MolinaSoleil“Skydreamer” by Adrian H. Molina w/ Mannequin Rituals featuring Helen Chanthongthip, Up Before the Sunrise, released by CHiTT Productions (2008)
Skydreamer is the opening track off Up Before the Sunrise, my first full-length album. It was a dream. I had been writing rhymes for 10 years, constantly envisioning what my first album might look like. What would it sound like? What would I say if I had one chance, one album, to say something to the world?
I started writing material for Up Before the Sunrise during the summer of 2006. I had been through a lot during the years prior. In 2005 I left the life I was living. It was a life that wasn’t mine. It was beating me down, slowly murdering me, and it probably would have killed me, mentally and spiritually, if not physically. I faced my demons, handled my business, then tested out my wings.
After releasing an EP and touring my first play Phantom Discourse in 2007, CHiTT Productions released Up Before the Sunrise in August of 2008. I packed up what little I owned, put it in storage, and hit the road for some gigs with $1000 in my pocket. It was with UBTS in hand that I met the Papers film crew, Aju, DJ Icewater, E.G. Bailey of Tru Ruts, Hakim Be in Albuquerque, and a host other artistic folks. These relationships would lay the foundation for my work in 2009 and 2010.
“Skydreamer” will resonate with everyone with big ideas, honest intentions and a brave heart. I wrote the track during the fall of 2006 when I took a job doing research for a gang resistance and education program in Greeley, CO. I watched daily as police officers scared the shit out of mostly brown and working class kids. There were some decent moments, a few well-meaning officers, but most of these cops weren’t teaching those kids shit. They were indoctrinating them with self-defeating ideas of obedience and complacency, setting them up to fail, basically telling them where they knew these kids were going to end up – in prison. They were already constructing prisons in these kids’ heads.
It was one of my last research days. I stopped taking notes, flipped the page, and wrote “Skydreamer”, thinking about all the prisons in my head that I had busted out of in my own young life.
Tomorrow marks the 2 year anniversary of Up Before the Sunrise. This album doesn’t carry the classic Hip-Hop sound of Shine Flow EP and SOULAJU. UBTS was much more on the experimental tip, no samples, straight out-the-basement musicianship by my DIY homies at CHiTT Productions.
I love the concept of sampling. Hip-Hop was built around the art of taking something old and giving it new context, new style. We are constantly in the process of sampling various ideas and realities, sifting through the possibilities, throwing out what we don’t need, keeping what we do. I embrace this.
I’m also down to try something new entirely.
Independent, experimental, sucka free.
Tags: A.M. Soleil, Adrian H. Molina, CHiTT Productions, Mannequin Rituals, Molina Music, Molina Speaks, music blog, Papers the movie, Retrospectively, Skydreamer, Up Before the Sunrise
