Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how your childhood impacted your musical direction?
A: I was born in Atlanta, GA in 1992, and I grew up with music playing in the house. My dad had a massive binder of CDs, and a very eclectic collection from Crowded House to Enya, and Harry Nilsson to Mariah Carey. Plus, Todd Rundgren on the turntable and 1990s smooth jazz on the car stereo (Atlanta’s 107.5 WJZZ). My mom was a regular at the public library, using the DeKalb County Public Library website to reserve not only books, but CDs and movies too – Otis Redding and Cat Stevens and The Blues Brothers Soundtrack and all kinds of stuff. We watched movies from the library with great soundtracks like Cool Runnings (Talking Heads) and Benny and Joon (The Proclaimers), so music was just a part of life. My parents put me in piano lessons at age 5 and I kept that up til I was maybe 14. I stopped in order to move on with my life, but then I realized that I missed playing and my parents were kind enough to pay for me hopping back into lessons of my own volition. So, that was an important moment for me and my relationship with music.
I played violin in the orchestra at school from 4th to 7th grade, but I quit orchestra in favor of visual art in 8th grade. I had always enjoyed drawing, and I was still in piano at that time, plus the orchestra teacher was weird, so that was fine. It was at around this time that I started to become interested in different music in earnest. I had bought Linkin Park’s first two albums in elementary school, and burned all the mix CDs I could get my hands on from kids on the bus (mostly great early 2000s hip hop like T.I., Trick Daddy, Lil Jon, The Ying Yang Twins, Chingy, etc), but in middle school I started downloading songs from Limewire and getting albums from the library. Limewire was a bunch of Slipknot, Three 6 Mafia, Mindless Self Indulgence, Soulja Boy, System of a Down, Bone Thugs, and whatever the flavor of the week happened to be, whereas from the library I was getting greatest hits CDs of artists like Bob Marley, The Mamas and The Papas, DEVO, Gwar, Eurhythmics, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, etc.
When I was 15, I asked my brother to show me something on guitar, and from there I learned open chords and bar chords, started writing lyrics, and began caterwauling in my bedroom about my teenage-feelings. When I was a junior in high school, a guy at school I became friends with was a rapper, and he and his brother would record on an old laptop. As we spent more time together, he learned that I wrote songs and sang, and he had me hop on a few songs. Then my dad brought home a recording device meant for guitarists practicing, and my brother figured out how to record into Audacity on the computer, and thus, my solo recording career was born.
Q: How are you planning on growing your fan base and sharing your music with the world? What message do you have for anyone who is about to discover “Big Scrimps”
A: Big Scrimps’ Facing East: The Holy Processions is a very special project in that it is “quite possibly,” and maybe even “almost definitely,” a one-off. It would be fun to do a song here and/or there with the dudes going forward, but I don’t think we’ll ever put together another full-on release like Facing East. My two emcees, Big Man Z and The Honorable Brother Muscles are grown people with careers, and I loved doing it, but fuck was putting this thing together a lot of work, so Facing East is probably a one-and-done type of thing. Thank you for covering it.
Q: Who is the most inspiring artist for you right now? And where do you find inspiration for making music?
A: I don’t listen to a ton of artists that are happening now, but my friend just turned me on to a band called Magic Rockers of Texas that kicks so much ass. Another inspiring person who’s still putting stuff out is Mitski- I always find her music and melodies and the vulnerability in her lyricism to be super compelling. There’s a band called Rattlesnake Milk that is admirably cohesive in their aesthetic and in their artistic statement, between the band name, the album names, the sonic palette of their music, the album artwork, etc. I would love to see them live. I am endlessly entertained and fascinated by the musical stylings of the band Pile. They’ve been going 20 years and released a sick album this year. Fontaines D.C. released a phenomenal album last year. The album Earl Sweatshirt released this year is great. In terms of bands that are no longer active and what makes me excited to make music, I’m a punk kid. I love 1980s American Hardcore like Bad Brains and Circle Jerks and X. In my opinion, the emergence of the DIY spirit and ethos is the coolest and most influential awakening of the last 50 years, and bands like Flipper and Dead Moon and The Dicks who made music because it’s a cool and fun thing to do are completely bad ass to me. I also like classic songwriting and girl groups like The Ronettes and The Crystals, and doo-wop groups like The Penguins and The Capitols. A lot of different stuff gets me stoked. Black Oak Arkansas.
Q: Can you tell us about the story or message behind your debut EP, “Facing East: The Holy Processions.”?
A: The message of the EP is that three friends got together to make something cool, and that making something cool just to do it is a very cool thing to do. And that once you make a cool thing, it exists and you can enjoy it forever. So, fuck yeah make something cool. The story of how it came together is below:
When, on the night of our Friendsgiving 2023, The Honorable Brother Muscles told me his idea to record songs consisting exclusively of DJ Drama-esque ad-libs delivered with an Action Bronson-style verbiage/parlance (we’d been enjoying the Accidental Bronson stuff) with a comedy slant, I was immediately like “oh yeah that’s cool, I like it.” And when, later that same evening, Big Man Z happened to mention to me that, while cleaning their place to host Friendsgiving, he and his then-girlf, now fiancé had listened to at least a few songs that would make for some glorious sampling, I said, “I like the sound of that, please take a second right now to think of some and text me that shit asap.” I knew something cool could happen if I connected the dots.
