad that
Speaker 1: the smartphones wasn't taken off like I thought it was,
Speaker 1: because that was the true story of my life, like
Speaker 1: me getting caught got caught up.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, but one thing you could say is like one
Speaker 1: you tell gods your plans. You're gonna laugh. But the
Speaker 1: two like y'all, you gotta uh sit in the car,
Speaker 1: know who's driving, and don't join the weather. You could
Speaker 1: drive through fire, drive through lightning, you could drive through rain,
Speaker 1: you could drive through a sunny day. You're sitting while
Speaker 1: he's driving. And so today I can look backwards and
Speaker 1: appreciate that time way more than I did during it.
Speaker 1: That time I was probably more focused on chicks, girls, women,
Speaker 1: And it's kind of been kind of in your life.
Speaker 1: It's always you know, it's an excuse to chill with
Speaker 1: my day ones or an excuse to chill with girls.
Speaker 1: Major distractions and for most of us, ration and motivation
Speaker 1: to keep doing this stay. Yeah, they ones aren't distraction,
Speaker 1: but the reason for it. So let's say, let's what
Speaker 1: what causes our mistakes. You go down to yourself at
Speaker 1: four years old. I don't know if you have anything
Speaker 1: like me, but I didn't have. Jordan's right, I'm with you.
Speaker 1: So I go to school with the thousands, some payless
Speaker 1: or there was a store in Brooklyn called Bobby, So
Speaker 1: I'm you don't want to bout it. You see that
Speaker 1: Bobby's back, come in. You can start crying.
Speaker 2: Milwaukee.
Speaker 1: It was today. I'm really grateful for my parents for
Speaker 1: not giving into their kids, telling them that you should
Speaker 1: purchase this because everybody thinks it's cool. They gave us
Speaker 1: what we needed. But back then, I'm like, what are
Speaker 1: those You see what I'm saying. So you come home,
Speaker 1: you go to school, church and family don't give you
Speaker 1: emotions like desperation and adequacy, heartbreak, you know, or doubt.
Speaker 1: They build you up. The church is reminded of a kingdom.
Speaker 1: Of school's like a jail. So you go to the jail.
Speaker 1: And now you go to jail and you're sitting in there.
Speaker 1: There's thirty kids in the class. One baddy right, and
Speaker 1: you look down like there's no way I'm not the
Speaker 1: one who bags. So you got to walk home with
Speaker 1: this desperation thing, you know, and it hurts a kid,
Speaker 1: bro it does. You walk home with feeling less than
Speaker 1: and you never thought you was less than until that day.
Speaker 1: And your parents keep telling you like, you'll be happy
Speaker 1: what you have. They try to make sure you remember
Speaker 1: the facts, but you're not hearing it. When you got
Speaker 1: to sit in that classroom that's just like general population
Speaker 1: and you looking weak out there and so legit like
Speaker 1: I could look back and then the reason I could
Speaker 1: forgive myself and forgive all these all my guys, and
Speaker 1: we're all good no matter what where we ended up,
Speaker 1: you know, with children picking up emotions, and we're making
Speaker 1: room friends in the in a in a room that
Speaker 1: sponsors by a wrong emotion, friendships in a room that's
Speaker 1: sponsored by a wrong emotions. So we if we all
Speaker 1: have desperation in common, nobody gonna find desperation wrong. How's
Speaker 1: it gonna feel when you got to take it out
Speaker 1: of you? You might not agree with the people you
Speaker 1: saw your whole life, so like it goes the same way,
Speaker 1: so some of the me being distracted. It leads back
Speaker 1: to just simple emotions that you walk home from school
Speaker 1: with that shouldn't ever be your few. You can use
Speaker 1: them like your fuel, like even impulse. You know a
Speaker 1: lot of niggas get pats on the back of impulse,
Speaker 1: but it got you here. They fuck with you, But
Speaker 1: this impulse keep you here. No, So at some point
Speaker 1: you got to take out the thing that once fueled
Speaker 1: you and be fueled by something you can keep sustain. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree and disagree with that, I think because the fuel,
Speaker 1: whatever that is. It's different for each person, right, And
Speaker 1: whatever that fuel is, you have to you gotta keep
Speaker 1: that light, you gotta keep that gas going. That's the profit.
Speaker 1: But are you getting away from feeling life? Do you
Speaker 1: want if pain makes you write the best songs and
Speaker 1: when you're happy you write trash? Do I want you
Speaker 1: to be painful so we can make some chicken? Or
Speaker 1: am I happy you can feel better?
