Mud is loved.

The dirty, dirty Yet out of the mud grows, the lotus grows life.

Well, for this album here, I think I started jotting down a lot of the ideas in 2020, and I have found a book of old lyrics and these old lyrics, I read them and these are always that old backs.

When I was like 15, 16 years old.

And so I started writing music to kind of help tell the story of my youth.

But as the music started developing, taking on a life of its own, it became more obvious that this is more of a ballet that I was writing.

It could be its own thing.

It didn't need all these lyrics that I had planned to play with it.

Instead, I opted to have it express through just music and dance.

Tony Pearce and Dustin, we had talked about me becoming part of their imagination Odysseys.

The thing was, I told them in the beginning that, you know, the first year would be this would be that, but I want to do something original, so I don't want to just do routine music and things that I to recreate.

I want to create something new and original.

And it's okay when you're ready.

And then this valley became it.

And I was ready.

And I took it to them.

And we performed it with dances and orchestras and visuals.

It was a great personal achievement.

Nas bust the Wu-Tang, and we always like having such a brotherly moment, all talked about recording some music together and we was like, Yeah, we should have a studio bus.

So in the second half of the tour, we paid for a studio bus to come and it happens to be the John Lennon educational bus.

And Dobie had just put in this whole new Atmos system into this bus.

Nobody came in and made a song.

When I realized that there was a chance that that wasn't going to happen, I was like, You know what?

No matter what, I'll come here every night.

And if anybody else come, we'll do hip hop.

If nobody else come, we want to mix this album in Dolby Atmos.

When you do an orchestra, an orchestra has a certain.

When you sit in, the music comes at you from a certain dynamic based on that setting.

And the mix in studio is based upon that kind of stereophonic sound you're hoping to get as the orchestra projects itself throughout the room.

But in Dolby Atmos, you go break all those holes.

If the horn player is here at the beginning of the song, can we put them over here by the end?

Now, in a real orchestra, a horn player will never get up and walk over to the.

Okay, But in Dolby, Atmos mixing was out, was able to do that.

So this album, which I think is special, that's mixed not only in Dolby Atmos, but actually using Dolby Atmos as a creative tool.

Now we're actually moving the instruments and moving the players throughout the mix to make you go like this.

You know what I mean?

And that was something that came about without plan.

You didn't plan ahead.

The first thing that enamored me about music was hip hop itself.

Hip hop has found this way to inspire the world.

I would advise young people to take the path that hip hop gives you.

Pick up your drum machine, pick up your fruity loops or your ProTools, whatever you're doing, but pick up an instrument because the understanding of the instrument is going to help you understand the creativity of what you're doing.

It's going to take you to a level of creativity that can be uniquely yours.

This album is no samples.

It's all musicians is playing this music.

The recording that we released is not the same recording that we first tried because each time we played it, there's something different happening because a human hand move different, there's a different amplitude, there's a different expression, there's a different embellishment, a flourish.

There's also something in the stimulation of your own brain that instruments gives us, you know, that self-expression.

And so this is a ballet through mode.

Like, yeah, maybe even my own past has been muddy.

Starting in the streets of Staten Island, Brooklyn, living, you know, the street life as we did waving Walkers and, you know, Wu-Tang Clan and and going through that mode, but then evolving to a Lotus, you know.

And the thing about a Lotus is that even though it goes with so many things that could be considered, the sounds around it, it maintains to keep this fluid.