Brooklyn rap duo Metermaids like to refer to themselves as the “Bad News Bears of hip-hop.” While this is accurate, it bears mentioning that they’re not akin to the cleaned up Billy Bob Thornton team, but rather the Walter Matthau-led original. In a musical drought where much of New York’s rap output has been dead set on recreating past magic, MCs Sentence and Swell haven’t needed to recapture anything they’ve had all along. After being a show-stopping staple of East Coast indie-rap scene, the two signed with Sage Francis’ Strange Famous Records and have unleashed a beast of an album in Rooftop Shake.

The most impressive feat of Rooftop Shake is how perfectly it captures the energy of the duo’s live show, and the adrenaline isn’t compromised in the slightest as great performances and impeccable mixing fill the duration of the record. Second most impressive is the guest list. As rare as it’s become to hear any scratching on rap records these days, the welcome surprise of its inclusion here is made that much better in being performed by X-ecutioner DJ Rob Swift, among the best turntablists in the world today. Also heard are labelmates Buck 65 and Sage Francis, who contributes two appearances. Production on the record is divided between longtime collaborator M. Stine and Grammy Award winner 9th Wonder. 9th’s production has become quite polarizing, especially in recent years, but if you’ve ever been a fan of his, you’ll be happy to know his contributions here are easily among his best work, combining the glossy shine of Little Brother output with the heartfelt soul of his Murs collaborations and a crunching thump that knocks with a fury he hasn’t hit with in some time.

What’s enjoyable about Rooftop Shake is that it’s a truly New York record, but as a whole what stands out is its completely unshakable artistry. The two have toiled together for so long now that they know not only what they want to sound like, but how to achieve it. From the bittersweet tribute to touring “Gone” to the gripping character study of “Last of the EMTs” to the wistful stroll through an old flame’s old neighborhood in “Ghost Town,” both Metermaids excel at concepts and wordplay as much as rocking a party. Particularly refreshing is how engaged both Sentence and Swell sound with what they’re doing, neither feigning apathy nor phoning it in, giving a certain comfort that they’re just as excited about making rap music as their listeners are hearing it.

There’s something really special about Rooftop Shake that, as a longtime fan of underground hip-hop, feels warmly satisfying. Metermaids remind me of that indie-underground renaissance of the early 2000s, a vibrant time that sprung from a DIY-aesthetic as well as a seemingly bottomless pool of creativity. In the decade since, we’ve watched as so many of these groups break-up, burn out and fade away without ever delivering that one great album it seemed they were sure to make. Rooftop Shake is a record with a focused mind and passionate heart set on following through on every underground rap promise left unfulfilled and having a heck of a fun time doing it.

by Chaz Kangas

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.

We had mad fun last night recording a jawn for Prolyphic’s album with Buddy Peace. Actually Ustream’d for the first time, although I’m not sure anyone watched it…

Having a good time in the studio is the perfect lead-in to talk about Victory Blvd.

I mentioned it in the 8mm breakdown, but Sentence was mad late for the studio that night. And he’s a punctual dude. I called him a couple times, no answer. I even texted his lady to see where he was — she said he was home. So I called him one more time. He picked up this last call, and sounded crazy out of it. Like, slurring his words out of it. He had just finished like a three day stretch of 15hr days, and had fallen asleep.

See — we both work full-time. It’s a sacrifice that every NYC musician probably makes. With the cost of living here, there’s no 15hr work-week hang out make music with your friends and rehearse shit going on. Sentence’s job is especially punishing. He regularly has to work weekends, super late nights and early mornings. Stripping ain’t easy y’all. Hiyoooooooo. Because of this, we aren’t the most prolific group of all time. While some of our contemporaries are putting out material all the time, we really struggle to get our projects done. You can imagine that after working ten or so hours, heading to the studio to record raps isn’t the most enticing proposition. But we do it for the love yo. For. The. Love. It’s actually one of those things where you don’t really want to do it until you’re there — then you remember why you started making music in the first place.

Back to the story.

Sentence assured me over the phone that he would be to the studio in a flash. I doubted that very much so. Because he sounded like he had no idea where he was. While we awaited his return, I laid down my verse. The “pulling a muscle in my back” thing is me and Matty talking because we didn’t think we would keep any of the takes we were doing. And that shit is mad true, too. I could barely breathe. Old man body, son. It actually happened again after that, and was equally debilitating. What the fuuuuuuck.