Speaker 3: Well? I think that in looking at it that way,
Speaker 3: you can say it that way, but I think that
Speaker 3: I think that what happens is this, and I love
Speaker 3: that that you brought that line, is that it's not
Speaker 3: necessarily that you write your best songs when you were
Speaker 3: in pain. It was just there was just an overwhelming
Speaker 3: connection to the pain that you were going through that connected.
Speaker 3: It's just a difference in time. Right, So I'm writing
Speaker 3: these sad songs. I'm a great I'm a great sad songwriter, right, great,
Speaker 3: But I was like that sign no more. You know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying, you can tap in. I'm not said,
Speaker 3: but guess what I connected so great at that to
Speaker 3: where when I wasn't going through it anymore, you almost
Speaker 3: feel like you're not doing good work because sometimes the
Speaker 3: response isn't the same. But that's that's based on the
Speaker 3: demand that people have gotten used to. But I said, listen,
Speaker 3: I'm going to keep this happy in this sex music
Speaker 3: in your face until you understand that this is what
Speaker 3: I'm on. That was work, But my best work is
Speaker 3: all of my fucking works. It always is, and and
Speaker 3: and so whether whether it's motivated, whether I'm being motivated
Speaker 3: in the trench trying to survive, or whether I'm thriving
Speaker 3: and I just feel like cooking up a.
Speaker 1: Tune, motivation, that's a good thing. Desperation. You could be
Speaker 1: down today, I could be below down. Desperation ain't gonna
Speaker 1: hit my system.
Speaker 3: But what I'm saying is that you've been able to
Speaker 3: figure out your way in desperation. We all come from desperation.
Speaker 1: I think it's is not repeatable, but I think I
Speaker 1: think that fact of course, if we if we take
Speaker 1: it into because art, Yeah, that's something that becomes a
Speaker 1: blessing for creatives. The fact that you can write out
Speaker 1: your pain therapy, the therapy for sure, and then the
Speaker 1: ability to turn it into finances, to literally turn your
Speaker 1: desperation into finance. Not desperate, but yeah, just your pain
Speaker 1: into making some money. You know what I'm saying, You
Speaker 1: think about I mean for me, I think about, you know,
Speaker 1: being a writer on a record like how could you for?
Speaker 1: Mario literally wrote that about young relationships I was in.
Speaker 1: Did I exaggerate some shiit? Absolutely?
Speaker 2: But did I feel a way?
Speaker 1: Hell yeah?
Speaker 4: And now I'm going to write a song about it
Speaker 4: and feed my family for the rest of my life
Speaker 4: off some dirty shit. I'm not angrateful, in no way
Speaker 4: being ungrateful.
Speaker 1: I just I just think, like within what we do
Speaker 1: bro like that is just it's a it's a well
Speaker 1: last thing to be able, like I said, to make
Speaker 1: some money off of some pain that we've been through
Speaker 1: and to.
Speaker 2: Make it way and make a way.
Speaker 1: I think it's relatable when I'm talking about this. It's
Speaker 1: not about we get a yo. It's like that having
Speaker 1: one foot in and one foot out of doing we
Speaker 1: get to pull from that room full of people who
Speaker 1: don't have the same talent and ways to make that
Speaker 1: emotion turn into what we're able to make any emotion
Speaker 1: turn into. And it's a sad thing to see. It's
Speaker 1: like I don't want for my guys who don't do
Speaker 1: music and don't have a place to express themselves that
Speaker 1: could profit them to be feeled by these things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the only thing I was saying. It's like those
Speaker 1: don't it's not it's not for us. We're supposed to have,
Speaker 1: like faith, we're supposed to have like you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Happiness, peace, like the coolest things to feel.
Speaker 1: Be your life's story. Like when you look backwards, you
Speaker 1: can say I remember feeling peace throughout all of that.
Speaker 1: It gets crazy no matter what, but I could look
Speaker 1: back and say I felt this last five six years.
Speaker 1: I felt happiness, you know, I felt still, I felt
Speaker 1: I felt faithful ship that is worth it. I felt
Speaker 1: inspired or inspiring.
Speaker 2: I felt like that was that is that is? That
Speaker 2: is your your path? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Right, and and and aligning I guess to what your
Speaker 3: purpose has always been, which is why you feel the
Speaker 3: way you feel. You've always been missing or looking for something,
Speaker 3: and so that piece that you feel now is in
Speaker 3: a sense finding it straight.
