In my head, I’m a rapper/producer. I don’t have a rap name, but if I did, it would be “MetalGearLiquid” or “Ampersand&.” But even though I’ve only officially made one song as a fake rapper/producer (which was 23 seconds long and made as a joke), I decided to accept the challenge of creating another song…a real one this time!
I was involved in a theater production as a co-director and part of the script required a dance performance to a song. The only problem was that the song didn’t exist and everyone who accepted the job of creating it backed out at the last minute. I thought “it can’t possibly be that hard,” so I accepted the task.
I called one of the most talented rappers I know and we formed two-man team. I was the producer and he was the rapper. After giving him a summary of the song and a script of the play, we went to work. He wrote a few versions of the song and we tweaked the lyrics via email and text messages for a few days. During the same time, I worked on refining the beat into something that would work well in the play. About a week later, we set-up a makeshift studio and spent about 5 hours recording.
When we were finished, we both listened to the final product and it sounded decent. Just as we were packing up, I played him another beat that I was going to use on a different project and he immediately said, “WE NEED THAT BEAT ON THIS SONG!!!” He was right.
We immediately went back to work—he reworked the lyrics and I refined the beat. Within 45 minutes, we had a finished product and the song was done. This time around, we were much more excited about the outcome.
The song was then sent to two dancers who choreographed a dance performance and a few weeks later, I watched as the song that we made come to life on stage in front of ~500 people.
Here is the song called, “I love His Name,” which is based on the book and play “The Day I Died But Now Live.”
June 27, 2018 -
This is very good so looking forward for the album now