Lyrics Born Takes Collaboration To New Level With ‘Mobile Homies Season 1’ Not many artists in hip hop push the boundaries of the art form quite like Lyrics Born. The Japanese native started his music career in the California college city of Berkeley during the mid-90s and since then he’s had an incredibly prolific output.
A lot of his discography results from joining up with other artists, rappers and producers for a variety of tracks, but recently he’s taken this approach up another notch. On April 15, Lyrics Born released the collaborative album Mobile Homies Season 1 via his label Mobile Home Recordings and it has a ton of features. These include the likes of Dan The Automator, Galactic, Lateef The Truthspeaker, Rakaa from Dilated Peoples and Prince Paul among a bunch of others.
We recently had a talk about how a podcast being done in the midst of COVID-19 quarantine influenced the making of the album, dealing with the structures of streaming services, a hard-hitting music video he put out for one of the tracks on the album and hoping to make it into a yearly album series.
This interview was condensed for interview purposes
Northern Transmissions: What made you want to put out this kind of record with tons of different artists playing a part in it, either with lyrics or with production, or beats and all that stuff?
Lyrics Born: During quarantine, when we were pretty much in the very depths of it, and of course we didn’t realize it at the time, but because nobody quite knew how long it would last. I started a podcast on my YouTube channel and on my Instagram called Mobile homies where I would basically just have conversations with a lot of my friends in showbiz. Either in music or in movies or whatever and we just ended up having these really amazing, great, deep, connected conversations. It became clear to me that, number one, it was a lot of fun to do and number two, we really needed that connection, everybody involved really craved that connection. Judging by how the fans reacted to it, people seemed to really feel connected to the actual conversations as a third party.
I was thinking to myself that if it made for an awesome podcast, I knew it would make for an awesome album series. I basically reached out to everybody that was involved in the podcast as a guest and then I had recorded some songs just prior to quarantine with some of the same people, which I put together as an album. READ MORE