Speaker 1: Up right, you travel the whole world to find it's
Speaker 1: your family you love the most.
Speaker 3: But then you got the flip side of it where
Speaker 3: you got you know what I'm saying, You got the
Speaker 3: niggas and pay the fools like, yeah, I feel.
Speaker 1: You, but I love this ship, my brother, right before
Speaker 1: I got it.
Speaker 2: I gotta do this ship.
Speaker 1: They still they're still gonna love you completely throwing that ship.
Speaker 3: But your purpose was different, your path was different, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean? What your what what ended up
Speaker 3: ultimately being your sustaining fuel.
Speaker 2: Just different.
Speaker 1: We we are.
Speaker 3: We are different, no matter how much, no matter how
Speaker 3: much streak we've encountered. Hm, we always find our way
Speaker 3: back to this in some way shape.
Speaker 2: That's a fact.
Speaker 1: And this room turns into a hallway to where outside
Speaker 1: of being legends in one field, there's other rooms in
Speaker 1: the whole way. Now y'all got the best not even
Speaker 1: R and B the best podcast out, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. And then there's more things and more things
Speaker 1: and more things. The whole way turned into a fucking
Speaker 1: mall and receive them all.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: Airport straight up. I see it that way. I think
Speaker 1: planning ourselves. My boy changed my life. He said, make
Speaker 1: sure the next thing you do is planted, not buried.
Speaker 1: And when he said that, I was like, man, I've
Speaker 1: made mad buried decisions and it didn't grow. You gotta
Speaker 1: think it's next, yo, yo, does this sound like something
Speaker 1: I should be doing.
Speaker 2: As a creative, as an artist?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 3: As an artist? What would you say? Is I want
Speaker 3: to your proudest moments? I say your proudest moment? I say,
Speaker 3: what's one of your proudest moments?
Speaker 1: Naked by Element.
Speaker 2: We was in.
Speaker 1: Encore and my younger brother was living out with me,
Speaker 1: helping me build out and plan out this family business thing.
Speaker 1: And he came to the studios, me him engineer Element,
Speaker 1: and the whole day was just like it was a
Speaker 1: dope thing. So in twenty fifteen, I set up something
Speaker 1: called an FB opportunity list. When most people were starting
Speaker 1: like at my level with a started creating like a
Speaker 1: publishing company. Instead of doing a publishing company, I created
Speaker 1: a process called a family business opportunity list. This is
Speaker 1: where instead of owning, buying and owning a percentage of
Speaker 1: your future, I would share an opportunity with you real time.
Speaker 1: If I landed for you, I got you agreed saying
Speaker 1: that if I share an opportunity landed on your behalf,
Speaker 1: I get set percentage of up front and back end
Speaker 1: of publishing. So I had by this time, I probably
Speaker 1: had fifty sixty people on this list that I could
Speaker 1: reach out to anytime I get an opportunity. So even
Speaker 1: if I knew what producer would be there, I'd still
Speaker 1: reach out to the people on that list, saying, Yo,
Speaker 1: I'm going to work with this artist. Send it just
Speaker 1: in case I'll leave her with it or whatever. So
Speaker 1: in that day, I go up there with a bunch
Speaker 1: of guitars because she signed to my boy must that
Speaker 1: I would never be disrespectful and bring a beat to
Speaker 1: a Mustard session, So I brought guitars, knowing that yo,
Speaker 1: he could add around it if we ever choose to
Speaker 1: do this. The guitars were from a young sixteen year
Speaker 1: old producer named Omer Fetti, who, by two I was twenty,
Speaker 1: was the biggest producer in the world at that time.
Speaker 1: He was my little bro. He was in tenth grade
Speaker 1: at Calabasas High School, and I brought his beat. So
Speaker 1: she I think she had already written to all the
Speaker 1: beats that were on the pack. Mustar's in London working
Speaker 1: for Rihanna, So I text Monster like, YO, I didn't
Speaker 1: want to violate that's my man, that's your program. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna call you and ask you, YO, do you think
Speaker 1: I could I got some guitars. We kind of stuck.
Speaker 1: She already wrote everything there. He was busy. He's like, yo, yeah,
Speaker 1: you could pull up the guitar joints. So I go
Speaker 1: back in there. I have a conversation with Ella. I say, yo,
Speaker 1: if all of your exes were in a room together,
Speaker 1: what would they all agree that they don't like about you?
