http://metermaidsnyc.com/site

GET DOWN – Metermaids by Strange Famous Records

To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember much about the recording of this song.  Obviously 9th made this banger, and I remember sitting in the motel room with Sentence and Matty trying to figure out a hook.  We recorded a number of different hooks in the studio with 9th along with our verses, but nothing really felt that great.  I believe we left North Carolina with the hook just being us shouting “Get Down.”  Hahaha.  We’re minimalists, yo.

When we were going back over the tracks and adjusting things here and there, we wrote the new hook and had our friends Gray and Clinton Curtis shout along with us.

What I’d like to talk about in this blog is how we got down (get it, Get Down?!) with Rob Swift.

When we were back in NYC, we started brainstorming DJ’s we could holler at to handle cuts on the record.  We knew from the jump that we wanted a lot of cuts — the record is simple, meat and potatoes hip hop.   We’d never made a classic-steelo hip hop record before, so we figured we should go all the way with it.

Our good friend Aaron worked for Boundless at the time (in case you haven’t noticed, we rock a lot of King Stampede gear.  It actually makes up 80-90% of my current wardrobe).  He had mentioned to us that they had had Rob Swift come through for a couple of their events, and that he was the nicest dude of all time, as well as being a legendary DJ.  I was particularly excited about this prospect.

See, I got my start in hip hop as a DJ.  In high school I saved up my dough and was able to get a couple of Technics and the shittiest Vestax mixer this world has ever known.  Bought a bunch of battle records at Fat Beats, etc.  And I spent hours in my room scratching.  I never cared too much about rocking a party or beat juggling, I just wanted to scratch.  You would think that the time I spent honing my craft would have made me particularly good at scratching, but it didn’t.  I could scratch really fast, but my fader hand never cooperated.  Sucks.  Although in a recent company trip to Scratch Academy, I did win the battle.  Hiyoooooooo.  DJ Name: Best DJ in the Woooooooooooorld.

My friend Tommy (who was Metermaids’ original DJ, and still one of my best friends) was much, much better than me.  Crab scratch, the whole nine.  He actually handles all of the cuts on Nightlife and does a damn good job.  I knew when Tommy started that I was never going to attain that level.  So I decided to try rapping.  Maybe I’m not so good at that either.  But I digress.

Back when Tommy and I were both DJ’ing, he picked me up and we traveled into the city for the DMC championships at SOB’s.  I had a cold at the time and was eating maaaaaaaad Cold Eez.  I remember that.  I also remember being slightly underwhelmed by much of the competition.  Then, in the middle of it all, The X-Men came up for an exhibition.  It was fuuuuuuuuuucking unbelievable.  Like, jaw droppingly good.  They did a Rock the Bells routine that blew me and Tommy’s little minds.  I was hooked from that moment on.

RIP Roc Raida.

So we hollered at Rob, and Aaron was right.  He is the nicest dude ever.  We sent him the tracks and waited to see what he would do with them.

Like I mentioned in the Rooftop Shake breakdown, the first track we got back was… Rooftop Shake.  The first twenty seconds of that song let us know that we had made a good decision.  Haha.   The more tracks we got back from Rob, in making the album, the more apparent it was that he was as important to the sound of the album as any other piece.  It’s like having a third MC, who just happens to speak with his hands.  I phrased that in a corny way, but you know.  Victory Blvd, 8mm, Graveyard Shift, Get Down — none of these songs were the same before Rob touched them.  Maybe at some point we can post what the album sounds like without the cuts so people could hear how different it is without this man.  I saw on Twitter recently that someone said the best part of our album is Rob Swift.  I can’t really disagree with that sentiment.

Rob then completely hooked up our Hello Mixtape, and even DJ’ed Matty’s wedding.  Haha.  Talk about an honorary Metermaids family member.  He actually tore down the wedding, too.  I danced my ass off that night.

Next week we get to rock with him live for the first time at our official album release party:

Thursday, 11/4 @ Irving Plaza w/ the big homey Sage Francis, Eternia, Rob Swift, and Metermaids.  Get your tickets HERE before it sells out, kid.

One more quick piece of trivia about the actual song: the subway recordings you hear were recorded by Matty using binaural (sp?) earphone microphones.  Basically, Matt can wear these headphones around that pick up 360 degrees of sound — so if you listen to the beginning and end in headphones, that is actually what it sounded like to Matt at that moment on the train.  Both in an audio and spacial sense.  Pretty cool.

All for now.