It’s 10 p.m. in London, but Fly Anakin is wide awake, chipper even. The Richmond-raised rapper and Mutant Academy founding member is in the U.K. to check in with his label, Lex Records, and play a few shows to promote his new album, “(The) Forever Dream.” So far, he’s having a blast. “We out here smoking weed, drinking beers,” he says with an explosive laugh. “Pubbed out.”
It’s only been a few weeks since the album dropped, but the promotional cycle is in full swing. Before his stint in Great Britain, he’d been traveling around the U.S. with Baltimore-via-Detroit underground legend Quelle Chris, the album’s executive producer, doing free shows at record stores — including a hometown kickoff gig at Plan 9 in Carytown.
We had a long, free-flowing conversation about the making of his excellent new album, the collaborative process with Quelle Chris, and the definition of “mindless music.”
Style Weekly: You go in a lot of different directions on this record, and I’m curious about how natural it felt versus how much you pushed yourself and how prescriptive you were about it.
Fly Anakin: I got this thing where sometimes I go crazy on verses where I’m not supposed to be going crazy. Say someone hits me up asking me for a verse, and I charge them X amount of money, and then I end up liking that motherfucker a little more than I thought I would. I’m not saying I was gonna write something that wasn’t good, but I’m not thinking about my own creation while I’m making it. I’m just making something over beat. Essentially, I’ve noticed that when I’m uncomfortable, I can find a way to be comfortable. Quelle centered on that. He focused in on how if I’m rapping on beats that I’m not used to, I’m gonna find a way to get comfortable on that bitch. It’s just about finding pockets on shit that I wouldn’t usually pick.
Your writing and delivery are both so technical and dense. What’s your editing process like?
Man, I ain’t even gonna lie, it’s not that much of an editing process. I know a lot of people who write first and then find a beat, but I usually go beat first, and I’ll do whatever the beat tells me to do if I love it enough. I listen to the beat; I live with the beat; I smoke to the beat; I drive around to the beat. I treat a beat like I got it on a whiteboard in my brain. As soon as something comes to me, I start there, whether it makes sense or not, and I just fucking flow. Usually, it’s a stream of consciousness; I don’t really stick to topics to avoid feeling boxed in. I low-key might have undiagnosed ADHD, so that’s kind of how my mind works in my day-to-day life. I don’t really stay on topic, and I’m really bad at keeping the conversation about one thing. I’ll get excited about something and blurt out some other shit, then everybody forget about what we was talking about. So, I try to keep my writing as honest to my personality as possible. There’s no real technicality in it, outside of the part where I’m just making sure it fits well on the beat. That’s the most technical thing I do — make sure shit don’t sound stupid over the drums.
How did working with an executive producer compare to some of your other projects, like “Backyard Boogie,” which you did in collaboration with Ohbliv, or “Frank,” where you sourced beats from a bunch of different producers?
I went out of my way to make sure it wasn’t a single-producer project. When me and Quelle first talked about doing the album, he thought I had asked him to produce it. I said, “No, I want you to be the executive producer because I just did Skinemaxxx with Foisey.” I wanted to explore some shit, to take it to a different place. I knew that we could come up with something crazy if we just outsourced a little bit versus honing in on ourselves, because, of course, we can make a great project together. I just wanted some razzle dazzle.
I started by sending Quelle songs. I sent him some shit I got with Graymatter, a whole folder of Madlib joints — some of this shit that be in the stash be amazing as fuck, like, it’s a whole Madlib album just sitting there. I can make a classic album out of my stash at any moment. I pulled “CheckOnMe” out after he said no to a bunch of shit, and it’s the only one he wanted.
Were there any other tracks that weren’t made specifically during the sessions with Quelle?
The outro, “Say Thank You,” would have been a stash song, but Quelle wanted it for the album. Not gonna say it would have died in the stash, but it would have stayed there until I felt like it would have made sense on the project. Also, “MY N*GGA.” My man ShunGu produced the beat and had it for probably like a year and a half before I knew I was gonna make the album with Quelle. I found out that the beat was about eight years old, and apparently, he put it on his SoundCloud page, and Quelle “liked” it way back then. That was one of them joints that’s like, ancestral. My ancestors picked that beat. And then to take it to the crib and do the video in Southside Plaza with family that I ain’t seen in like, five-plus years? Serious business, bro. That was a great fucking selection. We made that in them sessions, but that beat came from a long time ago. So, “MY N*GGA”, “CheckOnMe,” and “Say Thank You.” The rest was conceived in Quelle Chris’s basement.
How did Quelle challenge you to get out of your comfort zone?
For example, when it came to the title song, “Forever Dream,” I didn’t fully see the vision until that second verse. Chris Keys did some more arrangements with the choir, and I was like, “Damn, this song bigger than me!” Once I felt that way, I thought that shit was hard, you know? I can see the genius. It’s the element of trusting your people. I ain’t bring Quelle into the fold to be like, “No, I’m not doing none of that.” [Laughs] I brought him into the fold because I wanted to see a different side of this shit. I wanted to learn something.