Speaker 1: And she gave me a list. I started writing down
Speaker 1: the list of all her answers. The song comes out.
Speaker 1: Take away the big shirts, the tattoos, the sweatpants, the vans. Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't wear no makeup, no person in my hands.
Speaker 1: These are all her answers. My rest and bitch face
Speaker 1: is mistaken for the mean girl. But what if I
Speaker 1: told you there's nothing I want more in this world
Speaker 1: and somebody who loves me naked? And I wrote the
Speaker 1: whole song about in front of my little brother, so
Speaker 1: he got to see me kind of maneuver. It wasn't
Speaker 1: my first time working with Ella at that point. I
Speaker 1: worked on every ep she had. But it was dope
Speaker 1: to have my little baby brother moved out when he
Speaker 1: was eight. You see what I'm saying. It was dope
Speaker 1: to have my brother poorly with me and him in
Speaker 1: the rooms, just witnessing it and sharing that time with me,
Speaker 1: and she cuts it. She kills it for Christmas that year, right,
Speaker 1: I didn't buy nobody know, my siblings no gifts.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: The reason it's my favorite placement is I gave them
Speaker 1: a percentage of since I had my percentage of with
Speaker 1: the producer that I brought in had and my my
Speaker 1: percentage for writing the whole record, I have more than
Speaker 1: enough to say to my siblings, Hey, his this percentage
Speaker 1: to split. Uh. Now, if you go look at the credits,
Speaker 1: all of my every one of my parents' kids got
Speaker 1: a double platinum song that they're the right or yeah
Speaker 1: that's that's I can't beat that one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, mister Sam Hook, not to be confused, Sam Cook,
Speaker 3: he could be in your time, your top five R
Speaker 3: and B singers.
Speaker 1: I made a list Brian McKnight anytime, anytime, Lauren.
Speaker 5: Hell Yeah, yeah yeahs I'm on, Robert Beyonce, Yeah yeah,
Speaker 5: come on, part of high Chris Brown, I mean, why not,
Speaker 5: come on?
Speaker 1: Come on?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: Then I did another list called the Lightning Round.
Speaker 2: Got Lightning introducing podcast.
Speaker 1: Lightning Round, Sam Cook, Marvin Stevie Wonder Boys to man
Speaker 1: Kim Berrell, it's impossible to do five ship.
Speaker 2: You do what you want people do that. This is
Speaker 2: how you distribute that publishing. I know what you're doing.
Speaker 2: What you're doing. That was great. Top five R and
Speaker 2: B songs.
Speaker 1: Stevie Wonder if It's magic m Brian McKnight six, eight twelve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that one got me. Uh Lauren Hill's Education. I think
Speaker 1: that's track thirteen on there. Chris Brown crawl Wow, and
Speaker 1: obviously eliminate naked.
Speaker 3: Great song fucking writing. Geez, you know, g you gotta
Speaker 3: you got a lightning round for this.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I know how you do your version of I
Speaker 1: Can't Make You Love Me. It's a great sound, my brother.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have to other through that one. What long, long,
Speaker 2: night long.
Speaker 1: That's the work everybody know and they know the delivery.
Speaker 2: Bro.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my brother. Let's make a voltron. Let's make a
Speaker 3: super R and B artists heard you, all right? Who
Speaker 3: you gonna get the vocal from the performance style, from
Speaker 3: the styling, the heart of the artists? And for you,
Speaker 3: who's gonna write for this artist? Number one? Where you're
Speaker 3: gonna get the vocal from one.
Speaker 1: Vocal female male I'm gonna go Kells and Brandy put together.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ, that'd be crazy. That'd be nuts, Kells and
Speaker 3: Brandy together nuts.
Speaker 2: I like it. Oh, performance style.
Speaker 1: Female male Beyonce Chris Brown put together. You said votron.
Speaker 1: That's a votre?
Speaker 2: Crazy?
Speaker 1: Like what you like?
Speaker 2: What are you doing? Styling the drip?
Speaker 1: Rihanna Farrell, he got happy for real, R and B
Speaker 1: and yeah, yeah you bang with.
Speaker 2: That, right, you're cooking.
Speaker 1: Passion of the artists, Marvin Gay Whitney, Yep, yep.
Speaker 2: It might be the best.
Speaker 1: Actually created my own little push call. Who's gonna write it?
Speaker 2: That's what that's the last one you do that for?
