Brandon Blue wants to make experimental hip-hop for the mainstream.
“I used to try to be as weird as possible thinking people would catch on,” Blue says. “I was thinking other people were the problem. But the situation really was just me being too full of myself and having too big of an ego.”
The Dallas rapper and producer, better known as Blue, The Misfit, is being a bit modest here. While he was being “as weird as possible,” some people did catch on. Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q, Mac Miller and Ab-Soul are just a few of the notable artists who enlisted Blue as a producer.
“I’ve had a long journey with producing…But after a while nobody would see my vision like I do, so I decided to become an artist,” Blue says.
In 2014, Blue released his first full-length album, Child in the Wild, an intensely energetic hip-hop record that earned him critical acclaim and a spot at SXSW. His second album, Perfect Night, For A Funeral, drops October 28.
For his sophomore album, Blue took a different approach from the party-starting hip-hop of Child in the Wild. Perfect Night, For A Funeral is a darkly romantic, fresh take on alt rap.
“What I wanted to do with this album is make sure all my influences were seen in it, and not just be looked at as a rapper. I wanted to make an album for musicians, and people who just love all music, and not just one genre,” Blue says.
Inspired by artists from Crystal Castles to Linkin Park, Perfect Night, For A Funeral fearlessly crosses genres without getting overcomplicated. Smart collaborations with guitarists Jordan Richardson and Hunter Moehring, violinist Daniel Heart, and singer Sarah Jaffe give a new level of depth to the music. It’s dramatic, emotional, even a little gothic, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a musically matured Blue, The Misfit.
“I wanted to make an album that, lyrically, spoke to everyone,” he says. “That made everyone feel like they could be in my shoes, without getting too specific with my personal life…I really wanted to broaden what I talked about to make sure everyone could feel it, which I would’ve never cared to do before.”
This changed when Blue began DJing regularly throughout Dallas.
“The cool thing about being a DJ, which I wasn’t during the last albums, is that you get to play music and see how people react to it,” he says.
With his finger on the pulse of the city, Blue began to see music differently. He learned to tailor his artistic ambitions to what people wanted to hear.
“I didn’t know that’s what I wanted at first, and the deeper i got into DJing, it made me realize. I was creating all this music that i had to scrap once I decided it wasn’t right, and then go on to a new path,” he says. “Finding the balance is extremely hard…I’m keeping my creative balance and making what I think people (care) about. But that’s a super hard thing to do.”
If Blue struggled to strike that balance before, he makes it seem effortless on Perfect Night. The album flows with confidence, feeling more cohesive than his debut, with his best production work yet. You might expect an album so influenced by his work as a DJ to be mindlessly danceable, but it’s poignantly honest. Perfect Night, For A Funeral attains a confident vulnerability that makes it beautiful in a way that most hip-hop – most music, really – just doesn’t achieve.
[d-embed]PERFECT DAY FOR A FUNERAL LISTENING PARTY from ROBERT ANTHONY on Vimeo.
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