Regardless, Sentence showed up as I was finishing up my verse. It had taken him like 10 minutes total to wake up and get from Bushwick to Union Square. To say he was out of it is a serious understatement. He was stumbly, flushed, and talking crazy. Laughing in a crazy way. I’m laughing right now recalling this. I remember him grabbing the headphones to record, and Matty and I looking at each other like, “really?” But he said he was good to go.

What he says before his verse starts should be studied by scientists. Not only does he shout out Shia Lebouf, but right before his verse starts he shouts “Indiana Jones!” That isn’t some inside joke that we all have. He just shouted that. Months later, I remembered that Shia Lebouf starred in the Indiana Jones remake — so there is some connection there. I need to do more research. I feel like I’m close to cracking it all wide open. The a capella of this track is amazing. You can hear us all howling with laughter in the background and hear the weirdo noises Sentence was shouting in his hype tracks. It’s fucking great. I will have to post that at some point.

We delivered the song to Sage, and he didn’t like it. Haha. Then we sent it to Rob Swift, and Rob absolutely killed it. I mean — come on, son. Those cuts are fucking amazing. Not only are they technically dope, but they add a whole new element of humor to the song. This is why I keep telling people that Rob is an honorary Metermaid. This album sounded so different before he got his hands on it. When we sent the final version to Sage, he liked it. And we were all very happy.

We shot the video in BK (even though it says Staten Island, oh snap!) on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Shot it for $1 (the dollar Sentence burns to light his cigarette). Just us, the ladies, a flip cam, and the dog. Sentence’s mustache is immaculate. I showed the video to my brother and my sister after Sentence finished editing it, and they thought it was funny. So I felt like we did a good job. I still really like it. And I like the song. And I think Rob Swift is the greatest DJ of all time.

All for now.

So, as I’ve mentioned before, we originally delivered the five song EP (all produced by 9th) to Sage.  We were thinking that we would put out a digital EP, nothing else.  Then Sage and I had that long conversation at 4:00 AM, where he let me know that he didn’t think an EP was worth putting out — it should be a full album.

Keep in mind we had been sitting on the 9th EP for over a year at that point.  Over the previous summer we had put out our Hello Mixtape with Rob Swift, as well as Billy Mitchell Presents: Sleigh Bells, which represented the most work we had ever done in that kind of time period.  It took us like four months to put together Smash Smash Bang.  Which is five songs.  So we were feeling written out.

So the prospect of writing more songs wasn’t that appealing to me in that moment.  I’m also a nervous person by nature, so in my head we would start submitting new songs to Sage and he would think: “Wait a second.  These kids are wack.  I don’t want to put this album out anymore.”  Not to mention the fact that we had to come up with more beats to even write to — and how would those beats stack up against 9th’s?  I’m actually getting anxious writing this right now, and the album is already out.  Well done.

Our first thought was to go back through Matt’s back catalog of beats.  After returning from the sessions with 9th, he had gotten way back into the MPC — we were figuring that we could probably snag one or two beats he had done in the year since we finished the 9th EP, and make the rest.  He ended up already having maaaaad beats that we loved, which was awesome.  Apparently we need to pay more attention when he shoots these beats to us all nonchalant.

My idea was to send Sage the beats we were considering using so that he could help helm the rest of the album.  Pro-tip, kids: when you have a resource like Sage, fucking use it.  Haha.  The first two beats I sent him were the beats that ended up becoming “Bad Things” and “Kill the Crow.”  As I said in my “Bad Things” breakdown, Sage responded by saying that he dug them, and that he “might even surprise himself by writing to them.”  I believe we got his verse for “Bad Things” back first.   And it was fucking awesome.  We got “Kill the Crow” back second.

I think we were all (in the Metermaids fam) more excited about “Bad Things” off the bat.  It’s more immediate, more raw.  Our first priority was to finish that song.  Once that was done, we took a crack at “Kill the Crow.”

The beauty of “Kill the Crow,” at least to me, is that I bet it means four different things to the four different people who wrote it.  Sage wrote the first verse.  Apparently in Russia — he mentioned on our Facebook page last night that it was the first bit of writing he had done since Li(f)e.  That was crazy to read.  What a life this has turned out to be.  Sentence and I went off the vibe of Sage’s verse.  We talked a little bit about what we thought the song was about, but nothing concrete.  I know how I like to imagine it.  I would be fascinated to hear what other people think the song is about.

