Prime gives you the inside track on his brand new free album, Good Morning. Download it here. Part 2 coming soon.
8am
I wrote it long before it became a track. At first it was going to be on a beat Answer made that was really cinematic and loud and epic and dope but I just felt like it wasn’t right. I knew that first 8 bars had to start the project and sonically that beat wasn’t right for what that song needed to be. A friend of mine who had heard the Answer version urged me not to change it. We hit up Mules with the (pretty loose) idea of what sort of beat we wanted and he delivered perfectly. In terms of lyrics the whole sitting behind the wheel/going to the same place/being caught in traffic thing is about me being yet another MC about to do his thing on the solo tip.
“Right now WE’RE sitting behind the wheel.” It’s all of us. I find a way to get across the median and go the other way. To me those 8 bars are vital in setting the scene for the rest of the track, album, solo career. Like “we’re all going this way, I can’t really get through this way, and I don’t really wanna go this way. I’m gonna go my own way.” It’s my music, I’m going here.
Tunguska
After the kind of slow, simmering intro I wanted something with a bit more energy to follow it. One Above is a very talented producer and he’s about to get some of the props he deserves now with this involvement in the new Hoods album and I think that’s great. He deserves it. Anyway, the beat is his and the way it has all the breakdowns, different parts of the sample used etc, he expected me to do verses and a hook and verses and cuts. When I showed him what I’d done over the beat he was like “Oh you just rap the whole way through” haha. I think it works though. There is an element of punchline shit in those lyrics but it’s not just rapping to rap. It goes somewhere. “They tell me it’s generation Y/ I prefer to think of it as hesitate and die” is my favourite moment I think.
I get asked a lot about the title, if its about “blowing up” or some shit, but it’s not. It’s not that cynical.
Money
It’s a 2 year old song at least, maybe older. The motivation for writing wasn’t me saying “money is evil” or anything like that, but that line about people spending all their money to give the appearance of having some is true. I guess the message is “money is great to have, but don’t fuck up your life to get it”. It’s another Answer beat and it really goes off live. We had it in the Pagen Elypsis crew live show long before it came out and whenever I do it now it goes off. Even when I’m on someone else’s tour and 80% of the crowd don’t know me that song kills live.
Alone (ft. Purpose)
Some of the lyrics for this track were in a track I made but threw away called “This Plane I Built”. When I made it I loved it, but over time I realized it wasn’t perfect. I was listening to “Sure Thing” by Miguel and I started spitting some of the lyrics from that joint over it and it was just perfect. The thing about making a free album/mixtape/whatever is it gives you the opportunity to experiment with jacking beats or remixing existing tracks. I re-wrote the track around some of the ideas and lines that were already there. The little bridge after the second hook is the intro to the Miguel track. Anyone who is familiar with Purpose’s work earlier in the year knows the hook comes from his track “Faded”. The track was just going to be me. One night we were in town and I asked Purpose to add a verse to the end of that joint. He had to make sure a few days later I really meant it and it wasn’t just the drink talking. I told him I meant it and a couple weeks later he killed it.
For The First Time
Motive (Pagen Elypsis) was in contact with a producer out of Birmingham, UK called Kelakovski and he had a stack of his beats. One night I was sitting in my old house listening to tunes and that beat just came on. I started messing with it and what I ended up with was “For The First Time”. It’s a homage to Lupe Fiasco’s “He Say, She Say” but it’s also an exploration of that kind of concept spanning separate generations rather than just two different people in the same situation. The response for this track has been really dope, and I’m glad because it’s the kind of track that will only really reward the listener if they’re on it the whole way through. It’s one of my favourite tracks on Good Morning. We put the screwed snippet of “He Say, She Say” on there at the end to confirm that I was deliberately paying homage to it. It’s also a cool little thing for the person who picks up on the connection between the tracks.
Right Here
There’s no metaphors or hidden stories or anything about what this song is about. This song is “I am here, look at me. I am not going away” and nothing more. Good Morning is at times a pretty depressing record and this track is I guess what you would expect me to do based on my previous work. This track is definitely more in the Pagen Elypsis mould than a lot of the more personal stuff on Good Morning. It’s a big beat, big statements, big punchlines. It wouldn’t have been right to go through a whole 18 tracks without a couple of these tracks. I’ve started opening with this live just because it has that kinda of airy, ominous intro and then it bangs into life. Answer on the beat again. We made this at the same time we made “Money” and a few of the other tracks. It does pick the energy up after “Alone” and “For The First Time” and give the record a bit of momentum.
Restore My Faith
I wrote it January 2009. I had written like 50 bars or so just on some stream of consciousness shit. It was just a very honest account of where I was at and what I was feeling at that moment. A few days later I was in Melbourne to watch Adelaide United play away and while I was in town I dropped into to Answer’s place. He had made that beat the night before and I was like “I have a song for this.” I chopped the verse up and re-wrote a few bits and wrote a hook and we had a song in less than two hours. I don’t remember how It happened but somehow the track was getting played on Sydney community radio before I had released it or before it was even properly mixed. From that it got a few plays on Triple J in 2009. I decided at that point to put it up on myspace and from there it got ripped and put on youtube. Because it had been floating around for so long I thought twice about putting it on Good Morning but at the end of the day I felt that track needed to have somewhere to exist and kinda be immortalised. I didn’t want it to just fall away to nothing or be forgotten.
It’s one of those tracks where you put 100% of your honesty into it and by the time it’s released you might not neccesarily still live those feelings. That’s just how I write though. It’s probably the most popular track I’ve made. I guess people just relate to it and even those that don’t relate can respect what I’m doing rap wise on that track. I’ve had people say “I don’t like that kind of track but I love that track” and I think that’s a great compliment.
The Closest That I Get (ft Motive)
When Pagen Elypsis dropped One Way Ticket in August 2010 we had a launch at Fowler’s in Adelaide. That is a big venue to fill for a crew like us that didn’t have any previous albums or radio play or anything at the time. We were really relying on pushing it at a grass roots level and we pushed real fucking hard to get that place full. We prepared for that show like a grand final. Kadowg from PE and I would refer to that show as the Grand Final in the rehearsals. The show was huge and it was a big validation of what we were doing at the time. A week later we were like 5th on the bill for an international act, went on at about 8pm and there was no one in the building. The message from that for me was “There is no grand final. This doesn’t end until you quit or die.” And it’s true. From then on I’ve done bigger shows than I could have ever imagined and while you don’t ever get that career-defining win you might get as a footballer you do get those moments of validation. That’s what the track is all about. Just doing your thing the best way you can until that next big moment comes up.
I’m really glad Motive was involved. He is one of the best people I’ve met in music and it was important to me to get him on the album. I think he has the ability and potential to do some really dope solo music and I hope he does. One Above provided the beat and it’s perfect once again. This was the very last song to get finished in time to make the final tracklist.
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