New Green Street!

"All I See", the second single off our forthcoming neo-soul/jazz-hip hop instrumental album, has been up on our Myspace for several months now, but we haven't properly introduced it to you. For the amount time we put into making that joint, it's worth telling the story behind it for sure. Like most of the joints off this new album, it started out with Ken laying some guitar licks over one of my rough drum patterns. We had no real direction for the song to begin with, but when we got Malcolm in to add some rhodes to the mix, we knew it was gonna be one of our singles.

We'd been in contact with Oddisee of the LowBudget crew for a couple years, and after doing a drop for the intro on our first album, we wanted to get a verse from him on this album. For all who have never heard of Oddisee before, trust me, you are missing out. Not only is he one of the most down to earth people we have met, he is one of the freshest artists coming up right now, and he has worked with artists such as Talib Kweli, Jazzy Jeff, Little Brother, Kenn Starr, and Kev Brown, to name a few.

He dug the instrumental we sent him, and he agreed to drop a verse on it after we rolled him his loot. A-Live hadn't written his verse yet, so he got to it. It took a real long time to get the verse right. He wrote the verse during the week down in New York at school, then came up to the Bean for the weekend to lay it down. We ended up pulling an all-nighter trying to get the rhythms tight, but it really paid off.

Next order of business was the chorus. We had a saxophonist Ken played with in high school, Toby Forman, come through to lay down some horns for the chorus, but it wasn't sounding right. We ended up filtering what he played for the chorus in putting in in the intro and in the bridge, and it sounded fresh. The final piece was figuring out the vocals for the hook.

We wanted some soulful vocals for the hook and contemplated getting in touch with Oliver Daysoul or Darien Brockington for it, but we decided to stick with Ken, our in-house vocalist, and dude came through. He put in work writing the hook, then really delivered with his performance. Props to Ken, he never gets enough credit for all the work he puts in with Green Street. He saves us a lot of times when ish hits the fan. Dude is crazy versatile. Besides being a filthy guitarist, he's an ill song writer and can more than hold his own on bass, keys, and vocals...

Once the track was layed out, there was no rest for the weary. With all the instruments and filters, this track took a crazy amount of time to produce. In all we probably spent over 500 hours on this song, so I hope ya'll like it! Peace.

-Ren


Oddisee's myspace: http://www.myspace.com/oddisee720

Oddisee's blogspot: http://oddiseemusic.blogspot.com