We left a fourth verse open, because Sage said he was reaching out to other people to see if they wanted to jump on it.  What a tantalizing thing to say.  We had heard Buck65′s name thrown around, along with some other names that make our jaws clench with excitement.  But the Metermaids fam, if nothing else, are used to disappointment.  So we didn’t hold our breath.  Sage Francis was already on the song, and that was more than enough for us.

When Sage casually emailed me Buck’s verse a week or so later, I went numb.  How the fuck is Buck65 on one of our songs?  On one of Matt’s beats?  On the same song as Sage?  Sitting at my work desk, listening to everything for the first time, is easily in my top-5 surreal life moments.  It didn’t register.

My second show ever as Metermaids (pre-Sentence) was opening for Buck65 at now-gone Sin-e (RIP, my favorite club evaaaaa).  I briefly met him after a Sage CMJ show once.  He and Sage sang a little bit of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” to my lady.  That night Sage also gave her a free hoodie, because Susie had once knit Sage a wool-knit with a giant “S” on it.  Love this man, seriously.  Susie still has the hoodie.

Also — in the “trivia that no one would ever care about” category: this is the only song on Rooftop Shake that has no Rob Swift on it.

This breakdown is a little all over the place.  What are you doing to do, though.  I’m a little all over the place.  Filled with love, heavy sleepless eyelids.  Couldn’t be happier.

Tell me what you think this song is about.

It’s my favorite video we’ve ever done. One afternoon outside with the fam, having fun. Also — tell me that Sentence’s mustache isn’t magic, and I will call you a liar.

Check it out yo:

There really isn’t too much of a story behind this song. (Great intro, son).

It was one of the last beats Stine made as we were finishing up the album. I love the beat. We had a blast recording it.

Instead I want to talk about how this song perfectly sums up what the whole album is about.

Every proper album we’ve done (both of them, hiyoooo – Nightlife, and Smash Smash Bang) has been a snapshot of where me and Sentence were at that point in our lives. Nightlife is mad hopeful – we were both sort of new to New York City life, spending a lot of time on the road touring, and generally convinced that we were going to make it in a big way. Like, major label deal arena tour big. You know. We were young. And from the jump we had A&R’s coming out to shows — it seemed like it was only a matter of time.

Pretty funny to look back on, now. Kind of embarrassing too. At the time Gym Class Heroes was blowing the fuck up, and we thought we had a similar vibe going on.

We didn’t.

Soon after releasing Nightlife, we did a monthly residency on Monday nights at Arlene’s Grocery. It was during October. At the third show of the residency, we had the head of a large independent label come and check us out. The show was packed, and we tore it down. This guy even stuck around to meet us after the set. We talked with him for a while — he was saying how he wanted to get us on Warped Tour, how he already had bands he could see us opening for, the whole deal.  He said he only wanted to work with bands who want to be big.  I said we wanted to be U2 (I couldn’t make something that stupid up now — I really said that shit). I was so excited I kind of reached out to grab Sentence’s hand while we were all talking. Yes homo. It was all happening.

The last show of the residency the whole staff from this label came to check us out. Another packed show, and again we killed it.  We met everyone outside the venue, smoking and talking and joking, talking about next steps.  I thought we were a lock. It was all happening. The next week we played one of the two CMJ shows we had booked. We opened for some big buzz blog type rappers who I can’t remember now, and who have probably faded out of the public consciousness.

The day of our next CMJ show, my lady’s father died.

From there, we sort of lost contact with the label. We sent them the new stuff we were working on, and they passed. I can’t really blame them.

Smash Smash Bang is a reaction to that time period. It’s an angry little EP.  Shades Off was our love letter to the head of that label.  In hindsight, it’s completely not fair.  He had a business to run, and probably made a smart decision.  Along with the snot-nosed anger there’s  a looseness to it, though, that we’ve kept from there on out. We weren’t making music that we hoped would convince someone we were worth taking a risk on anymore. We were just making music again. The song Matchbooks obviously means a lot to us. The next year, on the anniversary of her father passing, my lady and I both got “One of these is gonna burn” tattooed. Her on her lower back. Me on my ribs. I wanted it where it would hurt the most. Because I’m dramatic like that, kid.

Rooftop Shake is about coming to terms with what it means to live in NYC. No more youthful naivete, no more drunken anger. It is what it is. Sometimes it’s electric, sometimes it’s miserable. Most of the time it’s meh.

