I have always believed that sometimes signs come from the strangest places. The hard part is that sometimes you have just got to lay back and try to be aware of the signs when they reveal themselves.
As most of you know I am finishing up a album with my man John O called "From Dusk Til Dawn". Now while the material is crazy, I am in the final stages of mixing and that is a tedious process (See my earlier blog on mixing). Plus I still gotta deal with everything else I need to deal with and it can get a little frustrating when you are working on so many different things. I find that sometimes you tend to feel like a project is not moving quickly enough for where you are trying to go with it.
Well I was feeling like this and then found myself watching TV. While flipping through tha channels, I came across an Quentin Tarintino interview on MSG. Since we named the Gecko Brothas project after the movie that Quentin did, I took it as a sign to see what the brother was talking about. They'd asked him what the toughest film he'd ever worked on was.
Quentin said that before he was well known, he had worked on a film project spending money he didnt have to buy film to do it for 5 years and at the end of all that, he had nothing come of it. No major movie deal or anything. He said that seeing that project thru was his proudest accomplishment because for him to have stuck to it and not given up on it showed a lot of growth in himself as and artist and although it was never released for everything that came with it he was glad to have done it. He kept pushing through it. Sounds like a sign to me. I got another sign a week ago.
I am a lover of music and I have a decent record collection. When I took the pic for my "Beast Within" mixtape that I put on my myspace profile, I was trying to recreate the feel of those old soul album covers where cats didnt have on a shirt on some old Al Green, Isaac Hayes type shit. Apparently a lot of people who saw it thought I was trying to be on some "I'm too sexy for my shirt" shit which was not my goal.
While there are a lot of cats are on here with tha shirtless pics chasing ass, (and females too) I am not one of them This is why I posted in big letters on my profile I DIDNT COME HERE TO MACK, I'M ABOUT THA MUSIC. Still what i found out is that some people never read the small print and thought I was trying to show some skin. I just wrote it off to the concept going over peoples heads. Then this week, I saw the video for Erykah Badu's Honey and I knew that some people DO get it.
If you haven't seen it go here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x46v8r_erykah-badu-honey_music
(ps: you get mad points if you can name all of the album pics in the video. Ten extra points for the magazine cover)
She recreated all of the old soul album covers and interjected herself into them.(The damn thing is brilliant.) Now if you just are from the mp3 age you might not get it but if you are a DJ or vinyl purist like myself you could really appreciate it. (She killed it with the Earth wind and Fire cover), Anyway I took it as a sign to keep thinking outside tha box.
Artists think like artists and that is what makes them artists. Everyone is not gonna get it. Not all of the Beatles were feeling "Let It Be" when Paul McCartney auditoned it for them. They didn't think it fit into their sound but they were true enough to the art to put it out there and look what happened. It is one of their biggest hits. Sometimes you just gotta look for the signs. I tell ya.
Have you ever had any signs that you saw and knew were meant for you specifically? How did they affect you?
Holla back
P
