Now you mentioned that you also do design work. That's your own company, right?
Well, I've been working, just freelance work under the name Broken English Design. I just worked with other independent firms and they float me some work. I've done a lot of work with Adidas for Adidas Originals, as well as some musicians here and there and some group stuff - guys in my group, like Braille and Othello. Yeah, that's been my bread and butter, my bread winner to keep food on the table and keep the bills paid.
There you go. I think a lot writers and artists have a day job as well. It's good that the design work probably keeps your creative juices flowing and such.
Yeah. It ends up keeping me from burning out. From one or the other. They both balance and kind of inform each other. When I'm designing, I'm listening to music and when I'm working on music, I'm planning the design so I can keep things well informed visually and auditorily.
Okay, now let's talk about the album.
Okay.
It's called Watts Happening.
Yes.
What can we expect from it?
Well for anyone who's heard my last record, I would say that it's the next step forward. I worked on trying to expand more on the musical side and there's this main track that was pretty much the first track I worked on for this record, but it was also the last one I finished because of all the parts I had to work on and the people I had to get involved and the musicians for it. And then on the other end, there's a lot more personal things in it, which is kind of the play on the wording of Watts Happening. Taking of course the "Hey, what's happening?" and spinning it with the last half of my pseudo name. So it's kind of saying that this is me growing. This is Watts Happening, you know? While it's happening and taking place right before you.
The record also shows the next step from the last one as well as events and things that have happened and taken place in my life. So, it covers a lot of ground and it shows a lot more of my influences and the things that I'm into, musically. Like, for instance, Brazilian music and funk and just some different things. It's just a bigger step forward, creatively, from the last one. I was just trying more things that weren't implemented because there's only so many things that you can do in the context of an album before you overdo it, or underdo it.
Sure. Now what kinds of themes are you dealing with on the album?
Well, one track, I had already done on a single that came out last September is called "No Delay" and there's another one called "Say What You Say." "Say What You Say" was just an instrumental track that I was, at the time when I made it I was just listening to a lot of funk music and Latin music and I just made that based off of what I was listening to. I just wanted to make a track from scratch, you know? There were no samples in it. I just replayed a bass line from a record I had been listening to and everything kind of built around that and the drums. So that was a fun track to work on at the time.