Today we celebrate or maybe just recognize the 10th Anniversary of my album Cracks on Memory Lane. This was the last solo album I made for six years. It was written and recorded during one of the best years of my life – junior year of college (released at the beginning of my senior year) and it was heavily influenced by the college experience – from having a track called “Campus King” to being part of actual for-credit projects.

To that effect, I do feel the album has high and low points. Some of my favorite verses I’ve written appear throughout the project, but others feel like I was caught in a certain excitement that no longer resonates. As I’ve done with my projects Obey Me, Hood Release and Alternate Ending, I wrote some not-so-fun facts about the creative process for anyone who cares to read.

But first, listen…

Uninteresting Facts About Cracks on Memory Lane

1. The title for the album is an homage to my aunt who had a stroke and was having difficulty with short term memory.
   

 

2. I took a class second semester of my junior year of college where basically you just get one-on-one face time with a professor to talk about the writing you’re working on. It was required for my major. Other students were working on poems and novels but I was working on this album so I submitted it for the class omitting “Put My Dick in That,” “Space” and maybe one or two others. I got a 4.0!
   

 

3. For the album cover, I ordered the Memory Lane sign online. I didn’t have a car at the time so Rawhide drove me around Potsdam so I could find the “perfect crack” in the road. Originally I was going to Photoshop lightning in the sky but it turns out I’m bad with Photoshop. Looking back now, the lightning would have been dumb and I’m glad it didn’t work out.
   

 

4. On the back cover, the tracklist was handwritten, then placed in a picture frame which I smashed intentionally so it would have cracks. Get it?
   
   
   

 

5. There was never supposed to be 3 seconds of silence at the beginning of the album. Since the vocals and the beat start at the same time I needed to give myself those few seconds after I hit the record button to count off but then I forgot to delete them.
   

 

6. “Campus King” and “My Little Skittle” are the first solo Rootbeer songs produced by The Rawhide Kid. He made the former specifically for me because he thought I’d sound good over it. The latter he played for me and I begged for him to let me have it.
   

 

7. The coccyx is actually another name for the tailbone and not, as I thought at the time, a bone in the throat.
   

 

8. “Pros and Conduit” uses samples from the Wii video game The Conduit. The developer High Voltage Software was holding a contest with Acid Planet for people to remix the songs from the game so I scoured their website and learned as much about the game as I could – from the plot to the enemies to the different gun types. I entered “Pros and Conduit” and while I did not win they specifically shouted out the song on the contest results page. Acid Planet was shut down in 2018 but the old contest page has been archived by the Wayback Machine.
   

 

9. “How Could You Not Love Me” and “Industry Woes” use the same drums and I didn’t realize it until the album was done.
   

 

10. On every album I like to reveal more and different parts of myself and my upbringing. I had never written a song about my brother so I thought Cracks was a good opportunity. I made the beat to “He Doesn’t Understand” but the lyrics weren’t coming to me. Coincidentally while I was writing the song I was taking a class in children’s literature and we read a book called Petey by Ben Mikaelsen. We were instructed to do some sort of creative project based on the novel and I actually took the in-progress song and rewrote it about the book. Having a song built around the beat made it easier to structure a narrative and write about my brother for the album version. The “Petey Version” still exists on my hard drive.
    

 

11. If you like “The Freshest Form of Flattery,” I do a lot of impressions on the Rootbeer & Rawhide Rate Rappers podcast. Listening back, some of them aren’t bad. There is a particularly amusing one on Episode 25 which is dropping next week.
    

 

12. “Space” was technically the first song made for the album, though it wasn’t made “for the album.” I actually created it before Alternate Ending was finished. My at-the-time girlfriend was sick so she and I went to CVS to get her some medicine. We went back to my place and she fell asleep so I started screwing around with PLASMA for the first time since Sittin Here. I ended up making “Space.”
    

 

13. If I could shoot a video for anything off my back catalog it would be “Space.”
    

 

14. Jon’s parts of “Put My Dick in That” (vocals and ukulele) were recorded in the gold room at WAIH. We were pressed for time because Jon was about to graduate.
    

 

15. There exists a censored version of “Put My Dick in That” where every instance of “dick” is replaced with a different sound effect.
    

 

16. Since I had the nice collection of sound effects from the aforementioned censored version of “Put My Dick in That,” we repurposed them to make “Space Mach II,” the hidden bonus track on the first Whiteout! album.
    

 

17. Sampled interviews on “Industry Woes”
    –Immortal Technique (Goodfella Radio Interview – May 28, 2009)
    –Ice Cube (Angie Martinez Interview – January 10, 2008)
    –Chamillionaire (self-recorded video – October 25, 2007)
    –Hi Tek (Juan Epstein interview – March 18, 2009)
    -MC Eiht (this video got deleted and I can’t find it)
    
    I’m really glad I favorited these interviews on YouTube 10 years ago because most of the videos were still live and made this bullet point very easy.
    

 

18. I’m realizing I never addressed the voice in the last part of “The Next EpiSODA.” When Rawhide and I were in college there were two girls, twins, who were both in the ROTC so they wore the uniforms everywhere. We started calling them the Cobra Commandos. Never to their faces. In fact, I never once interacted with either one in any capacity. They lived next door to Rawhide and I when we shared a dorm the second semester of sophomore year. One of the Commandos was always on the phone talking to some guy named Nick. So the whole outro of that song is an inside joke that only Rawhide, a couple of our friends and I understood.
    

 

19. “Now is the Time” is the first song Rawhide and I ever worked on together. It was first released a year earlier on his album Disintegration. We were fairly new roommates and had talked about making something together. One day I came back to the room and he had the beat all cooked up. Immediately I started rapping along with some unpolished version of “Talkin’ just stop it, pop it and lock it, now is the time, clock is a-tockin'”
    

 

20. I found the beat for “Jay Ain’t Jesus” on MySpace of all places.
    

 

21. After the success of “Hell of a Time” I decided I wanted every album to end with a track from a different producer. I forgot about that during my 5 year hiatus but it turns out I inadvertently stuck to it. “Midnight Snack” was done by Will Spitwell and “Home 2 U” was by Anno Domini.
    

 

22. “Jay Ain’t Jesus” was inspired by Jay-Z’s “Death of Auto-tune.” The wave at the time was heavy use of auto-tune and everyone was really enjoying the sound. Then as soon as Jay-Z spoke out against it with his song, everyone just decided the wave was over. I didn’t like Jay or anyone having that much power over the genre so I wanted to remind everyone that celebrity opinions are just that: opinions. This song isn’t meant to be a diss toward any of the rappers mentioned. Quite the contrary. It’s a diss to the listeners who can’t decide for themselves what they like or want to listen to. And I realized the irony of making a song telling people to think for themselves because they would, in effect, be listening to me and doing what I say. So I leave it vague at the end as to imply I’ve become the very thing I hate.