Danny Swain’s Track-By-Track Rundown of His New Album ‘Payback’

February 1, 2012 8 comments

Escobar season has returned Danny Swain week continues here at MJF. Uncle D. Swizzy was kind enough to give us an in-depth look at his new album Payback coming soon on Interscope. Without further pause, let’s jump right in.

1. “Overture”

So with Payback being another Danny! conceptual album with a storyline, I wanted to open it up with this cinematic, super-epic track. Most rap albums, you know, they’ll start out with an intro and call it “Intro” or whatever, and that’ll be the first song on the record. I wanted to open it up by instead flexing my production muscle. Instead of rapping I’m actually asking for forgiveness from God all throughout the song for doing what I felt I had to do; it helps set up the plot of the album where you have the protagonist of Payback who’s about to get into a bunch of trouble for all the dirty deeds he committed in order to achieve success.

If you pay attention I straight jacked the drums in the first few bars from the Wiz Khalifa/Big Sean/Curren$y lovefest “Flowers.” The whole track is a replayed version of “In Viaggio Attraverso L’Australia” by composer Piero Piccioni; I used the original version for the reprise later on in the album. The vocalist is none other than my homegirl and amazing singer Chell, who’s also on “Get Up” later on in Payback.

2. “Silly Me (Myintrotoletuknow)”

Pretty much all of my albums, with the exception of Where Is Danny? of course, opens up with a “this-is-where-I’m-at-tell-’em-why-you-mad” type song. Payback is no different. I really hope that people catch the Outkast homage not just in the title but in the opening drum sequence. “Silly Me (Myintrotoletuknow)” has me pretty much addressing all the hard work I’ve put in over the years and my false assumption that I’d be further along in my career than I am. I’m like “I guess I had it all wrong/’cause they ain’t checkin’ for you [un]less you rappin’ bout some Adderall or bongs”. That’s just my observation that the only rappers to gain swift prominence over the past few years have some sort of association with heavy drug use. That’s not a dis, it’s just a true statement. You can name 2012′s top new rappers and they’ll either be stoners or pill poppers. It sounds like I’m hating but I’m really just giving true statistics. Halfway through there’s an audio clip from a Lil B interview with XXL right before his career ascension. In it he talks about how the music industry shitted on him and how he plans to shit back.

So on the first verse I’m like “far be it from me to think hard work and talent pays off, silly me” but at the end of the second verse I allude very heavily to the trickery I had to resort to in order to put this album together and gain listeners. In fact the most observant of listeners will hear Payback and realize it is less a hip-hop album and more of a confessional on tape (laughs). So I’m like “who’s the silly one now?” because now that you’re listening to me because of all these features I managed to procure, I’ve got the last laugh. If Payback is the bomb that will cause the music industry’s proverbial head to explode, “Silly Me (Myintrotoletuknow)” is the fuse. The song ends and seques into Payback‘s plotline; at the end of “Silly Me” there’s an interrogation scene where a cop is trying to figure out how I became such a criminal given my presumed clean past. As he’s saying that I’m dozing off into my own little world and thinking back to my childhood, and that’s where Payback truly begins.

3. “Little Black Boy”

I’ve been wanting to flip this Sweet Cream record for years, dating back to when I first copped it in 2007 during my infamous record-buying binge when Charm and Danny Is Dead sales started trickling in. This is one of those songs where the original track is so inspirational and uplifting, it almost makes it off-limits to sample. But everyone knows it takes more than that to stop me. Anyway, like I said “Silly Me” kinda transitions into “Little Black Boy” with the cop asking me “how did you become this way?” and I’m daydreaming back to when I was a child, getting into trouble for little shit here and there but fortunately having the guidance of the neighborhood elders to put me on the right path. I like this song in particular because I’ve always wanted a track on one of my albums to feature singing children. I was finally able to pull it off.

I think every song on Payback pays homage to some artist or song that I hold in high regard, and it gets me a little down that most of the reviews I’ve read thus far neglect to mention them. In this case the drums for “Little Black Boy”, as well as the first two bars of both verses, were inspired by “Guess Who’s Back” by Scarface. I’m replaying the keys on this song as well; if you listen closely you can hear them in the background on top of the main sample.

