Let me explain one thing about art: If you overthink it, you kill it. He and I knew not to discuss these things beforehand and I'm glad we didn't because once I arrived at Nic's studio, instincts took over and we just let the music happen. Three to four days later, we walked outta there with seven brand new instrumentals. Upon leaving, the only question I had while driving back home was, "Why didn't we do this shit SOONER?!?!?!!" To me, the craziest part was the fact that the music sounded like Nicolay AND it sounded like me. The two styles merged and the sound was literally split down the middle. With these seven new ones in the chamber, we then talked about working toward completing a "Nicolay & Zo! EP" containing some music with vocals and maybe a couple of instrumentals in there. I spoke publicly about the EP throughout 2014, we even discussed touring options once it was released and everything.
Fast forward to the top of 2015 when Phonte started recording to some of the music along with Carmen Rodgers, Tamisha Waden, Shana Tucker and Carlitta Durand. Once the music started to take shape around the new vocals that were recorded, we decided to focus on creating a "crew" album rather than just a Nic & Zo! EP -- an +FE Music "compilation" project, basically. It sounded like an excellent idea to me, but, it also sounded like Nic and I needed to get back to work on some more music so that we could have a full album's worth of material to pull from. After coordinating schedules again, on March 31, 2015, that's exactly what we began to do. I drove back down to NC for round TWO of marathon studio sessions in Wilmington.
The second time was a bit different mainly because we knew what to expect from each other from the jump. At this point, all we needed to do was open up a "New Session" on Pro Tools and go in. Once I arrived, we set up quickly and jumped right into something brand new. I can't remember why we specifically decided to knock out a house track that night for that very first song, but I DO remember being hyped up about it being as though I had never worked on one before. Hell, I had never even PLAYED on one.
