In around 2002 or 2003, I was working on Splash and DJ Image was working with Stainless Steele on Mindstate of the Art, a very dope straight-ahead hip-hop record. I remember talking with the two of them about the music we were all working on at the time and the two of them saying they really wanted to get this straight-ahead hip-hop project out and then take it way out there. (They did that - Chromatica, among other things they did, is a must-listen in my opinion, and Image's Love Weather Dinner Party is a wild turntablist album, but I digress...) At the time I was more focused on instrumental music and wasn't recording as much of my vocal stuff.

Fast forward twenty years and DJ Image and I were able to connect, first for a few tracks on A Fish That Noticed the Water, then a few tracks on how? i never saw that, and now for the entirety of Broad Brushstrokes. This project is not backward looking to twenty years ago, but is a straight-ahead hip-hop record from right here and now before the next trip to the stratosphere or wherever it might take us. Banging beats and precise cuts from DJ Image coupled with my rhymes. I'm honored to have Steele's vocals on here destroying things on Buddha Monk and the ill cover from Bloodmoney Perez, and I hope you enjoy.

As for the music - these songs were all originally written with a line from earlier hip-hop songs as the springboard to jump off from. Some of those lines got written out as these were edited, but much of it is still in there both in the verses and the cuts. Some recollections on the songwriting: I remember writing much of the 'Randall Cunningham' verse in my head during a run when the lines came to me from out of nowhere, then frantically writing it down when I got back home. Not so uncommon to have a few lines come that way but the verse came to me pretty much fully formed this time. Ceiling fans I had the pleasure of being in the room with DJ Image as he laid down the cuts, the man is a master. Where You At? was probably the one that took the longest to write and edit into the form you hear on this, though the second verse is I think the oldest verse on the project - the way the two verses came together was a nice surprise. No Sac Flies was born from something Jesse Thorn said on a podcast about Ice Cube's triple double, which took my brain in a certain direction and it ran on its own momentum from there. We spent a good bit of time trying to figure out the right thing to cut on this and after some false starts it felt obviously done when it was done. Buddha Monk was something Steele had actually started and reached out to me about. Given the original intent to build a project around a line from earlier hip-hop it seemed like a great fit with the overall project.