4. “Get Up”

I originally sent this track to Che Grand but didn’t realize he actually planned on using it until he asked for the stems. It opens up with this Joan Rivers quote from the show “Louie” on FX; in it she’s pretty much telling comedian Louis C.K. that life doesn’t get better, only you can. That really hit me in the heart when I heard it so I decided to use it as the song’s opening skit.

Kweli came up with the lyrics that accompany the track’s whistling; I had no idea he was such a good songwriter. As far as the song’s concept, he’s basically talking to me playing the part of Joan Rivers in a sense. Well, kinda like a concerned uncle talking to his nephew and he’s dropping all this knowledge and telling me to keep my head up. I play the know-it-all, cynical youngster telling his uncle that it’s hard to stay positive in these times. Through my own self-discovery during the verse I eventually agree with where he’s coming from. Chell straight murders the hook with lyrics I wrote over an extremely obscure Japanese pop sample. If you listen closely you can still hear the sample underneath Chell’s vocals. The track ends with an homage to Roc-A-Fella and the way Jay-Z would have the beats to his DJ Premier-produced intros switch up midway through the song. That switch-up seques into “Evil,” almost making the two seem like one whole song.

5. “Evil”

It goes without saying that this is the ONE track on the album that I wasn’t initially crazy about recording (laughs). In fact, track five was originally supposed to be this “How To Rob”-esque track called “Maybe Not” but it was axed in favor of a more pop-friendly, accessible song. And I can’t even get mad at that (I did anyway though).

“Evil” shamelessly follows the formula that transformed B.o.B. from marginally-talented Andre 3000 clone into hip-pop superhero. I didn’t make this beat; rather it was crafted by none other than Mr. “I’ll Catch A Grenade With My Teeth For Ya” himself. In it I’m doing some self-reflection about the lifestyle I used to live that I tried to steer away from, but somehow it’s got a hold of me and now I’m paying for it by way of getting caught committing crimes and the pending trial. Even though I’m speaking in character, I’m slightly alluding to the grade scandal from 2003 and how it parallels with the way things are now with Payback. This is another confessional type song where the real content will surely fly over people’s heads in lieu of Mars’ crooning, but that’s fine. I originally named this track “D’evils” and though I eventually changed it, homage to Jay’s track of the same name remains intact in the opening lines to my first verse.

6. “Louder”

It wouldn’t be a D. Swain album without the homies Von Pea and Donwill on it! I open up the track with my best Puff Daddy impression; heads will recognize it as homage to the intro from MC Lyte’s “Cold Rock A Party” Bad Boy remix. The concept of “Louder”, as it relates to the plotline, is me still reminiscing about my past and in my thoughts I’m remembering my wild teenage/college years. Me & Tanya Morgan are at a house party and encouraging the band to play “louder, louder, LOUDER” as the song goes on. Eventually the cops wind up showing up to shut the party down.

I remember the original version of my verse had a jab at Kidz In The Hall but Pea had the foresight to intervene, so I replaced it with a Mickey Factz dis. I’m sure he’d think that’s a bad idea too (laughs). I close out the track with a clip from the outro of Cosby Show’s Season 6 theme song. My lil homie Allen Thomas from the group iLLmont is also a damn good drummer so I asked him to rock over the Nick Ingman sample to give “Louder” a live, house party feel to it.

7. “Phonte”

Everyone knows that although I’ve been listening to hip-hop most of my life, it wasn’t until Eminem’s first major label tape that I started to write my own lyrics. Every Eminem album (except Recovery) has a voicemail skit called “Paul” named after, and featuring, his attorney Paul Rosenberg. Those skits always involve Rosenberg admonishing Em about something he’s done or is about to do in an attempt to keep him out of trouble. So I decided to pay homage and have a voicemail skit named after Phonte from Little Brother. In it, Tay pretty much does the same thing; he’s caught wind of the news reports of the shit that I did and he’s basically telling me to keep my cool. I’ve been bugging Phonte to do a record ever since And I Love H.E.R. so it’s dope that I finally have him on the album in some capacity. I laugh everytime I hear him pronounce “Europe” as “Yerrrrrp” on the skit. That’s that Southern drawl, y’all.

