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The Confessional (Just Human)
1. Listen.
2. React.
3. Stat, tweet, and/or talk about it.
4. Come back in a few days to read some personal commentary about it.
MP3: http://www.mediafire.com/file/aetkdew8s7c6e82/The Confessional (Just Human).mp3
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Mr. Blue
I wrote this because blue is my favorite color.
That is completely untrue.
Mr. Blue is extremely personal, but not exactly literal. It incorporates bits and pieces of real life events, and people, but more than anything it was born from a feeling. It’s a story of two people who brought broken hearts and baggage into a relationship, told from the POV of a sad guy who will always be a little emotionally unavailable. One of my favorite things about it is the use of letters to tell her side of the story, then again in the next verse to take a look into Blue’s head.
But, it’s not nearly as depressing as reading that would make it sound, so just go listen to it. If I was pretentious enough to call anything a “single”, this would most likely be it.
If you like it, do me a favor and post it, tweet it, or talk about it.
Sincerely Yours,
Traff
MP3 = http://www.mediafire.com/file/j8ice7v2hv7eh97/Mr.Blue.mp3
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the detour
“To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.”
Once upon a time I was a rapper. During this time I did all the things I thought a rapper should do: I surrounded myself with other rappers, dressed the part, looked as intimidating as humanly possible at all times, and made music that featured heaping spoonfuls of sex, drugs, and violence. Within the extremely small microcosm of the human race that even knew I existed, I was thought of as pretty good at the whole rapping thing. Even though I’m not extremely proud of the music I made then (luckily for me, it’ll ALWAYS be around thanks to digital media and its uncanny ability to be replicated indefinitely with no sign of quality degradation. Yay.), I acknowledge that the mechanics were there. I did the things I was trying to do pretty well. Honestly, I would probably still listen to some of those songs if they were by anybody other than me.
But, when I press play it is me… in a way. It’s my voice. Those are my words. If you were to go to my old myspace page - if myspace pages still exist somewhere on the internet - you’ll find Body In The Trunk and Click Bang right alongside a picture of me (likely) snarling angrily at the camera. For a long time, this existence was fine with me. I got more than my fair share of compliments. Other artists wanted to work with me. People liked my songs. That’s really all I was looking for at the time. I was happy being that guy.
Then there came a day when I wasn’t.
I don’t know exactly what caused it, but I know when it happened: October of 2007. That month I left the city that I had spent my entire life in (minus a one-week vacation in beautiful Bogalusa, Louisiana, where I saw my first real live hog. Not to be confused with little pink pigs. This thing was huge, and black. Like me.) and drove to Baltimore. The drive took 13 hours, and I’m not sure if I did a Scott Bakula (did he even go forward in time? Whatever.) or what, but I had grown up a lot more than half of a day by the time I arrived at my destination. The change wasn’t immediate by any means. Upon arriving in B-more, I dived right back into doing music with some guys I knew in the area. The difference was that I was no longer satisfied with other people liking what I was doing. Even though it was still my voice and my words, what I was hearing wasn’t me.
So I stopped.
I stopped doing all of those things that I thought a “rapper” was supposed to do. I stopped thinking that all my music needed to accomplish was making a few people like it. I stopped being someone I wasn’t. Instead, I decided to start being me, truly, and making music that was honest and reflected the things that I truly cared about – even if they happened to be diametrically opposed to the teachings found within the Money, Cash, Hoes Handbook of Rapper Swag.
There was one unfortunate side effect of all this wonderful “growing up” stuff: I learned that finishing music that actually has pieces of you in it takes way longer than rapping about semi-automatic weapons and weed. It’s not necessarily the writing process that takes longer, not at all. It’s everything that comes after the writing. From the obsessive analyzing of every bar to see if a word or two could be changed, to the final step – giving it away to the public – these parts of the process became cripplingly burdensome once I started putting me into my music. These songs are my babies. In addition to that, I had to figure out the mechanics all over again. The way I rapped on My Name Is Crack wouldn’t really carry over to what I was doing now. It would be like DMX doing I Need Love on karaoke night.
At the end of it all, everything about me has changed but my name. And I couldn’t be more proud of myself for that.
Some of you are in that small group of people who who’ve spent the last few years pushing me forward, listening to songs in various states of completion, giving your opinions, and/or pushing the record button for me bazillions of times until I got it “right.”
Some of you are in the small group of people that still ask me when an album is coming, even though you haven’t heard a peep from me since we had a white president….
Some of you don’t know me at all…
Some of you know me well, but had no clue I did music until today…
Either way, thank you for coming. I hope all of you enjoy, and support, what I have to offer. If you have the time, take a listen to some of the music I’ll be putting hereand share the link(s) if you feel like it deserves your support.
- Traff / “TTMF”
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