To us, no one needs to carry that attitude more than EMTs. Somebody’s coming in, somebody’s leaving. They see amazing things happen, and they see terrible things happen. And it’s a job. Everyone I know has adopted the same mentality.  One of my first trips ever to NYC, I sat and ate lunch with friends in Tompkins Square Park.  I remember watching everyone sit, eating, and talking, and laughing, while street dudes slept on the benches next to them.   It was crazy to me.  Not that I’m some angel of mercy, but still.  You know.

I’ve lost that part of myself.  I’ve had a couple of drunken breakdowns about this — how living here has turned me into a person that I never wanted to be, etc. (seriously yo – mad dramatic).    I’ve written enough now, and I feel like I’ve lost the plot a little.

Take-away: If someone asked me what Rooftop Shake is about, I would point them to Last of the EMTs.  It seems like the least consequential song on the album (maybe other than Victory Blvd), but everything you need to know about the album, or the mindset that Sentence and I are currently in, is all right there.

Sentence and I drove down to North Carolina on a Sunday night.  It was the Sunday night the Giants lost a heart-breaker to the Chargers, if anyone remembers that.  I certainly do.  We listened to that game the whole way down and it sucked.

We got to the motel around 11 or so, and spent the remainder of the night on the balcony outside, smoking and wondering how the process was going to go down.  We were nervous.  Excited, too.  But mostly nervous.

When we were first having conversations with 9th over the phone, obviously we couldn’t have been more excited to work with him.  We are both huge Little Brother fans, I think Threat is one of the top 3 songs on The Black Album, etc.  When 9th Wonder says he’s down to work with you, you don’t say no.  At the same time, though, what 9th does best is not really what Metermaids does best.  To my ear, our best shit is always over choppy, aggressive beats.  9th obviously has made his name with the opposite of that — with him, it’s all about the groove.  We had talked on the phone about finding the middle ground.  But talk is talk.

When we first got to the studio, after grabbing bagels and coffee at this little coffee shop (which we did EVERY SINGLE DAY we were there), 9th was running a little late.  So we waited, and got more nervous.  As soon as 9th arrived he started talking to us about this beat that we were going to crazy for.  He pulled it off a USB and put it up on the studio speakers and… we kind of freaked out.  Not in a good way.  We must have let the beat loop for like 2 hours.  Sentence and I couldn’t for the life of us figure what we would do with it.  It actually got kind of uncomfortable for a while — how do you tell one of your heroes that you don’t want something he made?

Months later, I saw that one of 9th’s artists, Thee Tom Hardy, came out with a new song.  I clicked on the video and immediately freaked out.  The intro section brought me right back to that terrible feeling that this project wasn’t going to work.  I swear I can smell the studio when I hear this beat.  Regardless, Tom Hardy kills this shit.  Props to him for having both the ear and the talent to rock this beat.  CHECK IT OUT.

When we figured out that we needed to try something else, Sentence and I started leafing through the amazing vinyl that 9th had brought through.  We found a record with a hilarious artist and hilarious title.  We asked 9th, sort of joking, to make a beat using that shit.  He put the needle down, and BAM.  Classic 9th Wonder.  No middle ground here.  Beautiful soul.  He knocked the whole thing out in twenty minutes or so, which we soon learned is normal for him.

So we went out to the parking lot and did our nervous-pacing-smoking-writing thing.  Came up with some stuff we liked.  Went in and recorded it.

I put my verse down first (the first verse of the entire project, nahmean?).  I was shaky nervous.  9th immediately proved why he should be called a producer, and not a beat maker.  He coached me through the entire verse — telling me to do it with melody here, no melody there, etc.  He had me sing the little “Where you might be found” at the end of the hook.  Immediately all of the tension we had felt before fell away, and we were just making hip hop music.  And laughing.  And having fun.

Sentence did his thing next, and killed it (I really love that verse).

I mentioned before in one of these blogs that we eventually re-wrote and re-recorded a lot of the songs we had done in NC.  Not Ghost Town, though.  We added some hype-style-background shtuff to the track right before we finished the album, but that was it.  What you are hearing is exactly what was put to tape (digital tape?) with 9th.

Most of the songs on this album have their own kind of importance to us.  Ghost Town started it all off.  Got us on the right track.  It felt good to make, and it makes me happy to listen to now.

