Parereamea

One of the top new songs I’ve heard this year was in a small coffee shop in North Hollywood, CA.  It was r&b new music that I was never expected to hear while eating a turkey Panini at a corner table at the Amsterdam Cafe.  It was acoustic with a hip hop edge.  It was Jodeci singing with John Mayer with Timbaland forcing your head to nod.  Every person “working”, looked away from their Facebook news feeds, enamored by Eddie Gomez.  This kid was killing it, killing it for the 20 or less people that were sprawled out on couches and spaced out at the small circular tables.  I looked at the owner behind the register and he nodded to me as if to say, “Oh, I know.”  The cover of Blackstreets’ “No Diggity,” even had people coming off the streets to sit by the doorway to listen to him.  I’ve never seen larger smiles on faces from hearing that one song that.  We all heard it and thought to ourselves “oh man, when that song came out, I was ____ with ____ and we were _____, damn that was fun.”

I spoke to the 22 year old after the show: super polite, outgoing, and after 5 minutes you felt like you were in his incredibly small inner circle of friends (which included his 28 year old brother who played the jambay on stage with him, a 25 year old Japanese guy from Hawaii, and his hometown friend Kevin who looked like a cross between Michael Cera and Tony Hawk).

We chatted (laughed) for an hour or so and he gave me a rough CD of 2 of his new tracks.  I had to ask him about “Never Known.”  I told him it was like hearing R&B from the future that the crowd inferred the rest of the production in their minds.  They heard the drums, the strings, the harmonies-all of it!  He could paint the whole song, acoustically with his rhythm!

“Its about that girl, you know that one that everyone has.  You like her, you pretty much love her, but she just sees you as that kid that she has known all her life.  You just want to convince her you are crazy about her and it almost makes you mad that you and that she has never known.  The chorus is a progression:  it starts off ‘I’ve always loved her but shes never known’ to ‘I’ve always wanted more but shes never known’ to ‘I’ve always loved you.’  By the end of the song I’ve told myself exactly what I wanted to say to her, but still didn’t, but….I will.”

We were wrapping things up and he told me he was working on getting his demo finished and he hoped to get into a major by the end of the year.  If this guy doesn’t get onto the radio or is on a tour, the ENTIRE MUSICAL WORLD is at a disservice.  Its that new air that we’ve all been trying to find since Eminem, since Lauryn Hill, since Amy Winehouse even.  You know, in that genre we need new music from, but are just getting the same old thing.