strength do a whole lot. But what we’re aiming for is a reward that supersedes what we’ll be given at the end of a pay period from an employee. It supersedes what we would get from the Academy Awards or from MTV – you name it! We want a reward that is eternal, that is stored in a place where moth and rust can’t touch it. And that is to hear ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.’ Since Jesus secured that for us, if we believe it, if we know that’s ours in him, then the only response would be giving our works to his causes.
SAM: Now you’ve said on Twitter that you classify the style of this record as “cinematic trap”. Did you come up with this term?
KB: You know what? I actually did! I’m not the most musical guy you’ll ever meet, I love music but…
Yeah! Cinematic trap is the only way I could describe what I wanted to do with this new project. It has taken a lot of the elements of my last album [Weight & Glory] that I loved and then teaming them up with the sound of the culture right now – I think trap is running things. And I love it – I’m a hip-hop lover and resonate with it. That was it!
SAM: Some of these tracks just shapeshift like crazy. The first track Give My All does that, just when you start to get used to something it changes – and that’s a good thing! It starts with those textured harmonies and then to that bouncy
trap. What was your vision for the song Give My All?
KB: I sat down with my team: Joseph Prielozny who is the head of production at Reach Records, he’s also a really close friend of mine. I sat with him and another producer that I work with in Atlanta named Dirty Rice. And I told him that I wanted an introduction track where I could explain the concept of the project. That was one of the last songs that we did and I was like ‘Man, I want something that is ballad-y, something really pretty.’ I wanted to try and balance it with this rugged, rough, punchline heavy flow – but over something really pretty and I had an idea from a song that I heard from another rapper.
So I gave it to them – I call it giving them the scent, letting them smell it, and they just take off. The first thing that they did was start off with that [sings] ‘one hundred…’ and then it went into that super trap thing. I thought that we got too much trap right now, and as the introduction we should just curl back, but then I said: ‘What if we make it both! What if we make it really pretty, and trap, and see what happens?’ So he sent me the beat back and the way that it flowed was just moving.
It was delicious to the ears, man! So that’s how that came about. It ended up not being just an introduction, we made it into a song. I wrote some more to it, and that ‘I give my all’ part at the end and it turned into a full song as opposed to just an introduction
SAM: Great. Lots to look forward to! KB, thanks so much for your time and I’m loving that all this music you’re making is simply to God’s glory and that you’re giving it your all and encouraging us to do that as well. So yeah – all the best with 100!
by Sam Robinson
TAKE OVER / MAY 2014 7