Dear Jean Grae

February 4, 2014 by vozvibrante 2 Comments

I quite recently came across your music, via an old DJ Premier mixtape. I sat by the piano playing along to your song Keep Livin’ when my tears started falling. Sometimes music hits you that way. It has happened to me listening to for instance Tom Waits or Nina Simone. And last year I was touring East Africa with my band Timbuktu & Damn!. Somewhere over Ethiopia my colleague handed me his headphones with Kendrick Lamars track Sing About Me. I cried unstoppably. What’s that phenomenon evoking emotion? Is it the human being seeping out of the music and in to the listener?
I find some of your lyrics nearly unbearably sad. It’s a fine and rare facet of rap music that I appreciate a lot. It takes courage by the lyricist to write that way. But also a well developed poetic sensitivity.
I have a correspondance collabo with one of Sweden’s finest producers, Patrik Collén. He lives up North and I live in the South. It’s an exciting way to work. The first year we didn’t even talk by phone while getting maybe five or six tracks down, sending skeletons back and forth, adding flesh, skin, features.
This beat is a child of that relationship. I send it to you as a gift with a hope that we will one day work together.

Best Regards
Voz Vibrante