Beats From Speech's Vault

On Speech's debut album Speech, he had a song called "Freestyle #8 from Speech's Vault." (What happened to Freestyles #1 through #7? I guess they are still in the vault...) Anyway, at the end of the song, he mentions a special vinyl-only project called Beats From Speech's Vault. I remember looking for it at some point and not finding anything on it, and from that point I pretty much forgot all about it. Seemed like a project that didn't materialize, and that's fine, as it happens all the time in the entertainment world (so when does Dr. Dre's Detox come out again?).

But then I started this site, and a loyal reader asked me if I knew anything about it. Since I did not, I thought I would ask Mike from Vagabond, who was able to confirm that it did exist, but that it was on CD, not vinyl. But not only that, he would get the files to me.

So here they are! What we have is 9 tracks that Speech did. No vocals, just beats. It looks like the project morphed into a way to get some production work for Speech as one can see on the cover if the photo I took was any good. To be honest, I'm not sure if it worked as none of the tracks sound familiar to me and I don't see anything out there. It should have worked as I do like many of the instrumentals here, specifically some of the later numbers. It's a shame that after all of the outstanding work Speech did producing AD and producing Gumbo that people weren't coming to him for beats, but that was the climate at the time during the No Limit Records era. Without further adieu, here are the Beats. There aren't any track names so I will improvise and come up with my own creative names :)

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Guess my names aren't so creative.... Finding this little project has been a really nice upshot to doing this blog, so again, I want to thank Mike for all of his help with it!

Also, I want to apologize for not getting this in a zip file. I have a lot to learn still...