Josh Brickman, senior in Engineering, spends a majority of his time learning how to create buildings. But when he’s not busy, he’s putting the finishing touches on his upcoming rap album, The Music Man, set to drop on Friday. Her Campus sat down with Josh to get the lowdown on how a high school talent turned into something bigger than he ever expected.
Her Campus: When did you first start rapping?
Josh Brickman: I started rapping around the age of 15 as part of my literature class. We were in the middle of (reading) Hamlet, and I was sitting in class, when a little ditty popped into my head. I told my teacher I had a song in my head and asked to present it as extra credit. When I showed up to class the next day, I performed my “Hamlet Rap” as a joke, but everyone loved it, and it kind of just grew from there.
HC: What do you love about rap music?
JB: I love rap because it combines so many different musical aspects together as a way of expressing yourself. You can take so many genres of music and mix them together to give it a life of its own, and you have a lot of power to create something unique.
HC: How do you balance time between school and your music?
JB: I just try to stay very organized and schedule it just as I would with my homework. I outline which tracks I need to master and which music video scenes need to be filmed. I actually put two albums out (before this one) during my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, but those weren’t as well produced and were a little haphazard. This one was a scheduled album that I’ve been working on since January 2011.
HC: Can you tell us about the process of making this album?
JB: Most of my song ideas come from a spark that I get. I could just be sitting around, playing with a hook or a string of words I like, and then deriving the lyrics from that by telling a story and getting the point across. I probably went through about 50 songs to make the 13-track album. As soon as I have the lyrics, I focus on the type of beat to go with them. I prefer to find the right kind of music to go with the rap, versus building the rap to the music. That way, you can be more precise and reflective with what you want to say, and you get more musicality out of the song. Finding the right music also takes a while. I’ll sit down with my friends and show them a bunch of YouTube clips and say that I like that drum line, or I like this specific instrumental style, but maybe we can raise it up a little bit. So it’s a process of layering that music, which can take about a month to finalize everything. It only took me about a half hour to record the songs. I’ll record my lyrics, and then I’ll work with one of my producers to give me a drumbeat to tweak it a bit and get it perfect.
HC: What was the inspiration for the songs off your album?
JB: My inspiration for the songs is as varied as the tracks themselves. The song, “My Brickhouse” is about how I can be honest in relationships; “Tragic” was based on the movie “The Prestige”, meant to be a storytelling song; the hit single that I think will be the most popular off this album, “Champaign State of Mind”, is kind of like my homage to U of I. It’s different from (the Jay-Z song) “Empire State of Mind”, because I felt that Champaign needed its own theme song, and it’s about why I love being here.
HC: What can we expect from this album?
JB: You can expect my life on a CD. This album is essentially every crazy part of my life. I have some serious songs, some feel-good songs, some funny songs and some storytelling songs. I have a remix of the Coldplay song “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall”, which was really fun. And I have some commercial jingles. Every song I make, I try to contrast lyrically, stylistically and instrumentally. I try to envision them in terms of colors, and I want the colors to contrast from song to song. On “Marlon Brando”, for example, I think of it as a “purple” song because it has a jazz-like groove to it. The song after it, “Tragic”, it’s more of a reddish-yellow, because it has a piano line, but it’s also heavy in terms of the meaning of the song. Another one of my songs, “The Brickhouse”, is more a green-type song, and after that is “R2D2,” which I envision is more of a “yellow”. I wanted to get as much variety as I could on this album for every type of listener. It’s basically just me in a nutshell.
HC: What are some of the artists who inspire you when you’re creating your songs?
JB: There’s a long list of people who inspire me, most of which I’m sure many people haven’t heard of. I do like a lot of the mainstream guys like Kanye West and Jay-Z, but a lot of the rap that’s played on the radio doesn’t get into what I’m trying to express. There’s a greater depth in lyricism and greater musicality in other artists that you don’t hear on mainstream rap, like with Pusha T (who’s recently working with Kanye West) and XV. Jedi Mind Tricks is another group I like, and the samples they work over with the orchestra and instrumentalists are really incredible. And I really like Cunninlynguists. One of their rappers, ToneDeff, is literally one of the fastest rappers alive. He raps over symphonies and Mozart, and he’s really creative.
HC: What other genres of music do you like?
JB: I have 13,000 songs on my iPod. I like everything from Disney to classical to gangster hip-hop. I like how everything meshes together and sums up my creative prowess.
HC: Where do you see yourself in the future?
JB: I like to think of rap as a very dedicated hobby. It’s so much of a part of me that I can’t stop rapping. Even if I’m not performing live, I still want to be writing songs just for myself. I love both engineering and rapping, and I want to try and figure out how I can take the creative aspect of rap and mix it with engineering, and vice versa. But for right now, right after the album drops, I want to start immediately working on the next one. I have six other songs that I’ve already outlined, so hopefully I’ll have another album out by next spring.
Josh Brickman’s “The Music Man” drops on Friday. The tracks will be available for download on Saturday at http://thebrickmanmusic.tumblr.com.