Speaker 1: For you?
Speaker 2: Yes, I bet who's writing for the artists?
Speaker 1: Myself? Neo poo Be, James farn Lroy Money Long, baby Face,
Speaker 1: all in the same yoke. He's gonna do it. A
Speaker 1: little honey in that room writing. Be happy to see it.
Speaker 1: Oh you named monster? Also, who produce it?
Speaker 2: Who produces?
Speaker 1: Right? Mike Will made it? DJ Mustard, Oma Fetti d N,
Speaker 1: DJ Camper. Yeah, go the album, take the artist.
Speaker 3: That's a run, I'd say run, Yeah, Yeah, that's a
Speaker 3: that's a Dionne Warwick twenty years of hit records run.
Speaker 2: No, that's a that's a deity that you created. It's
Speaker 2: a god.
Speaker 1: I had a lot of time to practice. I watch
Speaker 1: every episode, man like every time I'm watching my structure. Structure,
Speaker 1: that structure.
Speaker 2: I've said that.
Speaker 1: That what I was about to tell you about the
Speaker 1: best you had, the best structure.
Speaker 3: You too much for you, You created structure. You're also ready.
Speaker 3: You're ready for every motherfucking thing.
Speaker 2: That's what true.
Speaker 1: Nah No, but I'm faithful for everything. It might look ready,
Speaker 1: but I'm not scared.
Speaker 2: There's there's the difference.
Speaker 1: Right now, we have the very important part of the show.
Speaker 1: It's called I Ain't saying no names. We tell us
Speaker 1: a story funny or fucked up? Are funny and fucked up?
Speaker 1: In the times and the journeys Sam Hook? Maybe when
Speaker 1: he was going to you know, collect the pack. No, Nope,
Speaker 1: maybe when you was selling the track, selling the track.
Speaker 1: The only rule to the game, you can't say no names.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: This story ties into kind of what we was talking
Speaker 1: about today, Not distractions, but things. Yeah, my distractions wanting
Speaker 1: to impress people, wanting certain people to see me, and
Speaker 1: wanting to chill with girls. This story has all of
Speaker 1: that in it, mixed with.
Speaker 2: How stupid I was.
Speaker 1: So I fly to New York with at the time
Speaker 1: of very popular video fiction, right, and I'm more hyped
Speaker 1: to show her to my niggas than I am to
Speaker 1: even hang with her.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So we laying I put on I g that that
Speaker 1: I'm out there. So one of the biggest producers in
Speaker 1: the last fifteen years reaches out to me when he
Speaker 1: sees I'm in New York. He's also in New York.
Speaker 1: He's like, yo, pull up to the studio. I said, nah, bro,
Speaker 1: I can't. I got so and so in town. And
Speaker 1: I try to stumn on him.
Speaker 2: He's like what I was like?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was like, I'm about to go to this
Speaker 1: part of time and show off. This is corny of me,
Speaker 1: just so you know, I think this is corny today,
Speaker 1: but this is how.
Speaker 2: This is how it happened.
Speaker 1: So I do that day one. Day two, I'm like, nah,
Speaker 1: but you know, I got my niggas in Jersey. He
Speaker 1: calls me again day two to pull up to the studio.
Speaker 1: I'm like, but you know, I got my Jersey niggas.
Speaker 1: I got to bring it there too. So day two
Speaker 1: he the day three. I wake up and I'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: so and so, Bro's gonna kill me if I don't
Speaker 1: show up to the studio today. It's day three. I'm
Speaker 1: not even gonna let him call me first. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: call him tell him I'm on the way. So I
Speaker 1: go up to the studio, the studio. Can I say
Speaker 1: names of the studios?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: So the studio was quiet in Manhattan. And when I
Speaker 1: get off the elevator, so I go by myself. When
Speaker 1: I get off the elevator, I see a bodyguard that
Speaker 1: I'm sure I've seen in met or seen in tabloids
Speaker 1: or scene. I know him from somewhere, but I'm not
Speaker 1: putting one in one together. I'm more what's more in
Speaker 1: my mind is feeling bad for the last two days
Speaker 1: and not showing up for my dog, the producer. So
Speaker 1: I go to the back room. All of his production
Speaker 1: team is there. I'm like, yo, where's Bro. It's like
Speaker 1: now he's in the main room. And so I go
Speaker 1: in the main room. Mind you. Nobody tells me shit.