As always, we later gave the song to Rob Swift to put his magical touch on. He did the most restrained, pretty cuts on this. I love em.

One last thing: I never want to talk about what songs mean, because that’s not for us to decide for anyone.  I will say that, to us, this is not a love song.  And it’s not about girls. So, yeah. Aaaaaaaaawesome.

Title track, son.  Title track.

As I mentioned before, we took two separate trips down to NC to record with 9th, a week apart from each other.  I believe we came back from the first trip with “Ghost Town,” “Gone,” and “Graveyard Shift.”  And I remember feeling like, although we thought those songs were dope, we hadn’t gotten the joint yet.

Which is funny in retrospect, because “Graveyard Shift” ended up being the first single.  Clive Davis I ain’t.

We did Rooftop Shake the song on the second night of our second trip.  It was rainy  out.  I remember that vividly, because Sentence and I did all of our writing in the parking lot of the studio, pacing around different sections, absolutely chain smoking.  Seriously — thank Busey that cigarettes are cheap in North Carolina.  Otherwise those trips would have cost us thousands of dollars.

The original beat for Rooftop Shake was now what you hear in the hook section.  Mad stripped down and shuffling.  I fucking loved it from the moment I heard it.  We always write the hooks first, so Sentence, Matt, and I sat on the floor of the studio trying to come up with something while 9th looped the beat on the MPC.  I’m going to take credit for coming up with the line “I make the Rooftop Shake.”  We’ve rocked a ton of house shows (they’re still kind of my favorite show to do),  and I had always thought that line would make a good hook.  I’m pretty sure Sentence came up with the “rock on, rock back” part.  We did it for 9th and he liked it — so we immediately went out into the rainy parking lot to write our verses.

While we were outside writing, we could hear 9th flipping a different part of the sample.  When we came back in to record what we had written we heard it for real.  It was nuts (come on son, no one can front on this beat — even if you hate us, you got to admit that this beat is ridiculous).

9th told us that we should just use the new shit he had just put together.  For some reason though, I bugged out thinking that we were going to lose the old section that we had just written to.  I remember telling him “Yo but the other beat is too dope to lose.”  Or something deep and insightful like that.  He told me, and this is one of my favorite memories of our time down there, “we’ll just use the other part as the hook, OK?  See?  Compromise!”  See — 9th Wonder is one of the funniest dudes you’ll ever meet.  The way he said “compromise,” with his arms all outstretched  and that huge smile on his face, was hilarious.  I realize reading this back that this story doesn’t really translate in print.  Ah well.

The other cool thing about Rooftop Shake is that 9th was so excited about the beat that he wanted to rap on it.  Which we were obviously more than down for.  I think it would be the third time he had ever rapped on a beat of his.  The first time being Murs’s “Asian Girl”, the second time being on “Gone”, which we had recorded a week before.  I think 9th sounds dope as fuck when he raps.  He’s got that deep ass voice, and you can hear his sense of humor come through when he’s doing it.

9th didn’t have any raps ready, so he went into the booth and rapped the verse that he had put down on “Gone” the week before.  It sounded much better over the Rooftop Shake beat (it sounded dope over the Gone beat too).  That was a mad fun session too.  Everyone was so excited about this beat and having fun.  9th did his thing, we did our thing, and then we did the hook.  9th did the “I make the Rooftop Shake” part of the hook, because he sounded much cooler than we did when he said it.  We handled the “Rock on” parts because we like yelling things.

Definitely my favorite moment of recording with 9th was pulling into the parking lot of our motel with Matt and Sentence, bumping the shit out of the raw audio we had taken from the studio.  We were fucking geeked.  Then we probably went inside and ate Papa John’s pizza and felt like shit for hours.  But in that moment, we felt like we had DONE it.  I remember texting my lady from the studio, telling her something along the lines of  “We just recorded THE song.”

It’s still my favorite hook we’ve ever written.  And for me, that’s saying something.  Because I take a lot of pride in the hooks we write.  You can tell me that I’m the worst rapper alive, that I make MC Lars look like Rakim, and I won’t argue with you.  But if you tell me we write terrible hooks, we gonna have a problem.

We had the songs with 9th for so long in Brooklyn that we ended up re-writing almost all of them — I think Ghost Town is the only song that wasn’t touched after we left North Carolina.  We re-wrote the shit out of Rooftop Shake.  We felt like, after living with the songs for a while, that we sounded two much like guys trying to impress one of their favorite producers.  We sounded nervous.  So we went back and got loose again.

