Two Reviews of Three Years

I noticed that a deluxe version of Sittin' on Chrome by Masta Ace Inc. is dropping in a week or so, which made me want to make sure that I hadn't fallen asleep at the wheel and missed an announcement of a deluxe version of Three Years was coming since seemingly every other release from that time is getting one.  Well, no luck there, but I did stumble upon a fairly recent review on emusic of Three Years that was a nice little read.  Check it out here.

And then I found another cool one from this year, from Liz's 1001 albums.  She finally got around to Three Years on day 710.  No problem.  Check that review out here.

Ebony on "Three Years" Anniversary

Great piece, nuff said, read it here.

The Story Behind The Mr. Wendal Video

Here's a great story that I found on gawker with quotes from the director of "Mr. Wendal" talking about shooting of the video.  Looks like this story is made up of quotes the director posted on youtube with the video.

Tony Bingham, a sincere friend, found our location for this video at the last minute - and we were of course elated. But on the shooting day in question, the skies produced rain clouds for miles.
I sat silently, thinking how I'd finally gotten to shoot a music video for this band (I had already directed their EPK and documentary), and now the heavens were not cooperating. Clearly a disaster was abound. I decided to shoot anyway. Maybe two takes in, I'd pretty much given up on the clip having any signature look...everything was drab, muddy and dark.
But within, it seemed, seconds, a wondrous thing happened. I received a call from my steadicam operator who said prior his schedule would not allow for him to be there - now he was asking for directions. My smile began. Once he arrived, the cloud cover peeled back. We had a stretch of about 3 hours of moist sunlight! Outstanding!
After a bit of fertile photography, we packed up and left the farm location, stumbling accidently on a small shack in the middle of nowhere. Funny, when I entered the rickety structure, a visible hole stood out in the middle of the place. I thought out loud, "Quick, let's place the camera down there, and spin it in a circle to catch each band member in a different part of this open house. Worked like a charm!
And when I suggested Speech sit in the window, the sun grew brighter for our two only takes. God...is all one can say.
We traveled back to downtown ATL, where I was favored with the distinct honor of working with famed artist, Radcliffe Bailey. A polished professional. He braved rush hour traffic, and seedy alleyways for us to capture what was pure about his work even then.
We ended our spirited day at the Scoville Hotel, where we finalized our efforts for the remainder of the concept.

 

The Samples

The other day I posted an image of what I thought was the album cover of "3 Years, 5 Months, And 2 Days In The Life Of..." However, on further inspection there was some additional writing added to the cover: "Hip Hop Is Read Presents" and "The Samples." So clearly I am blind. I looked it up and came across this fantastic post on the Hip Hop Is Read blog: The Samples. The file at that site includes all of the songs that were sampled to create "3 Years" and should be a fascinating listen. A word of warning though, the download link was pretty slow this morning.....

The Prince song sampled here, "Alphabet Street," will have to settle for second on my favorite Prince sample list though- a few years ago I was listening to a Prince album and heard him screaming, I couldn't believe that I recognized the sound from House of Pain's "Jump Around." I thought it was some kind of whistle all of those years: House of Pain sample. Although now it's actually unclear if it was a saxophone sample or Prince- hard to tell, which actually makes it even more mind blowing. Pretty bizarre! I won't give away what exactly was sampled for "Tennessee" from "Alphabet Street" either, you'll have to listen for yourself. :)

(Note: I swore I posted this a while back on 9-26, but I was looking at something else and noticed this was still in "edit mode" and I don't see it anywhere on the site. So my apologies if this is a double post.)

Eyes As Hard As A Million Tombstones

Here's a somewhat-interesting promo for the 3 Years album. Runs about 8 minutes or so, lots of exclusive footage in there.