8. “Shit Starters”

This track should make every hip-hop listener in every demographic’s head explode, for various reasons. I’ve been making beats since before I was a teenager, but again, it took the prominence of Roc-A-Fella records to get me to try my hand at sampling. Circa 2003 I was the BIGGEST Diplomats fan…well maybe not the biggest by a long shot, but those beats can come on right now and I can recite every word. There was this mixtape that Juelz Santana put out around that time that featured this song called (not surprisingly) “Crack.” It wasn’t that spectacular but the beat? Whoa. Being the sample encyclopedia that I am, you can imagine my frustration at spending the last eight years trying to figure what the original sample was to no avail. Finally, I’m at the crib playing these old rock records from the record-buying bonanza from a few years back that I mentioned earlier, and I play this Armored Saint album…and there it was. I hooked it up in the sampler and was able to make a replica of that track in record time.

I immediately knew who all I wanted on the song and fortunately was successful in getting everyone on it that I had in mind. And of course being a Jim Jones fan I was extremely grateful that he came through with a verse. I even remember bugging the shit out of DJ Kay Slay for a drop to give it that mixtape feel: after weeks of getting a “yeah yeah I’ll do it, hang tight” from him, I hit him like “yo Kay if you don’t wanna do it I understand, thanks anyway”. He IMMEDIATELY hits me back like “YO GAWD DON’T EVEN PLAY ME LIKE THAT GAWD!! IF I DON’T WANT TO DO SOMETHING I’LL FUCKING TELL YOU B!!!” Apparently he types just like he talks. Either way I got my drop.

So I’ve got my lineup all set and I know it’ll make a killing on New York radio but then I think of one more person who can close it out. Contrary to popular belief there is no bad blood between Def Jux presidente El-P and I; despite my warranted anger with the way things panned out over there, I found a lot of solace in El’s empathy and similar frustration with the music industry. We kept in touch over the years and he always offered to rock on one of my songs one day. So, knowing that this song is going to be huge later in 2012, I literally hit him up like “I’m cashing in my chips…what’s good?” Now you’ve got these two underground geniuses pimping the shit out of future Hot 97 listeners alongside three heavyweights. The song is one of my favorites from the record. As it relates to the storyline of Payback, this is the part where I’m still daydreaming about my past and now I’ve come to the phase in my life where I get mixed up with the wrong crowd.

9. “Overture Reprise”

Here we have Chell reprising her vocals from the opening number. This is not a beat I actually made, but rather the Piccioni sample itself. There are a huge amount of parallels one can draw between Payback and And I Love H.E.R.; like the latter, this one has an implied “Act I” and “Act II” with an intermission of some sort to divide the two. I really love what Chell did with the vocal arrangements, she really knows her stuff. She coos over every horn stab, harmonizes like it’s a choir full of Chells. I asked for her to sing on this and she went over and beyond my expectations.

After the song ends it transitions into another brief skit with a concerned friend asking me to hold my head up despite the consequences up ahead.

10. “Speed”

I pride myself in not videotaping EVERY all-star collaboration or Tweeting (read: spamming) about every single A-list studio session that led to Payback, putting them on blogs and shit. Who gives a fuck? Just make the goddamn music. With Pharrell on the hook, this is the part of the storyline that takes place in the present. Now that I’ve spent Act I doing a lot of reminiscing, Act II is me dealing with the consequences of my actions. I rap the first verse as my sister and the second verse as my mother, who are both trying to get me to “slow down” since my life has been spiraling out of control. As I’m driving I’m reading these letters from them and reciting them out loud; in the third verse I’m rapping as myself, paranoid as hell and basically wondering aloud how things got out of hand. The metaphor for my life is the car that I’m driving recklessly in the song; the “consequence”, in this case, winds up being me crashing headfirst into another vehicle. The song ends on a somber note with ambulances and all; it really reminds me of “My Problem” from Charm in a sense. I didn’t make this beat, but there’s a remix featuring my homies Speak Easy and Lario Emu Iji that will be featured on the Australian version of the album as a bonus track. I did do that [beat].

