No More Heroes Liner Notes 1. No More Heroes When 5th Ave and I started this project, I wanted to use similar music for the intro and the outro to give a sense of completeness to the album. As far as the vocals, we felt that starting the album with a spoken word piece would force the listener to actually listen to the music from the jump as opposed to throwing the record on and forgetting it’s there. We tapped D.Scott (poet and actor extraordinaire) to freak the intro and outro for us (similar to The Roots and their use of folks like Chuck D and Ursula Rucker on their albums – the Roots were a big influence in the making of this album, especially the darker newer joints: Game Theory and Rising Down). D.Scott killed the piece (obviously) and really set up the whole “No More Heroes” narrative perfectly for us. 2. Chapter Seven 5th hit me with a track by LA singer/guitarist Hope called “Never Forget”. There’s this ill breakdown where she sings acapella, “How could I forget…” the original song and the vocal sample I took indicated a sense of loneliness and despair that I tried to capture when I built the rest of the beat around the sample. I tried to give the track a lot of space, real minimal production with a lot of space for 5th to shine on it. Normally, artists will save the more serious/emotionally driven tracks for later in the album. But the first time hearing Chapter Seven in its entirety, we immediately knew it was the intro track. We felt it was important to let the listener know the context in which the album was made in order to understand why the album sounded the way it does. 3. My Most Favorite Emcee This was actually the first track 5th and I worked on together for this project. I wanted to give this track a big, epic, feel. This was aided in part by using the synths from Dahlak’s Phantom keyboard for the bridge. His keyboard had sounds I couldn’t recreate on my tiny MicroKorg. Also, we reached out to my cousins, Angelace, to add more depth to the track. Part of the inspiration for this was Kanye West’s “Street Lights”. I used to always drive home late at night and as corny as it was, I would listen to “Street Lights”. There’s this part at around 1:38 of “Street Lights” where the female background singers come in and it always floored me. Although it’s a small detail, the track became dramatically larger sounding when the harmonies came in. For “My Most Favorite Emcee”, I felt I could get that same feeling with Angelace on the track by using their three-part harmonies as another instrument. 4. Look Alice Mac Dre is responsible for this track. We wanted to do some sort of party joint on the album (we’re fun guys, we needed to put a different side to ourselves on there), and I wanted to include some sort of Bay Area slapper. I think the key to a lot of Bay slaps is its bounce. It’s got a different bounce from East Coast/Southern party tracks. So I wanted to use that bounce with some sounds you usually don’t hear in slaps. 5th will maintain up and down that “How deep does the rabbit hole go?” wasn’t meant to be a sexual connotation. He’ll tell you he was trying to find out the depth of the girl’s personality. Hmmmm…right 5th. Right. 5. Needy Girl 5th, D.Scott, and I were chillin in 5th’s studio listening to different beats off my MPC for the album. I originally made this beat as a joke, I just wanted to see if I could freak the sample. But once I threw this track on, everyone just started gigging and acting a fool. We knew right then we had to use it. 5th had actually written “Needy Girl” a couple months prior, and he and I were going through different versions of the track. But as soon as this beat came on he started with the, “I don’t need her, I don’t want her, I just hump her, I don’t love her…” everything just clicked. This whole time I was secretly trying to find a way to get some AutoTune on the album. If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a big proponent of Thelonious Pain. So we experimented by putting AutoTune on the pre-hook, aiming for the whole cheesy 80’s R&B vibe. The phone call in the middle of the track is a nod to the track’s inspiration, Chromeo’s “Needy Girl”. Jay Synth (the engineer who recorded the album and also Sacramento’s King of Beats) was the one responsible for pasting together the dialogue to make it sound like an actual phone call. We didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously with this song and wanted the listener to know that we were just regular guys going through regular guy sh*t. I’m Super This beat was one of the first tracks I made with my MicroKorg. My MPC had a memory card failure and the whole project got deleted. All I had left was a short minute long bounce that I had sent out to a couple folks. Verses of the Foulmouths actually took the beat and made an ill track out of it and another one of my beats that got deleted. I was always a fan of Pete Rock’s interludes between his tracks and wanted to incorporate that element into No More Heroes. This beat was the perfect opportunity for that and also for D.Scott to tell the world that he is indeed, super, b**ch. 6. Chillin This track (session name: Watchboy Anthem) was intended to be a posse cut featuring different folks from The Neighborhood Watch. In theory, it was meant to be “Welcome to My Cypher” Part II (see: Dahlak’s Dual Consciousness). The Neighborhood Watch is a Sacramento-based hip hop collective founded by 5th Ave. Aside from being the posse cut, the track contains a little tribute to my favorite producer of all time: the late J Dilla. I recreated the melody to “Think Twice” and used it for the breakdown. To give the track more of a Watch feel, DJ Flow scratched in vocals from other Watch fam, Mainetain and Rock Burgundy. 7. Dear Langston The music for “Dear Langston” was actually inspired by “Girl”, a poem by Adriel Luis of iLL-Literacy. Adriel and I intended to collaborate for one of his songs, but we both decided to go in a different direction for the track. The beat sat unfinished until 5th heard it and started writing to it. After that first verse, the two of us knew that this was going to be the climax of the album. I used Dahlak’s Phantom for the piano ending, and recorded it to try and make the listener feel that they were outside of the studio (which is why you still hear the beat in the background). DJ Flow hooked us up with a sample from a Cornell West interview that fit the track perfectly. 8. Grandfather Jensen The idea behind this track was to give the listener a different hip hop experience. I knew from the jump I didn’t want to have any drums and wanted the focus and rhythm to come from speech (similar to Jay Electronica’s “Eternal Sunshine”). I messed with the timing of the string sample (from a 90’s video game. Ha.) to give it a little awkward/uneasy feel. Like “Chapter Seven”, I wanted to give this track a big feel with a lot of layers/dimensions to it. D.Scott actually wrote this piece before he wrote “No More Heroes” and killed it! My favorite part is toward the end when he’s acapella and the little variations in his voice just haunt you. For more information regarding No More Heroes or Delorean, please visit www.delorean916.com