THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When Leon Michels and El Michels Affair released their first record Sounding Out The City, in 2005, it was hard to guess what was next for the multi-instrumentalist and his then-introduced, now-patented “cinematic soul” sound.
Now, four EMA studio albums and scores of tribute and remix projects later — all while producing for and working with some of the biggest names in the industry — Michels has trademarked his sound, with each project taking audiences somewhere new and pushing the boundaries of what he is known for. The man is a river, not a lake and this time he takes his golden touch into the realm of hip-hop laying down a musical bed for one of the greatest to ever rhyme into a microphone: Black Thought of The Roots crew.
Their new collborative album Glorious Game and is a remarkable debut partnership in more ways than one. Michels provides his bottom-heavy, soul-tinged production; Black Thought gives us some of the more personal and transparent verses we’ve ever heard from him. Michels and Thought have been in each other’s orbit for a while now. The two first met in the 2000s when the rapper was first getting familiar with the contemporary soul scene.
“Out of that whole world, Menahan Street Band was probably my favorite,” he says, recalling the funk and soul group Michels co-founded back in 2007. Skip ahead a few years and musicians from that collective — Dave Guy on trumpet and Ian Hendrickson-Smith on sax — are now full time players with The Roots. This connection eventually led Leon and Thought to doing a few fundraising events around N.Y.C. and Philly together. “Before long, Black Thought was coming around the studio and would jam with us from time to time,” Michels explains. “Then, fast forward to 2020 and COVID lockdowns, he just hit me up out of the blue, wanting me to send him stuff to write to. We both were looking to stay busy.”
Being that Thought is the co-founder and MC for The Roots — hands down, the best live-band group in hip-hop — Michels took a decidedly different approach to this project. Instead of sending tracks featuring live compositions, Michels composed and recorded soul songs in his studio, then sampled himself and other arists, chopping, looping and mixing the sounds to create instrumentals. “I’m a big fan of soul music,” he says, as if we didn’t know. “And part of hip-hop’s appeal to me has always been the sample-based production.”
The result has the organic feel of loop-based tracks that breathe and fluctuate enough for Black Thought to flex on. “What I write about is determined by the equation of the producer’s energy and my energy,” Thought says. “It’s about where we meet.” So armed with Michels sampled and re-sampled soul cinematics, Thought rhymes through personal memories and distinctive perspectives, all dripping with visuals.
First single Grateful — a thick, low-end banger with a haunting flute line — gives you a nice intro into how the record will go. Thought’s verses lay heavy in the way we’ve come to love: Cadences that walk a line between street teacher and poet, explanation and experience, as he pays homage to what’s come before him and how it’s made him. The title track, with its unhurried bassline and bouncing drum track, finds Black Thought rhyming double-time about the trials of fame and respect but also speaking to his gifts and his well established place in hip-hop. On The Weather, he paints a vivid portrait of growing up in Philly. You can almost see his Grandma’s house in your mind as he rides the tempo changes of the track flanked by ghostly background vocals.
“To me,” Black Thought says, “these songs are like scenes from a film that is my life. That’s the way it evolved.” And with his pure lyrical skill on full display and Michels’ custom-made approach to making beats, this record is a bit of a rarity in today’s hip-hop atmosphere: there are no flashy guest features and no attempts to be on trend. “This is an effing rap record,” says Michels. “He’s a storyteller; the point is to listen to the story. It’s not a verse-chorus, verse-chorus approach. Listen to what he has to say and the way he has to say it.”
