In this interview spotlight, I rock with Hand’Solo Records’ representers Library Steps about their latest project Rap Dad, Real Dad, motivations, challenges, influences and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Who are The Library Steps? Where are you from?
We’re rap legend Jesse Dangerously on vocals and sort of, executive production? And Ambition AKA Ambeez on beats, made with classic hardware samplers like the MPC 3000 and SP404.
We both grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is the territory known as K’jipuktuk to the Mi’kmaq, the First Nations whose genocide was attempted by British officer Edward Cornwallis beginning in 1748 when George Dunk, the Earl of Halifax, put him in charge of the colony. So we’re two white people who grew up loving hip-hop, which has a special history in our city due primarily to the large indigenous Black population that was established in the Africville settlement before it was bulldozed by the municipal government when my parents were kids.
Ambition still lives there, where he’s raising a son. I moved away to another part of Canada about eleven years ago, but you’re from where you’re from! So I carry the complicated legacy of the place and culture I’m from with me, trying to find a way to move through the world peacefully.
We’re also from the Backburner Crew, a collective of hip-hop artists that began in Halifax and spread outward and now has members from BC to Newfoundland. In the early 2000s, some members of the crew started organizing a weekly freestyle cipher on the front steps of the Halifax Memorial Library on Spring Garden Road. From as soon as they locked the doors until it got too dark or cold to continue, we’d beatbox or play instrumentals on a boom box and share spontaneous rhymes. That’s one of the nicest parts of the history Ambition & I share, so I wanted to place it front and centre when presenting our collaboration to the world.
What style of music do you create? What attracted you to this genre or style?
It’s hip-hop with a very traditional, early-90s-style, sample-based foundation that rests on hard drums and layers of split-second jazz fragments. When Ambeez sent me demos to start writing to, I gravitated toward the ones that felt more melancholy and pensive, but that also had a lot of thump, while coming together in a style that I’ve never quite been able to imitate with my own production.
Who or what influences your rapping? Your production?
My influences as a rapper are kind of arranged in a disco smile, where the ones I heard at the very beginning and whoever I’m listening to the most right now are going to have the most noticeable and traceable impact on how I put words together, and everything in between kind of forms a hazy support structure that it all hangs from. My biases favour the east coast and the golden era, but also the avant garde underground that was blowing up when I started making my own music in the late 90s, and the most thoughtful and expressive and meaningful or just FUN or EXCITING stuff I can find today. Ambition’s beats pushed me more toward the styles I was influenced by the most when I first started, because he really captured the vibe of that era, so it was fun to write in a way that I hadn’t quite managed in over a decade, and find that everything I’ve done since has prepared me to do that MUCH better than I did as a kid. I was influenced by these sort of landslides of fun and catharsis that came from either finding a way to impress myself with cleverness or work through some really difficult personal stuff. Oh yeah… a big influence on the lyrics to this album was depression, and processing loss. So what I needed to work on in my own emotions was a big influence, too.
How long have you been creating and sharing your music with the public?
About twenty years for me, and I think about ten to twelve years for Beez. Which makes me suddenly realize he’s more established now than I was when I first met him as a fifteen year old kid trying to get into shows! Wow I felt like such a OG then… I wonder if he’s met any kids like young him yet, besides his own.
What motivates you to keep going?
In the immortal words of Rakim Allah, “it’s sorta an addiction.” It’s kind of the one thing I ever learned to be REALLY good at, and it sits at this intersection between sport and therapy that means it’s really healing for me to spend time on it, and rewarding for me to find connections through it with others. I’ve also built a huge and inspiring community of colleagues around me, and a tight but mighty contingent of fans who support me even when I’m barely releasing anything. Even when depression has more sway over my days than inspiration. I love to be surrounded by people who do some of the same things I do for some of the same reasons, and push one another by example and learn from one another and succeed together and fuckin fail HARD together and eat dirt together. Without all that, I don’t really have a thing that makes me Jesse.
Why should people listen to The Library Steps?
People should listen to us if they like sophisticated, thoughtful beats and rhymes, with an emotional component. They should listen to it if they’re looking for life lessons in a gentler, less destructive masculinity (if such a thing is possible – the jury is out). They should listen if they’re queer or fat or in some other way always being treated like a joke by mainstream culture, and want to spend just forty minutes listening to someone who knows what that’s like and isn’t going to ever do the same thing to them. They should listen if they love beats that thump and slump and bump. They should listen if they love sophisticated rhymes with layers of meaning, delivered with wit and sincerity. They should listen if they love to hear guest MCs completely wreck shop and destroy the main artist on a record. I like to think of it as a soft place to land and enjoy a bit of rest, even if there’s still bad dreams.
What is your new release? How is it different from your own releases?
Rap Dad, Real Dad is our first full-length collaboration. We made the floor plan around Ambition making all the beats and me being the MC, but in the rest of our work we both do both, either alone or with others, and my first releases featured my production primarily and his first releases were strictly as a vocalist. This led to some fun things like Beez working out some aspects of a chorus before I started work on a song, or me adding little touches to the production like analog synth or tweaks to the arrangement when I was supposed to be just rhyming. For me, I think this record turned out calmer than anything else I’ve released, although some of that might be a function of my age now that I’m about to be 39. For Ambition… I would say this album has more… Jesse D… than anything else he’s ever done.
Did you set out to accomplish anything specific with this album?
Yeah, I made it from start to finish with the intent of turning over a complete project to Hand’Solo Records that would honour the things I admire most about the venerable indie rap label out of Toronto, and I wanted to finish quickly because I had so many other albums start and stop and drag on and take years and I was still trying to finish the album I started in 2012 so I needed to prove I could cut through the fog and shine my little lighthouse light across the waters again. It was my antidote to giving up. Plus Beez’s beats are completely ill and I wanted to have them all to myself.