11. “Hey You”

Now if you’re doing a song with anyone from OFWGKTA, especially its ringleader, you kinda expect a blood-filled violence fest ripe with references to Charles Manson and SWV. But in an effort to flip the script, I’M the only with a risque verse on this song about wooing a young woman. I talk about rape pretty darn graphically but in the end of the song I clarify that the “woman” was really just a metaphor for the music industry, and how Payback is going to do just that. My friends all leave the studio in disgust and I say in mock amazement “gosh, I’m so misunderstood” which is a perfect seque into the next track, “Misunderstood”. The synths on this track are amazing.

12. “Misunderstood”

This is another beat that I did originally intended for someone else, but in this case it was actually turned down. I submitted this to Von Pea for what would eventually become the You & What Army? EP. The original chorus had a bunch of Tanya Morgan scratched vocals from over the years and the beat has this super New York/DJ Premier type feel that I like a lot. Pea turned it down in favor of something with a faster tempo but I decided to keep the track for myself. I removed all the scratched vocals except for the “misunderstood” line, which ironically enough is from a Von Pea song that I’m featured on (“Open School” from Pea’s Gotta Have It).

The sample for “Misunderstood” is so fucking ill that I had to consult WhoSampled, The-Breaks and all my normal sample spots to make sure that no one had touched this yet. Fortunately thay hadn’t. Lil B shouted me out in one of his infamous tweets last year so it was a no-brainer to get him on the track. It opens with a verse from Mr. Roth who talks about the ills of being an internet rapper, then closes out with me paying homage to Scarface (the rapper!) again by way of his “This Can’t Be Life” verse. In it I talk about my friend Rick, who dates a girl named Tina who’s struggling with drug addiction.

13. “I Don’t Wanna Hear That Shit”

Ah, where do I begin? In retrospect this probably was both a good and bad choice for a lead single. Good in the sense that it’s something most guys can relate to and it has a catchy hook, but bad as an introduction for listeners who are getting acquainted with me for the first time. I’m no singer by any stretch of the imagination but I feel like I was able to perform capably for this track. However, I understand if people who may have heard of me for the first time dismiss it. Either way I’m happy with the song and its musings on the dreaded “friend zone”. Literally all of my self-conscious female friends hit me up within days and was like “OMG is this song about me?” (laughs). Probably, but the resentment of being relegated to friend status with someone who you have strong feelings for is a tune we can all sing to.

The sample comes from this obscure library record composed by Francis Rimbert. I remember fighting for this song to be released first as opposed to, say, “Evil” as I didn’t want to be “friend zoned” with my career and be relegated to the one-hit wonder status that a song of that magnitude would inevitably lead to.

14. “Do It All Over Again”

Now the album jumps back into story mode after the quick detour that was “I Don’t Wanna Hear That Shit”. This is also the longest song I’ve ever done, clocking in at just over seventeen minutes. This song is so long that the retail CD only features a truncated version of this track to free up space on what is an 85-minute long album (CDs can only be replicated with up to 80 minutes of playback).

In the first half of the song I vent again about my career and how people just say “Danny’s dope, yay” but never really having that translate into anything worthwhile. I talk about how when The Minstrel Show first came out, everyone was like “yeah this is hot but why is Little Brother so jaded?” and how I now understand what they were going through at the time. When the beat switches up (similarly to how I did with “Get Up”) E-40 interjects with some insight to his slow but steady career success. Like Kweli on track 4, he kinda plays the older uncle role in that he gives me advice and encourages me to be more optimistic. During my verse that follows his, I give a rundown of my own music career from when I used to have to resort to double-selling the same beat for money, to when I got my first co-sign from a close friend, to my first record to Charm to Where Is Danny? to now. After that I go into my long-ass monologue about how things started to take off for me after Charm. It’s been compared to “Last Call” by Kanye West a lot but honestly I don’t care. I think for the true fan, it’s a good look inside the inner workings of my career highlights and missteps. I remember having to sip a can of Four Loko while recording my monologue straight off the top of my head. After that the song fades and we’re transported to a courtroom, where jurors are going to decide my fate. Am I found guilty? Innocent? I kinda leave it up to the listener’s imagination, as well as real life karma in order to determine whether or not doing what I had to do to put Payback together will ever warrant any harsh ramifications.

