Track 12 – Morgan Blu (F/ Blu)

lets start from the TOP:

i go to a beat society showcase at the (now closed) knitting factory in manhattan in 2007. or maybe it was 2006. i dont even fully remember the show but i remember not knowing who exile was. he was mad entertaining at the showcase, this was before he was doing the live beats but he had props and just was really animated while his beats were playing. i also remember thinking his sound was similar to the mobb deep “pearly gates” beat, and then i found out that was in fact him! this is important because if id not gone to that beat society “morgan blu” may not have happened. it was the first step in the chain of events!

step 2: my homeboy Dee asked me if i wanted to check out this album by blu and exile. he didnt say i needed to hear it, i dont even remember him saying it was dope or not! but since id seen exile last week i wanted to hear more beats…wait…it WAS 2006…anyway i turn it on thinking im about to just zone to the beats and thats when blu came through and kicked me in the face!

so somewhere from that point it got passed around to everyone in my circle and i did my bootleg campaigning for the album when it came out. so much that one day out of nowhere blu had contacted me just to say thanks. ilyas had spoken to him and they decided on doing a song…ok here is the funny part:

on the bridge ep we have a song called filthier interlude aka “place” and the beat goes “place……place……place….place…..” repetitively over and over and over and over and…

when i made that beat i had also made one that went “blue…..blue….blue……” over and over and over again. i hadnt heard of blu yet, (both the “place” and “blue” beat were old beats from years ago) it was a coincidence because i liked the guitar and i was more about looping that part. they were brother and sister beats, in a way. when ilyas asked for a beat for this song i went searching for this “blue….blue….blue…” beat id made years ago, but to have a beat saying “blue” for 4 minutes wasnt going to fly, thats too much of a blu commercial! haha…plus it looping for one bar was boring. so i turned it into more of a full track so we all could go in over it.

next step was sending it to blu and getting it back. he’d sent it back to me in a month or two but then his hard drive crashed so there was no accapella. for the next…few months? we tried to get it redone but i was more hoping the old hard drive would start working (hey aeon, deja vu! hard drive failure is the worst).

long story short it never got redone but blu and john (manager) both apologized about it, and its nothing but love! im actually happy we got to keep the original take. i had sent him the wrong demo of the beat with 16 bars open for him and 16 bars open for ilyas, with donwill’s rough verse and a verse i recorded but didnt like (id written it on the A train in a rush…ha) and he ended up rapping to the full 32 bars (lol). once we heard that the new hurdle became “do we put this demo on the album?” “ilyas isnt on it and hes the one that put the collaboration together!” “von doesnt even like his verse!”

it looked like a disaster for a second, but in the end we didnt care so we mixed his demo with the real version of the song. i got to write a verse i actually liked (my verse was supposed to be inspired by DOOM but you probably dont hear it. the 3rd person talk more than anything) and il & don wanted to do longer verses to match the legnth of blu’s verse. ilyas never wants to perform his verse though (OOOOH I THREW HIM UNDER THE BUS! lol just joking)

exile was supposed to produce a song on the album too, and we had the beat, but it didnt seem to fit with  the stuff we had so we didnt end up recording to it. i guess i have said all there is to say about this song at this point. Thanks to john kim and blu for going through the months of harassment from us (haha) and know that the album would not have been complete without you. the same goes for every artist (and that artists’ team) that contributed to this album. it really means a lot to us.

p.s. “she got on the pill after 23 jimmys cause i got enough son’s/sun’s and they all want a penny” (that boy good, that boy good)

(extra points because some people call jumpshots jimmys too haha)