Recently, Recording Artist Royal Blu and Producer Tim Foresta finally released their long anticipated project, the “sinG with God EP“! Featuring 5 tracks, listeners were treated a mix of awesome lyrics, melodies, and production that will have you rocking and rewinding to catch the lines. Recently we got a behind the scenes look at the creative process with Blu and Foresta, more specifically the situations that led to the making of each track. Tune in!
Art By: @TajFrancis
Track 1: “Let’s Get High“
Royal Blu: For “Let’s Get High”, I remember being in studio and one of my Engineers who helped with recording the session was intentionally smoking near the booth so it could aid in me capturing the feeling of the song (haha). Leno Banton and some of the REM crew was in the studio session as well, and they’re like the Ganja gurus. So it made even more sense.
Tim Foresta: “Let’s Get High” was a very interesting process. I only had this rough loop of the hook part of the beat. I had no clue where this could go, but it had a vibe, so I sent it to Blu. He then was able to write an entire song with three verses, hook, basically a whole arrangement on this simple loop. He sent it to me via voice note. I was blown away and it instantly became clear what kind of a song this will be. Within an hour most of the ideas you hear now came to my mind. That’s also what I like about working with Blu. The process doesn’t follow the simple pattern of I send a beat, he writes a song – done. It’s always different.
Track 2: “Believe (ft. Lila Ike)“
Blu: I haven’t really said this anywhere else, but the song “Believe” was actually written out of me being hurt. I had a song called “Wrote You This Song” that was originally set to be a part of this EP, but didn’t make the cut. It was the first song Foresta and I ever did, but we didn’t work in studio together for it. He was still in Germany. But basically, that song was about singing to my past self and letting him know that things get better in the future. Because the past self I was singing to at that time lost all the files for his song, the studio I was working with got ripped down, I was betrayed by friends, lost loved ones. It was a depressing time. So that energy carried over into writing “Believe” because I wrote those two songs very close together.
Foresta: Believe. In 2014 I was in South Africa shooting a Documentary about Zimbabwean refugees, living in the streets of Cape Town looking for work. It was an idea by director Thandi Sebe, who at the time wanted to write a Theatre play about it. Growing up in Cape Town, she always saw these groups of men gathering and always wondered who they were and what they do. So, while doing this Documentary I composed some music for it as well and this is where the idea for Believe came from. In the end I didn’t use that beat in the documentary, but interestingly enough the topic Blu found for it perfectly fits the scene of the film that inspired me coming up with it.