I spent the next week making beats from the three songs the Big Man texted me, and sent them to the dudes like “Yo. Here’s y’all’s idea. These beats are the stage and you are the players. So, we doing this or what?” It turned out that we were, and I’m so glad we did.
Over the next year, we recorded a total of eight times. To start each song, I had the guys freestyle way more than we could ever use, and then I’d parse through everything we’d recorded, figure out what was workable and how to string those bits together, and how the song should be structured based on the beat and what we had. When I was satisfied that I’d done all I could with the latest recordings, I’d export a version and send the (usually 3-4am) text, “Inboxes, Gentlemen!”
We’d listen and decide what was good, what needed to be re-recorded, and what should be replaced because it was problematic or boring, or just not quite it for a third reason. And we’d go from there. So, the original inspiration for the project was DJ Drama energetic hollering meets Action Bronson detailed evocation. A calendar year+ and untold man-hours later, what it became is not exactly that, but it’s sort of that, and more importantly, it’s that idea channeled through the individual and collective creative sensibilities of three chums who agree that doing cool shit is an end unto itself.
Q: How would you describe your sound in one word for potential listeners?
A: One word is tough for any project, but I feel that it’s particularly difficult for this project. The beats are one thing, Big Man Z’s warm and effortlessly-cool vocals are another, and The Honorable Brother Muscles’ outrageous and endlessly-entertaining vocals are still another. And somehow all three elements work as one to tie each other together and create something that, I feel, is more than the sum of its parts. In one word, I guess maybe I would say it’s “chaotic”? I’d also like to think that these songs could be described as “fun.”
Q: Did you face any challenges while writing or recording the EP?
A: The process of bringing this EP from an idea to mixed and mastered WAV files was very fun, but also pretty intense, to be honest. I made all of the beats, and those came together in a pretty flow-y, natural way, apart from the beat for “State Fair,” the process behind which felt like swimming into a body of water with my eyes closed and hoping it was a pond and not an ocean. I didn’t have a ton of material to work with in terms of the track I sampled (“Suave” by Luis Miguel), as most of the original song had lyrics on it, and making that beat was a little bit of a process of accepting what it was and also what it wasn’t. I’m very pleased with it, but I made it in like four 6-hour nights from 10pm to 4am, and the unfinished beat haunted me all day each one of those three days between sessions.
Getting the finished lyrics took a while because everything was freestyled to begin with. There was so much gold, so it was all about which lines in combination would make a song. I would listen to the raw material I had from each guy, pull the gems, and put them in a sequence that made sense and on the beat in a way that was cool. Then we would decide what worked and what didn’t, and schedule another recording session to kick the ball that much further down the field. These sessions became more and more surgical the further along we got, so that was comforting and felt like progress.
When we were satisfied with all of the lyrics, I went through the process of adjusting the volume of every single word in every single verse and chorus to be consistent throughout. And then I made new mix files with the consistently-volume-d vocal tracks. To put it plainly, it was a metric shit-ton of work. But we couldn’t have made what we made without doing it in exactly that way. So, all well worth the effort. But good God.
Q: What is the message of your music? And what are your goals as an artist?
A: The message of the EP is that making cool shit is a cool thing to do and you should do it. My only goal for this project was for it to exist as something of quality that we could be proud of, and for it to exist as a document of the friendship between me, the Big Man and Brother Muscles. They are both very special people, and very dear to me, and the lyrics they freestyled are from them and of them, and the way I placed their lyrics on the beats I made for my friends to rap on is from me and of me. The tape is a snapshot of this time in our lives, and it’s super silly, but also rude and disrespectful, but also warm and loving, and all of these aspects through the lens of the millennial experience of life in America. Look at the cover art and you’ll see what I mean. We’ve got Mufasa and Harambe and Paul Walker and Pluto and the Twin Towers- all symbols of the world we were raised to inhabit that dematerialized year by year as we grew up.
Q: Who is your dream artist to collaborate with? (dead or alive)
A: Your mom, preferably dead.
Q: What is your advice for people interested in pursuing music as a career or for those trying to enter the industry?
A: Hmmmmmm. I guess my advice to a would-be-artist would be that the best approach to playing music or writing or recording songs is to do it because you want to because it feels good, and then if you’re catching some heat and can actually make money off it, then go ahead and ride that trip til the wheels fall off. But if you are starting from scratch with the goal of making a career as an artist, then you are approaching it all wrong and for the wrong reasons. Especially because, in the modern era, being a professional artist also requires you to be a social media star. So that sucks.
Q: If you could go back in time and give a younger you some words of wisdom, what would they be?
A: Music is art and art is worth doing. It is an end unto itself. In the words of Josh Homme on his episode of “Guitar Moves” with Matt Sweeney, “When you expect anything from music, you expect too much.” So, echoing my answer to the last question, do it because it’s fun and it’s rad, and because something inside is pushing you to do it. There’s absolutely no reason not to, and once you’ve made a song, you can press play and it will play. How fucking cool is that??