Where is the best place to connect with you online? And to discover more of your music?
I, Jesse D, am what they call “Extremely On-Line” and can be connected with via Twitter, FB page (not my personal FB, I got boundaries, I’m old), comments on the blog at dangerously.ca or patreon.com/rljd, you can follow my twitch broadcasts at twitch.com/girljd if you want to watch me play video games while a dope mix plays in the background and you can most certainly holler at me there… you can follow Jesse Dangerously on Spotify, Google Play, Apple Music, iTunes, and all those things to keep on top of the free singles I’m dropping every month for the foreseeable future, and keep my albums in your rotation. I’m out here for you.
Ambition is extremely In The Real World, and pretty much only uses Instagram with any regularity. He posts beats in progress and SEVERAL times during the album I had to comment on them to be like “THAT ONE IS FOR OUR RECORD PLEASE” and make him send me his newest. He has his albums on Bandcamp and all major digital distribution services, plus he features heavily on a lot of remarkable albums including releases by Backburner, ChanHays, and The Extremities.
Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?
I use Google Play because it was convenient to share a family plan with a friend, but I think Spotify has the most potential for spreading artists to new listeners, and Bandcamp is the venue of choice for people who already know the artist and want to shop for their merchandise directly, for the greatest amount of financial support up front. I’m someone who buys the record but then still mostly streams it for the best of both worlds, as far as other artists. It’s important to me to support other artists because it means so much to me when I’m supported, but that can look lots of different ways. It’s not always the same old transactions we grew up with.
What about vinyl, CDs, and MP3s?
It’s almost impossible to be a hip-hop head my age and not completely fetishize vinyl. That’s what I mainly collect, and it’s a huge part of my worldly possessions. But I listen to music on the go more than sitting in one place, so I like when a record comes with a download. I also like cassettes as a cute little artifact even though I don’t always have a working tape deck, so I like when they have DLs too. CDs I could pretty much care less about, but I have an attachment to anything my peers and friends release, so sometimes CDs crawl into my heart, too.
As an indie musician in the digital age, how does the technology help and how does it hinder your art and career?
I benefit from greater accessibility of the tools to create and distribute music, and I suffer from the fact that everyone else does, too, even though that’s a problem I help CREATE as much as I experience it. There’s more music released every day than I could ever hear in my life, and I’m lost in that ocean. There’s less emphasis on curation than there was when radio programmers led us all in little cliques to whatever we might each recognize as the next big thing, or respected music reviewers threw down in the pages of dozens of alt weekly papers across the continent and world. It’s like a huge incredible maze of treasures was built and we all got stuck in it and there’s no lights down here.
I grew up developing a set of pro-am musician skills that would have worked very well in the 90s. Then the 00s happened, and I’ve had to constantly reorient my focus ever since then, and I haven’t done a great job. I can’t really blame technology for my obsolete outlook on the independent music industry, I just need to navigate my way through it, by touch and smell.
What are your other biggest challenges in attracting an audience to your music?
I’m bad at keeping myself in position, I let things slack and I get distracted, and stuff doesn’t get finished or released as often as I’d prefer, so people drift and lose interest. I guess it might be naive, but I think that’s more the issue than anything about the music itself. It’s a bit peculiar and fussy, but much weirder stuff than mine finds its audience as often as more ordinary stuff does. It’s not so incompetent that it couldn’t have more people loving it if I could show it to them. So it’s a matter of promotion – that’s why I’m hiring a publicist for my next album. It’s time to go big or go home. Traditional channels are still good for something… I hope.
What was the last song you listened to?
I was streaming Risk of Rain on Twitch this morning and bumping Onyx and other 1993-ish rap classics… I think the last one that played before I got killed was “Mi Fresh” by Poor Righteous Teachers.
Do you tour or play live? Where can music lovers find out where to see you perform?
Ambition and I haven’t been able to plant ourselves in the same place yet and do a proper Library Steps performance, but we both do habitually play as much as we can in our respective cities or anywhere we can get to. I’m starting to plot out Canadian and US tours for this fall, talking to a good friend who appears on the Library Steps record about maybe joining forces. Keep an eye on the Jesse Dangerously Spotify artist page, which should feature local upcoming shows tailored for the location of the listener as they approach, and follow me on Instagram (girljd) and Twitter (rljd) to catch announcements.
What’s next for you?
For me, Jesse, it’s another long distance producer/rapper duo album. The group is called Danger Grove, we put out a collection of remixes in 2016, and we made ANOTHER album to deal with my depression last spring and summer at the same time I was working on the Library Steps record. It’s called Want, For Nothing” I don’t want to jinx it but it’s got a label with Canada-wide physical distribution, and a release date of October 19, 2018. That’s the day I turn 39. I hope to keep promoting Rap Dad Real Dad through my process of supporting the new record, and well into next year when I’ll be ready to release the third album I finished last year, I Promised Myself, which is a “solo” album in that it features WAY more guests and collaborators than any other album I’ve ever made and some of the songs might be better off without me haha no but seriously, watch out
Any last thoughts, shout outs, or words of wisdom?
Love to my massive Burner family, everyone who ever feels bad or useless, the types of people John Smith lists in “Kinship of the Down and Out!” Black Lives Matter, police is institutionalized violence, men are responsible for ending sexual assault, sex work is work and FOSTA/SESTA is destroying lives instead of helping anyone, somebody loves you, please give me literally all of you money forever. Thank you for being you.