The album itself is one big look at whether or not doing deeds deemed as “evil” by society are truly wrong in the grand scheme of things, especially if it’s done in the name of survival. I remember watching Aladdin and seeing Princess Jasmine, disguised as a beggar, almost have her hand chopped off for stealing an apple from a merchant for a hungry boy. Is that really fair? Does a person truly have to pay for his or her actions — whether it involves harsh or mild consequences — if he’s trying to feed his family? Even though the fate of my freedom is left on an ambiguous note, the song that follows kinda hints toward the possibility of an exoneration of all charges.

15. “Keep Your Head To The Sky”

I made this track for the same reason (and in the same vein) that I made “Fly” back on Charm; I took a song that I cherished in my childhood and flipped the sample to both modernize it as well as introduce it to new listeners. In this case, I took the classic 1991 Sounds Of Blackness record “Optimistic” and put a fresh spin on it. Toward the end of the song you can hear me shout in excitement, “I can’t believe we cleared this sample!” as I fought extra hard for this song to get approved. This is probably another favorite on the album for me. In the song I talk about two unrelated individuals who seem to be letting social or familial constraints prevent them from reaching their potential. In reality, they’re the only ones standing in their way so the song is trying to help them see that. This is one of those “message in a bottle” songs that I wrote for myself to listen to years from now whenever I get down and out (laughs). But it’s also for inspiring anyone who feels discouraged. Writer Khal from Rock The Dub told me that both this song and its original makes him “cry man tears.” It is a pretty moving song.

Collette comes through and kills the damn song. I swear she is the Bonnie to my musical Clyde. Her and I have worked together over the years on various projects and definitely have more being cooked up as we speak.

16. “Far Away”

In typical Danny! fashion, I become pessimistic literally seconds after the track ends with “Far Away”. It opens and closes with a heartbeat in homage to Jay’s first few records for Roc-A-Fella. My verse even emulates Jay’s from “Bring It On” syllable for syllable. Again, there’s so many in-jokes and homages to 90′s hip-hop and other obscure gems that it’s a little disheartening to have them not get mentioned in reviews. At any rate, John croons on the hook (he wrote it) and I lament about how things can be so uncertain in both life and my music career. Very depressing track, especially when juxtaposed with the previous “Keep Your Head To The Sky”.

17. “Payback”

Not wanting to go out on such a somber note, “Payback” was an 11th hour addition to the album. Though my concept albums are usually critically-acclaiimed and highly revered, there’s always a few people that grumble “well his beats are dope but his lyrics are so-so”. The title track was my opportunity to have at least one song on the record where I’m super-duper lyrical/spiritual/miracle to shut up the naysayers. “Smokin’ sour diesel with Evel Knievel/watchin’ “Leave It To Beaver” reruns with twenty-three nuns/And fifty priests/Sixty feet under sea level/She-devils rebel and rabble-rousin’/I grab a thousand pounds of sheet metal”. Like, my verse makes NO sense whatsoever but the wordplay is, in my opinion, pretty amazing. I invited the group iLLmont to rap on it with me and they all murked their verses.

I had been wanting to flip “It’s A Terrible Thing To Waste Your Love” for the longest time but it had been done to death. So I took a different part of the song that I’m surprised no one even touched and turned what sounds like a heartfelt soul ballad into a RZA-worthy production. Speaking of which, I originally wanted Raekwon on this song but didn’t hear back from his management in time. Maybe I can get the Wu on a remix…? (*cough* *cough* *foreshadowing of things to come* *cough*)

Conclusion: This is the last of three concept albums I said I would make and I believe it’s also the strongest. If you’ve ever wanted to hear what Charm sounds like with A-list features, or what And I Love H.E.R. could’ve sounded like if it came out on a major label, you should enjoy this. There’s many levels to the “payback” that I allude to throughout the record, the most known one being that I’m “paying back” the music industry for overlooking me by releasing an album alongside people that they’ll definitely check for. Then, once they’ve played the album, they’ll have been “tricked” into listening to me so to speak. But there’s another underlying aspect to Payback, one that will soon be revealed publicly but was referenced throughout the record if you pay close attentiom. At any rate, I’m extremely satisfied with the way the record came out and I sincerely hope that all who hears it enjoy it at its face value.

- written by Danny Swain for mostlyjunkfood