Today, Paul's album "We Live In The Future" (via Fake Four distro) comes out! Anyone who is or has known an artist understands the emotional ups and downs of working creatively. When they feel uninspired they can be in bad moods, when they are inspired they feel great. It has been a long, but exciting year of watching Paul put together this project. And I couldn't be more proud of the end result.
Paul's focus has always been hip hop and rap, and while that edge still comes through on this album, it's definitely got more pop and is dancier than his previous projects. I joked before that I felt like he made the album for me, but me and my sister really were sounding boards for this project. Maria lives in Manhattan, and we have her over for dinner all the time. It makes me so happy that my sister and my husband are such good friends. So Paul will invite her over for dinner sometimes, and while we are in the kitchen cooking, he will play some of his beats and gage our reactions. When we started dancing to a beat, he knew it was a keeper. When we just stood there chopping veggies, he tossed it. We were his product testers so to speak.
Since I work in the visual arts, I often think about the producer process as similar to an art curator's process. Obviously, by making the beats and the musical arrangements, he is also the artist. He even wrote the scores for the live horn and string sections. But as the producer, he chooses the artists that he thinks would sound best over the different songs. Then once he has the finished songs, he figures out which order he wants the listener to experience them. He even writes liner notes that discuss each song, which are akin to artwork labels in a museum. The end result is a creative, well thought out exploration of Paul's futuristic interpretations of funk, dance, disco, pop, rap, and even rock.
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