Sitting cross-legged on the chaise lounge of his couch, Billy Capricorn searches through the apps on his TV for the right tunes. Mid-afternoon light spills through the big, east-facing windows of his Jackson Ward apartment, and everything feels warm and hazy, like a dream sequence shot with a Vaseline-smudged lens.
Across from the living area sits Capricorn’s studio setup, with monitors flanking a bright orange chair, a bass guitar, and a small collection of keyboards behind the desk. The whole space is open and inviting, a conducive environment for letting one’s mind wander into the ether, returning with a bounty of ideas to parse through.
Finally settling on a playlist, he leans back against the wall, a song from New York rapper MIKE’s album “Showbiz!” emanating from the speakers. It’s his day off from working as a mail carrier, a job whose long shifts enable an insatiable musical appetite. “I listen to a ridiculous amount of music,” he chuckles, and during our conversation, I notice the playlist shuffle between a wildly disparate array of genres and artists, from Massive Attack to Linkin Park to SahBabii to Toro Y Moi.
Though he ostensibly makes hip-hop, the 29-year-old Capricorn (né Eric Spruill) doesn’t feel beholden to form. The music on his Bandcamp page bursts with ideas, the product of an artist primarily interested in exploration. If you were to scramble its contents, you’d whiplash from psychedelic house stompers to menacing boom-bap slabs to spacey trap jams within minutes.
If there is a signature “Billy Capricorn” sound, it has roots in Spruill’s love of Gorillaz and Odd Future, artists that combined bass-heavy, hip-hop grooves with alternative, electronic experimentation. “When I started Billy Capricorn, I wanted to be genreless,” he says. “I didn’t want to box myself in, and I didn’t want to make something just for the sake of making it.”
Spruill’s first foray into making music started early, as he picked up the upright bass for his elementary school’s string ensemble. He switched to saxophone in middle school but hated rehearsing, ending up in remedial band in eighth grade, a class that focused more on composition than ensemble playing. “The director was impressed with what I was making but couldn’t understand why I didn’t ever want to practice,” he says. “He wrote ‘I hope you continue pursuing music’ in my yearbook.”
Though Spruill didn’t think much of the comment then, he looks back on it as a catalyst.
In high school, his uncle taught him how to DJ, defining the art in simple terms: “He told me not to think about the equipment, just focus on what song pairs well with what I’m playing.” Soon after, Spruill got his own equipment and started doing weddings and family reunions—he even landed a guest appearance on the early 2010s reality series “Dance Moms.” His love of DJing spurred an interest in making beats, and in 2013, he started learning FL Studio, a sampling and sequencing program widely regarded as an industry leader in digital hip-hop production.
Over a decade later, Spruill’s amassed a rich, rewarding, and deeply exploratory catalog. His first release, “Out of Love Vol. 1,” was simply a collection of beats he’d made from January to February of 2015, what he describes as a journal of sorts. He dropped it on Valentine’s Day that year, inadvertently establishing a tradition of releasing a new volume every Feb. 14. The first four editions of “Out of Love” were all instrumental, the fifth was the first to feature vocals, and six through nine are production showcases, pairing Billy Capricorn with another rapper (except seven, which featured Spruill on both sides of the mic).
The latest installment, “Out of Love Vol. 10,” is Spruill’s clearest execution of the musically voracious Billy Capricorn project. After spending years bouncing between NOVA, New Jersey, and Richmond, he permanently relocated to Richmond in mid-2020, fully immersing himself in a crew of like-minded young creatives like akaLUTHER, Alfred, Ty Sorrell, Ru, and CLWDWLKR, all of whom he cites as massive influences on his own work. “Out of Love Vol. 10” feels like a celebration of that community, as almost all of them feature at least once. Spruill’s candy-colored production is the star of the show, running the gamut from syrupy plugg (“Did You Miss Me?”) to atmospheric jungle (“Coconut & Pear [Theme]”), from skittering cloud rap (“Sincerely, Billy! <3”) to dreamy R&B (“DEWYUHWUNTEWDNCE?”). He knows exactly how to shape his unique, Tyler, the Creator-esque baritone to fit the airiness of his beats, and his curatorial sense of where to place his friends and collaborators is always spot-on.
Spruill describes “Vol. 10” as the grandiose album he’d “been yearning to make for so long.” Now that it’s out of his system, he thinks it’s time to end—or at least pause—the series. He’s spent the past decade with a serious amount of self-imposed pressure to drop an album on a set date and relishes the idea of freeing up his schedule to see what new creative lanes may open. Nearly fifteen years ago, when he settled on the name “Billy Capricorn,” a play on his Zodiac sign (“double goat,” he tells me with a sly smile), he envisioned the character as a funk artist. “You know, low rider, platform boots. I wanted to make a funk album.”
He pauses, notices that the TV’s playlist has queued up a Mastodon song, and shrugs.
“Who knows what’s next.”
