“Passin’ Me By,” (Produced by J-Swift) [click to read]

Imani: My verse came from when I was jocking a chick and she tried to play me to the side.
Tre: Word. [Laughs]
Imani: J-Swift and 'Lip were trying to make beats back then. We weren’t producing, but we were learning how to become producers. Swift would come to 'Lip with and idea, and 'Lip would go to Swift with ideas, and they were building off of each other.
Bootie Brown: I’ll tell you: J-Swift would lock me out of the studio because he’d say I didn’t need to be in the studio. [Laughs] So there’d be times where I had to sleep on a shelf at the top of the equipment closet to stay in the studio. I just came down during the nighttime and worked on the track.
Fatlip: Around the time that song was made, that’s when we first decided to be a group. It was weird because a lot of stuff was in sync. After we found all those records, J-Swift – who never smoked weed – starting smoking and grew creatively.
Bootie Brown: The person who pushed it through was Swift’s brother Pedro. He knew how to do stuff to the tracks, and he was a big helping hand throughout everything. Swift could understand it, but he wasn’t on top of things like that, so Pedro came in and helped get it together.
Fatlip: J’s background was different, too. Back then, he was doing more "New Jack Swing" beats, whereas we wanted Hip Hop beats. So it was a combination between our flavor, his musical skills and his brother helping out. His brother was always willing to show us how to use the MPC.

It was incredible because we would always have access to this one spot, and all we did there was hang out, listen to records, smoke weed, freestyle and makes beats out of the records we listened to. And then we went to Quick N Split. [Laughs]
Imani: am/pm and Quick N Split. [Laughs]

“Runnin’,” (Produced by Jay Dee) [click to read]

Imani: Nobody knew us when we were working with J-Swift, so the entire dynamic of how we worked was completely different. At the time, Jay Dee was a nobody, and here we are coming off of the first album [Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde], so we had some fans now. We went from working with J-Swift and having no fans to working with a nobody with fans, and some of our homies would ask, “Why are you working with this dude?” We wanted something totally different than the first time around.
Bootie Brown: People were running with the Bizarre Ride album like, “You have to be a clown.” I didn’t want to be anybody’s clown, but every time somebody wanted to do an interview it’s like, “Tell a joke! Be funny!” What we put out there was coming back to us tenfold, and I just felt different this time around.

We went out to New York, and we had the opportunity to be working with a lot of big name producers at that time, like [DJ Premier] and Diamond D and all these people. We were trying to work with Q-Tip [click to read], but he was busy working on [Mobb Deep’s] The Infamous. We went to his house, and he was playing some beats and told us, “I’ll be honest; I’m really not on it right now because I’m working on so much other stuff. But I got this tape of these tracks that I got from someone at Lollapalooza; just take this and listen to it.” And it was a wrap after that.

Nobody was coming with what Dilla had. The harps, the strings, just the whole sound of it was different from we were hearing other people were doing at that time. The only way I can explain it is that Jay Dee was a musician that was fucking with Hip Hop. He was a drummer, so you can feel that whole vibe in the music. And at that time I just felt like it was something new. He came to L.A. and was only supposed to do maybe one or two tracks, and he ended up doing half the album.
Tre: He was pretty incredible. As a beat maker, when we brought him ideas he would flip it in a crazy way. I was intrigued by his beat patterns. He was definitely someone we were supposed to meet. He had his own style, and you couldn’t deny it.
Imani: We were lucky and blessed, man.
Fatlip: Jay Dee, at that time he wasn’t well known at all. So we got a chance to see his career grow, and to see him become a legend. Continued on page 3 »