“I love recreating my songs live to include other grooves, genres and influences,” says rap legend LYRICS BORN about his new acoustic album That 1 Tyme In The Studio: Acoustic Selections, which gets released via Mobile Home Recordings on May 10, 2024. Digging into the crates of his critically hailed musical oeuvre, the Berkeley-based artist Born has reworked, remade and remodeled some of his biggest hits and transformed them into stripped-down and refreshed versions of their former selves.
Sometimes, staying relatively close to the original to highlight the songwriting from the studio versions, like his jazzy New Orleans take on “Chest Wide Open” (from 2015’s Real People) to the reggae-flavored “Callin’ Out” (from his 2003 solo debut Later That Day), That 1Tyme In The Studio reveals a more organic side of the rapper. When asked how difficult it was to transform the songs, he replies, “It was a lot of fun. It was a lot like the live experience, where you know the song, you just get in and knock it out, and the energy that’s captured with no editing or revisions.”
Turning up the drama on the James Brown staple, “This Is a Man’s World” (from 2018’s Quite a Life) showcases his vocal range amidst a smoky nightclub musical backdrop. His takes on “I Like It, I Love It” (from 2008’s Everywhere At Once) and “Do That There” (from Later That Day) made him most excited to tackle. “I really love the way those tracks turned out,” he beams. “The energy is just so much fun.”
As Lyrics Born dives deeper into the entertainment world, having had a cameo on Boots Riley’s 2018 sleeper hit film Sorry To Bother You, a role on Netflix’s hit film Always Be My Maybe (alongside Ali Wong, Daniel Park and Keanu Reeves), and a hit YouTube cooking series on its fourth season with Dinner In Place, it seems as if his musical journey may be coming to a close. Starting in the in the late ‘90s as a vital part of the intensely influential Bay Area hip hop collective Quannum Projects that spawned DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lifesavas and Latyrx, of which he was half with Lateef the Truthspeaker, Lyrics Born broke countless barriers as the first Asian-American solo rapper to perform at Lollapalooza, Coachella, release a greatest hits record, etc. There was never a glass ceiling that he wasn’t able to break.
“I am doing more on-camera and multimedia productions,” he explains about moving away from music and toward other media. “Dinner In Place: Season Five is on the way and it’s received over three million views across all platforms! It’s really been rewarding to use all those other sides of my creative brain.”
As a retrospective of his first 14 albums, That 1 Tyme In The Studio is a solid note before he bows out in the Fall. “I have one more album after this for 2024 and then I’m gonna take an indefinite hiatus from releasing albums,” he says contentedly. “In the fall will be my 16th. I think that’s enough for now.”’
That 1 Tyme In The Studio: Acoustic Selections will be released via Mobile Home Recordings on May 10, 2024.
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