I’d like to explore the concepts of creativity and vulnerability, publicly with you all. Especially with my music peers. People often ask me to listen to their music and to provide feedback. I enjoy it! I love hearing people being creative and taking risks. As a risk taker myself, I realized that I’m not that open with you guys, creatively. My process and who I am in general, is pretty private. Though I believe as an artist, if you’re looking to maximize your “I feel you” moments, you need for your listeners to see themselves, in what you’re delivering, somehow, in order to convert them to followers. That’s pretty elementary, right? Vision is everything. One thing my mom told me when I was in grade school that has stuck with me through the years is “You’ve got to see it first, in order to achieve it later”.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been an artist trying to find myself, my sound and my energy, musically. Through these years, I’ve experimented with so many producers and styles, I’ve chased so many hits, (I’ve been fortunate to have produced and been apart of a couple, by hood standards😉) missed more than a couple dozen times, lost big, had some big ass wins, celebrated success and battled with depression. What I’ve learned through it all is that you’ll never quite have it all figured out. Things change, people change, times change. (Might be my argument for evolution, simplified?)

I took a step back from my artistry for a while to better put my goals in perspective. I wanted the music game so bad until I got there and realized that it’s all just a game and most of its players are simply actors and victims. Granted, they have a whole lot of fun. This raised a question for me that still keeps me up at night:

Is this what you want? Is this who you want to be? Is this how you want to contribute?

If there’s one thing I’d like to be remembered for, it’s that I give maximum effort. To my dreams, my family, my friends, my music, my community….

With that in mind, I’m back on the grind, from scratch! Early last year I started recording music again with the intentions of releasing it and getting back on the road to make enough money to buy my mom a house! It wasn’t the smoothest process getting to this point. December of ’16, I was in a groove! I was making music and having a sonic break through. I was finding myself and my frequency again…… Then, GMK’s hard drive dies with no back up and I lose almost all of my progress. 😢

Some of my favorite music, lost. All sessions unrecoverable. All I have are the rough demo mp3’s 😖

Should I try and recreate these songs? Musicians know how hard it is to recreate that energy. It’s impossible, really.

I took it all in stride and kept going nonetheless. Connected with the homie from high school, 10.4 Rog in Oakland and started cookin’, aggressively. He was working on a graduation thesis for film school, I was working curation at Pandora. In 3 months time we made adn & sYw ep’s and dropped them into the clouds. We’re now wrapping up the 3rd ep…..

I’m writing this post today because I’ve decided not to just let those dead hard drive songs die and never be heard. I think I said some good shit, so I’ve decided to open up and upload my roughs to Soundcloud! No make up, no mixes, no vocal tuning, no fx….. Pure imperfection. It really hurts me to listen to them because I cant stop thinking about everything I would have and could have done if I hadn’t lost the sessions. Maybe we’ll replay them live?

The demo takes! This is as vulnerable as it gets for an artist, I think. Raw ideas.

The ideas I never finished.

– P

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