Blu & Exile - The Feeling
"My life was blessed, even times when my life was less. I kept faith and God put me in a good place."
Album: Miles: From An Interlude Called Life [3rd album]
Genre: Hip Hop, Jazz Rap
Album Release: July 17th 2020
Single Release: July 8th 2020 [5th single]
Length: 7.35
Producer: Exile
Vocalist: Blu [age 37]
Label: Fat Beats Records, Dirty Science Records
Music Video
Live version from KEXP in 2020
Sample: Jeannie Reynolds - The Feeling Aint There (1976)
Charts, Streams & Sales
Spotify: Over 700, thousand
YouTube Music: Over 150 thousand
Credits
Sample: Jeannie Reynolds - The Feeling Aint There (1976)
Details
- The album is named after jazz musician Miles Davis and actually features a track called just that. 'Miles Davis', the Blu & Exile song, is track 4.
- Most of the track is Blu talking about what's happended to him since his last album was released in 2012. "First we felt ‘miles’ away from our last record so we wanted to catch up the fans, with songs like 'the feeling'." Blu talks about staying positive while going through hardship, racism and police violence in America and how it is especially important to count your blessings when times are hard "and the fact that I’m broke, and my life is on the ropes but I got good health, tryna buy high hopes."
- The track features spoken word poetry by Jacinto Rhines. In an interview with the Doc-Jota blog on tumblr Blu recalled how he and Jacinto first met.
"Jacinto is a very special man. I met him one day after ordering food from his restaurant, where he personally delivered the food to me. When he bought me this delicious plate of soul food, he asked can he give me a lift across the street to my studio. Me being a young man, of course I said ‘I can handle it on my own’ but he insisted to give me the lift. So I hopped in his back seat and immediately I noticed a book that someone gave me for my collection, it was a poetry book. I said ‘hey, I have this book’ and Jacinto replied,’I wrote that book’. And our miraculous friendship began from there." - It’s like what I was saying about how jazz can take you on a journey of a person’s emotions without any words. I want that same thing to happen with the music I’m involved in, but through the words. I want to create something that will allow the musical emotion to match it and bring it out. If I make a beat, sometimes I’ll be like, “I can hear you talking about this,” and I’m basically trying to match the emotion of the music through my description of what the content can be about. Then again, there are plenty of other songs where Blu catches onto that and creates his own song. For example, the song “The Feeling,” I thought it would be dope if he personified what the feeling is, and I think he did a wonderful job of doing that. (Exile talking to passionweiss.com)
Artwork