You refer to “(The) Forever Dream” as “mindless music” because you didn’t come to it with any set concept. It feels like the warmest, most inviting Fly Anakin album, and there are moments on the record that feel more like you’re giving a little bit more of yourself to the audience. Was that a conscious thing? Did you feel so free working without a concept that you ended up writing a little bit more about your own life?
It’s the product of being comfortable working with someone, because if I’m not comfortable, I’m gonna bar up. This is the cheat code to get a personal verse out of me, bro: The beat gotta hit my spirit, and it got to just be us in the studio. Because then, I’m gonna think as personal as I can, and I’m not thinking about performing this around nobody. But if I’m uncomfortable, I’m just gonna go stupid. That’s literally why the shit with Quelle makes so much sense. The whole time, we just kicked it, played the game, smoked weed, and ate shrooms. I feel like the songs just made themselves after that.
Like the intro, “Good Clothes,” to me, that’s my version of mindless music. It just got passionate towards the end, because I’m talking about my come up and shit like that, because that’s me pulling off the rail, like I always do. But, yeah, it’s mindless. I’m not trying to make a song about nothing! This is just supposed to be a vibe. A better example of what mindless music is for me, is the trap shit. I love music about nothing. I don’t want to hear n*ggas talk about they struggles. I got my own struggles! For example, you know the UGK song, “It’s Supposed To Bubble“?
I do.
And what is that song about?
I honestly don’t know.
Thank you. [Laughs]
Sometimes shit can just jam. You can throw on a song and feel something without some deeper meaning being prescribed.
Yeah, hell yeah! Another thing about my process is that anytime I make music with someone else, I never tell n*ggas what I’m about to rap about. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but I feel like whenever we make them songs and them collaborative albums, we never go in there with a concept; n*ggas go in there and find whatever the fuck pocket they think makes the most sense for them, and the first thing that comes to their mind, they get on that shit and take off.
As soon as n*ggas find out that beat is the one, we all shut the fuck up and write, and in 15 to 45 minutes, the song will be done. I guess you could look at it like a cypher; a lot of the time, we hear people say it sounds like we’re in the crib, just handing the mic to each other. That’s literally what it be like! Nobody’s really coming to it thinking we have to do this a certain kind of way, because I feel like that’s what makes music lame.
Did you go back and listen to your old solo albums while you were making “(The) Forever Dream”?
Whenever I need a pick me up on some inspiration shit, I listen to my old music, but it’s usually once, maybe twice a year. The main reason I do it is to stay in my own world, to be inspired by myself. I still don’t know how many songs I got. I think if I did know, I would start obsessing about it, so maybe I shouldn’t. People will post old songs that I did, and I’ll be like, “Damn, I forgot all about that joint!” I do keep track of how many projects I have, though. “(The) Forever Dream” makes it 41 since 2009.
All this definitely wasn’t on my bingo card. If I was to have a dream of being in the position that I’m in right now and then wake up 15 years ago in Southside, it would fuck my head up. I’m from Hillside Court. Growing up in Hillside from birth to seven or eight years old, looking at calendars sometimes struck fear in my heart. It would be like 2000, and I’d see something that says the year 2020, and I’d be like, “There’s no way I’m gonna make it to that.” It just didn’t seem realistic. I didn’t believe in the future. Next year? My next birthday? Shit didn’t make sense.
I was a very gullible kid, so I thought the world was gonna end in 2000. Of course, I had dreams, but I just didn’t think that it was going to happen. It’s still times where I’m like, “Damn, I really am who I thought I was” and it don’t trip me out as much as it used to, but a couple years ago, it was shocking the fuck out of me. Like, “Wow, I’m in Europe. Wow, I’m making money off of being creative.” Shit is incredible!
It sounds like you’ve developed a process where making music is less work than it is a way to check in and get to know yourself continuously.
Definitely, it gives me a purpose. For a long time, I think I just wanted to feel like I belonged to something. Now I have a career, some shit nobody can take from me. I got younger family members, nieces, nephews, little cousins, like all these n*ggas is like, “Big Cuz!” you know what I mean? I told myself that I was the black sheep with my family, but I was not the black sheep this whole time. I thought nobody fucked with me, for real. I’m just trying to make sure these people are proud, first and foremost. So all the other people? That’s a plus.
Yeah, I know that well. You can convince yourself of something like that so easily, and then getting proven wrong is shocking and incredibly valuable.
I’m so grateful for this. Everything that’s happening feels like it’s supposed to happen, so I’m not questioning nothing. I don’t feel as delusional as I did at one point, just hoping it’s gonna work. It’s working! All I gotta do is keep on.
