Brasstracks Discuss the Making of Their New ‘Good Love’ EP

The Brooklyn-based duo discuss working with Chance The Rapper and more.

Brasstracks
Image via Brasstracks
Brasstracks

Brooklyn-based duo Brasstracks have been gearing up for the release of their new Good Love EP for some time now. In between preparing for their own release, they’ve also had time to produce records for and collaborate with other big names—their biggest collaboration of late being their production for Chance The Rapper’s current single “No Problems” alongside Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz.

Today, Brasstracks is happy to finally share the finished product that they’ve worked so hard on. Their 7-track Good Love EP is a short, but sweet selection of just how broad their sound can be. Working with a range of artists from London’s Jay Prince to Virginia’s Masego to Norway’s Lido, just to name a few, turns their EP into a global experience of sound. The duo, made up of Ivan on the trumpet, and Conor on the drums, explained to us exactly how their latest project came to life.


Explain to us how Good Love came together.

Good love was a series of trial and errors. We must have made 20 or 30 different songs trying to find a specific sound or a niche for us to fill. The conclusion that we came to is that we shouldn't focus so much on a specific sound, but just to be ourselves, and try to make good uplifting music that we like by any means necessary, whether that be with live instruments or on a laptop. By the time we figured that out, all the songs just kind of came together.

With such a versatile sound, how do you choose who to work with? 

Well, obviously for our own project we reach out to people that we like, and we make so many different genres of music that the only requirement for us is to like whoever it is we're working with musically. But in terms of the people who have reached out to us to work in the past—we've just kind of let that happen. GoldLink, Anderson .Paak, Chance [The Rapper], Wyclef [Jean]... any of the acts we've worked with in the past couple years have been completely random and a huge amazing surprise every time, either the artist finds out who we are or the producer on the track does. Then they reach out and the rest is history.

You previously mentioned that you both prefer to record tracks live, how much more difficult does that make trying to collaborate with others?
 

Not much more difficult at all. We always try to keep our tracks as live as we can, but sometimes the artist doesn't want that. Or sometimes the studio won't have the proper equipment. We're producers, we adapt to the situation.

You recently produced “No Problem” for Chance The Rapper, what was that creative process like? What’s changed since then?

Well, the song was born out of a demo that we had made in December of 2015. We brought it to our sessions with him in LA, it was one of the last beats that we played for him, after playing something like 20 beats. After hearing it, he kind of freestyled over it, and that freestyle was the backbone of the melody and lyrics. It was pretty amazing to see. After those two sessions, we worked on the tune remotely from NYC, sending it back and forth with his team, fine tuning little things here and there. We must have a couple dozen versions of the song. Since then, things are definitely different, we definitely got a lot of exposure from the track, but we're still just two NYC based producers grinding 24/7. That has not changed.


What else do you have in store for the future?

We're doing our biggest tour yet from September to November, with Jack Garratt for one leg of it and Griz for the other. On the way we have a ton of tracks coming—recently we've been able to get in some work with D.R.A.M., AlunaGeorge, Aminé—we have more music for the Jay Prince project, a cover with Alexander Lewis, a couple more songs with Lido. We're working with all of our usual East Coast suspects, S'natra, Masego, JNTHN STEIN—there's a lot. Too much to name. We're excited for all of it to see the light of day though.


 

Listen to Good Love in full below.

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