Yes, the “Hey Omar” line is a The Wire reference.

One more fun fact: Rob Swift killed the cuts on this song so hard that when my lady heard the intro, she got so excited about it that she cried.  Love you baby.

Aaaaaaaaaand we’re back.  And back with a doozy.

We finished the five songs with 9th Wonder in early November of 2009, I believe. Once the songs were completed, and we were back in Brooklyn with the fully mixed EP (at the time), we started to send it around.  Obviously for us, the first place we sent it was to Sage Francis and Strange Famous Records.

See, around the time we released Smash Smash Bang, I sent Sage an email.  The body of the email was basically this:  SFR would always be our number one choice as a potential label / family.  I wasn’t asking Sage to sign us.  I was telling him that if ever heard something of ours that he liked, we would drop everything to join his team.  The email was a token of our undying love for his label and everything it represented to us.

For reasons on why we felt so strongly about Strange Famous Records, please see my previous blog about what it means to us to now be a part of this label.

While the EP was with Sage, we also tested the waters elsewhere.  I know Rob Swift sent the music to Rhymesayers through a contact he had there.  We also had some meetings with some other labels in the interim.  I don’t want to talk too much about the industry side stuff, as it is really no fun.  That being said, we love Rhymesayers too for the artists they have and what they stand for as well.

In November the following year, Sage mentioned that he might be interested in putting the album out.  We were geeked, but were not sure how to advance.  On the night of Sentence’s birthday, Sage sent me a text asking if he could call me to talk about the situation.  I left the bar where we were celebrating and stood outside for pretty much the remainder of the night, chain-smoking, paranoid that I wouldn’t notice the call in the noise.

Sage didn’t call until around 4AM.  Other people might have missed that call.  Thankfully no one here at Metermaids sleeps.

We had a wonderful conversation about how we saw the project, how he saw the project, etc.  Sage told me that he didn’t see a point in putting out a five song EP — he would rather put out a full-length.  I saw his reasoning.  But that meant we had to record more songs.

So back to the drawing board we went.  We felt remiss not using this legend of indie hip-hop to help executive produce the album with us, so we went back through M. Stine’s back catalog of beats and sent the ones we liked to Sage to see what he thought.  Now Stine claims that he played the “Bad Things” beat for us months before, and that we hadn’t appeared impressed.  That’s hard for me to fathom — I can’t think of another beat off-hand that is more tailored to our style.  I remember calling Stine and telling him it might be the best beat I’ve ever heard.  I get hyperbolic like that son.

Bad Things and Kill the Crow were the first two beats I sent over to Sage.  He responded that he liked them, and that he “might even surprise himself by writing to these.”  How do you respond to that?!  I’m sure I tried to play it cool.

A couple of days later Sage sent the two beats back.  Each with unfuckingbelievable verses on them –  immediately the Bad Things verse Sage put down stuck out.  I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard him so loose and fun.  I still got five bucks on that being one of the top verses of 2011 (I got another five for Dolan on the redux).

Sentence and I then wrote our little back and forth for the second verse of the song, and came up with the hook in the studio.  “Shake it Off” has been my NYC mantra for the past year.  I say it to myself every single day.  Fuck you, New York.  I love you, New York.

Regardless, performing this song with the big man has already become a permanent highlight of my rap career.  SFR huddle on stage.  You know the drill.

Now it’s time to bring it back to the East Coast.  We’ve got some shows lined up in early November in NYC, Boston, and Rhode Island…all with Sage Francis and some more unbelievable guests that we will announce as the time gets closer.

Here’s the details:

Nov 3 – BOSTON
at Middle East (Cambridge, MA)
Sage Francis
Metermaids & more TBA
TICKETS: http://www.ticketweb.com/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&eventId=3960605&pl=mideastrestaurant

Nov 4 – NEW YORK CITY
at Irving Plaza
Sage Francis
Metermaids & more TBA
TICKETS: http://www.livenation.com/Sage-Francis-tickets/artist/898939?tm_link=edp_Artist_Name

Nov 5 – RHODE ISLAND
at The Met (Pawtucket)
Sage Francis
Metermaids & more TBA
TICKETS: http://www.etix.com/ticket/online/performanceSearch.jsp?performance_id=1567807&search_source=etix