That's good, 'cause you guys would never make money as a group of twelve. (laughs) Yeah, there's no way. It's hard enough with just the five of us.
Everybody seems pretty involved in side projects and whatnot. How difficult is it to rein everyone in together to work on the group's album? Um. It's extremely difficult. When we decided to record an album, we sat down and said, Okay, we know that everyone has their side projects that we're working on, but what we want to do is to take the best beats and the best concepts and focus on the group album. The goal was to make this album a "classic." That's actually what we said when we sat down. "Let's make this album classic. Let's make it so that it's in people's favorites - their top five of all time." And what that took was people making a lot of sacrifices. We determined from the beginning that if the beat wasn't good enough, it would get kicked off of the album. If your verse wasn't good enough for the song - if it was holding the song back from reaching its potential - you got kicked off and replaced by someone else. There couldn't really be any ego involved. Everyone had to look at it as the song is the most important thing.
And I still think that there were times when people - we would hear something that one of us would do on a solo project and we would all go, "What? How come that wasn't for the group album?"
(laughs) It was difficult, but it was something that everyone was determined to do. So, we're pretty happy with the final product.
That's good. And judging by the latest solo drop - Theory Hazit's Extra Credit - and the other solo stuff I've heard... If the group album is better, I'm sure it's gonna be something that will turn a lot of heads. (laughs) Man, I hope so.
So the album is called The Have Nots. . . What is it that you don't have? (laughs) The Have Nots. We didn't really start off with an album, but the working title when we first started was Spitting Images. And the concept behind that was sort of, you know, we're all created in God's image, so we're spitting images of Christ. And then, somewhere along the line, we decided not to use that title. Part of it was that we had recorded a song called "Spitting Images" and we didn't think that it was up to par and also, I think someone else, during the time that we were recording, put out an album called Spitting Images. So we decided to abandon that.
We had a song called "Have Nots" and the song is great. In that song, it's sort of an appreciation for what you do have. The lyric to the hook says, "take a look around and see the haves and the have nots." To take it a step further, sort of a theme in that [concept] was Christ saying, "You have believed because you have seen, but blessed are those who have not seen, but still believe." And that's us. We have not seen the risen Christ, but we still believe. So we're the Have Nots.