Speaker 1: Walk in the room, I'm like, what's up there? Before
Speaker 1: I put a g on the gull.
Speaker 2: Right, I see.
Speaker 1: Top two biggest artists of all time, just sitting on
Speaker 1: the couch at least top two or top three, and
Speaker 1: then the gug came out like good.
Speaker 3: I was like.
Speaker 1: Working on the last and then salt to the wound.
Speaker 1: My man, the producer, he says, hey, yo, so and
Speaker 1: so this is who I've been telling you about for
Speaker 1: the last two days. I'm just like damn. Right next
Speaker 1: to her was sitting was actually, uh the chairman of
Speaker 1: the publishing company that I was at that you're signed to.
Speaker 1: And he's just sitting there like dick right, and I
Speaker 1: sit down. Just small, bro, I'm small, like I just
Speaker 1: I fucking shrunk. And my man. So she gets in
Speaker 1: the booth and she finishes the final vocals that they
Speaker 1: had written in the last two days for a record
Speaker 1: that probably lasted as long as fuck number one on
Speaker 1: Billboard and then the next year it was on Super Bowl.
Speaker 1: And so that's my my I ain't saying no names.
Speaker 1: Uh story.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One, don't be a cornball and try to show off
Speaker 1: girls see your niggas. Two when opportunity, cause you can't
Speaker 1: let it be the truth about you, uh, that you
Speaker 1: ignored the ship for a distraction, for something that meant nothing,
Speaker 1: for something he wasn't even intentional about That's what I
Speaker 1: take from it. But it's hilarious when I tell you who.
Speaker 2: Was there and what happened. Oh man, yeah, fuck.
Speaker 1: That's funny and fucked up, right, Man, it ain't that
Speaker 1: funny us on some funny shit. God, that same person,
Speaker 1: that same producer called me in on another mega artist,
Speaker 1: and that time I fucking listened and I ended up
Speaker 1: on too on the album that's probably like seven million
Speaker 1: sold right now?
Speaker 2: Yeah, good good?
Speaker 1: But I could have been on both, if that makes
Speaker 1: it feel better, can't I was a dick, straight Sam.
Speaker 1: I hope there worth.
Speaker 2: I hope you can still tap in with that.
Speaker 1: From think I'm just outside. I retired that.
Speaker 2: I'm not talking about you. She owed you that.
Speaker 3: People keept you away from that, my God saying man,
Speaker 3: you you you are a brother that goes without saying.
Speaker 2: But your talent, your hustle speaks for yourself. Appreciate and
Speaker 2: I think you know.
Speaker 3: The beauty in this conversation man, and people getting to
Speaker 3: know and understand more about your makeup. You know those
Speaker 3: things you said at the end, you know, really finding
Speaker 3: the value in that relationship with God and your family
Speaker 3: like that, that that is a foundational That is a
Speaker 3: foundational tool that if you don't if you don't have
Speaker 3: something like that to hold on to, especially in this
Speaker 3: place that we're in, you'll find yourself flailing in so
Speaker 3: many different directions.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 3: And you know, as we talk to the people who
Speaker 3: are listening and the people who are aspiring and inspired
Speaker 3: by you, I pray they really heard that, because that
Speaker 3: was that was That's incredible. Yeah, that's incredible that that
Speaker 3: that grid and that checklist and that being intentional about
Speaker 3: your purpose.
Speaker 2: Man. Can't beat that. Man, I appreciate you.
Speaker 3: You can't beat that. So I appreciate that more than
Speaker 3: anything about you. I know you're talented. I know you
Speaker 3: can you can write, you can write a hit in
Speaker 3: twelve minutes.
Speaker 2: And I got all that. I got that.
Speaker 3: But the intentionality, uh, in terms of your relationship with
Speaker 3: the creator and your relationship with your family.
Speaker 2: Man, that's the goal.
Speaker 1: That's my biggest assets right there.
Speaker 2: That's that's the biggest asset.
Speaker 3: My name is Tank Man, I'm Valentine, and thank you,
Speaker 3: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: About to be some brown paper bags coming in.
Speaker 3: I want some of them too. I'll take up back
Speaker 3: we'll be on that opportunity. Sam My name is and
Speaker 3: this is the Harmy Money Podcast, the authority on all
Speaker 3: things R and B. And this has not only been
Speaker 3: a lesson in music, this has been a lesson in life.
Speaker 2: Man with our brother. This is Sam.
Speaker 1: I appreciate you. Appreciate