In a new interview, Sounwave, longtime friend and producer to Kendrick Lamar, said that the rapper’s next album is already underway.
Kendrick Lamar has already started working on his new album. In a new interview with Complex, Lamar’s longtime friend and producer Sounwave claimed that while the world is still unpacking his latest – Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers – Lamar’s in the studio shaping the next one.
“Oh, we always start immediately after. Like, we’re starting on the next one now.” Sounwave, born Mark Spears, said.
“That’s never going to change, all the way from the Kendrick Lamar EP. The next day, we started on Section.80. It’s just the ideas never stopped.” Spears said.
“That’s one of the main reasons I go on tour with him, is to create the next album. We can’t skip a beat. We have to just keep it going. There’s no breaks. There’s no such thing as a vacation when you’re doing what you love. Everything you do is what you love to do, so you’re excited.” he said.
“Your family might feel a different way about it, but it’s always like, what’s next? We’re like kids in a candy shop. Personally, once I release an album like this, I don’t go back to it for a while, because I lived it so much. It’s like, it’s not for me anymore. It’s time for me to clear my head, so the best thing to do is to think about the next project.” he added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Sounwave also spoke about how his creative relationship with Lamar had evolved over the years, to the point where they had ‘no boundaries anymore’.
Love Hip Hop?
Get the latest Hip Hop news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
“The fact that we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want it, that allows us to think bigger. We can get any type of instrumentation we want and make it our own. It just opens your eyes to a completely different world of things that kids coming up from Compton can never imagine.” he said.
Still, given what the world had been through on a global scale for the past two years, working on Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers was a challenge. ‘Rough’, to say the least.
“It was good times, bad times, and frustrating times. I remember we went through so much from the five year gap. We lost very key figures in our culture in Nipsey [Hussle] and Kobe [Bryant] within less than a year of each other, which can bring anybody down. It brought me down, to the point where I was creatively stuck.” Sounwave admitted, adding that with COVID in the mix, he was an ‘emotional wreck’ and ‘drained’.
“I was forcing myself to create music, but eventually you gotta get out of it. I found myself A&R-ing a lot more than production.” he admitted, before adding: “When things opened up a little bit, though, you could actually get in the studio with the artist. You could actually feel the energy—things that you forgot you needed.”
“I’m a perfectionist. I need someone to be like, “No, no, no, that’s actually good. Don’t throw that beat away.” Otherwise, all my beats would never come out because I just feel like it could be better. I still listen to the songs today and I’m like, “Ah, I wish I didn’t do that.” That’s just the perfectionist in me. I’m hard on myself, so you need people like Kendrick to be in the studio to give you life sometimes.” he said.
For more on this topic, follow the Hip Hop Observer.
Check out ‘N95’ by Kendrick Lamar:
