DONORMAAL & WELP DISNEY: ADAPTATIONS
“It’s been a while since we met
I feel like reintroducing myself again
I am your fan and your sister and I’m your friend
and that’s what really counts in the end”
-”STARFISH OPINION”WASH, as you may know, is dedicated to Washington-based artists. Your definition of what that means may differ from mine, but I mention it because DoNormaal’s life has been sort of a Seattle sandwich. Though you’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone else whose presence has been more impactful on the region’s music, she hasn’t lived in the area for years.
This is to say that I originally struggled with whether to use this platform to write about PALMSPRINGA, DoNormaal’s newest record in the seven years since her sophomore breakthrough, Third Daughter.
Any qualms I had about my own potentially misguided principles were drowned out by two factors.
The first was that PALMSPRINGA, was entirely produced by someone who does live in Washington state: percussionist and producer extraordinaire Tony LaMothe, who goes by Welp Disney. I have no excuse for the two Zoom calls I did with them; we suffer for convenience in this country. On my screen they’re all hair and beard and big round glasses, soft spoken and mildly sarcastic, willing to cede themself to my questions and DoNormaal’s input. Their role in the record’s creation made it less of a dilemma to cover it here - just looking at the DNA, PALMSPRINGA is at least 75% “greater Seattle area.”
The second came the moment I pressed play on the record.
There’s nothing I appreciate more than the shrugging off of expectations, and whatever original impression I had of DoNormaal’s music - ultra-clever cleavers of honesty over a soft bulletin of local production wizards - could not prepare me for the cold shock of LaMothe’s production, which is simultaneously grimy and opulent, agoraphobic and sweeping. “DAOT,” with its glimmering base and frantic beat, evokes the sun-stained sidewalks of Southern California; “FEED ME,” is a woozy, heart-lurching house track about codependency; “MEDICAL LEAVE,” which kicks off a run of climactic moments, is given an appropriate symphonic heft. There’s so many moments where LaMothe is not just backing up but supplementing meaning to DoNormaal’s words - they’re co-credited on the record for a reason.
In fact, LaMothe’s sheer presence highlights a key theme of PALMSPRINGA: the palpable distance between DoNormaal and Seattle. The album might be named after her childhood home, and her California-based family makes itself known frequently, but hidden underneath the clamor is a similarly germane reflection on the complicated relationship between her and her other stomping ground, the city that helped shaped her art.
“CHRISTY K-E-K-J
LITTLE KENRICK THE THIRD
JJ TOLD ME TO MAKE IT RAIN”
-”PALETZ” (photo by Jacob Loup)Christianne Kenrieke Elise Karefa-Johnson was born in Long Beach to a lineage of brilliant, historically prominent Black people hailing from across the globe: West Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and South America. Her grandfather, John Karefa-Smart, was a prince of the chiefdom of Rotifunk in Sierra Leone, and had helped the country achieve independence from Britain in 1961. Her grandmother, Rena Joyce Waller Karefa-Smart, had been the first Black woman to graduate from Yale Divinity School, as well as the first to earn a ThD (or Doctor of Theology) from Harvard.
And that’s just her mother’s side. Her father, Kenrick, shares most of a name with Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, who rose to prominence in the 1930s as the leader of the massively influential West Indian Dance Orchestra. The only all-Black swing band in Britain, as well as its most popular, the Orchestra spent their active years tearing down racial barriers in the country until Johnson’s untimely death from German bombs in 1939. Karefa-Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather was also a pioneer in the medical field, as Guyana’s first Black physician. It was her father’s mother, an intrepid woman of Trinidadian and Bajan descent, who brought his side of the family to the US in the 1960s, looking for better education for her two young daughters. Karefa-Johnson, tragically, wouldn’t get the chance to know him; shortly after her birth, he passed away at 42 years old.
Her family translocated frequently, including back to Sierra Leone, where they lived for a year until the turbulence from the country’s civil war forced them to leave. Though she finally settled back in in Southern California by the time she turned six, she still moved between its myriad cities as she spent the rest of her itinerant childhood in the care of her mother Suzanne.
Though the influence of her grandparents introduced her to a range of hymnal and gospel music, her parents kept Motown’s classics in the rotation, and her siblings - the oldest already in their late teens - ensured her exposure to contemporary popular music. Her enchantment to hip-hop, she explained to KEXP, was secured via the television in her older sister’s room. “I went in there one night and the video for ‘On My Block’ by Scarface was playing,” she says. “He’s speaking about where he comes from and who he does it for and the video paints such a strikingly vivid and beautiful picture of that. I just started crying and crying. And there was a little star shining in the sky out of the window as it was slowly starting to get light outside and I just kept looking at the star.”
From left to right: AJ Suede, Raven Matthews (RVN), Christy Karefa-Johnson (DoNormaal).
After finishing her high school education in SoCal, Karefa-Johnson attended Sarah Lawrence College in New York to study poetry, where she finally committed to her budding interest in writing and recording music. At Sarah Lawrence she met Raven Matthews, a fellow creative with a similar interest in pushing against the boundaries of hip-hop. (Matthews has performed under a bunch of names, including Raven Hollywood and the truncated Rave Holly; on DoNormaal records, he’s credited as RVN.) The pair vibed on a transcendental level, and in the process of forming a nascent trio called Three Wise Kids with a mutual friend, they fell in love. When Matthews moved back home to Seattle to focus on pursuing music, Karefa-Johnson soon joined him.
At the time of Karefa-Johnson’s arrival in 2014, Seattle was in a strange place, and not just because of Amazon’s encroaching influence. A few years prior, local label Sub Pop had achieved temporary relevance again on the strength of a national “indie folk” surge; releases by Iron and Wine, Fleet Foxes, The Head and the Heart, and Band of Horses had all sold well. Another rock scene based in Capitol Hill, led by bands like Tacocat and Chastity Belt, was on the precipice of breaking out. But on the hip-hop front, against incendiary releases from groups like Blue Scholars and Shabazz Palaces, the city’s identity at large had been swallowed by its status as the home of Ben Haggerty (aka Macklemore), who had beaten out Kendrick Lamar for Album of The Year at the 2013 GRAMMYs. While he penned his very public apology, the city’s underground shifted uncomfortably in his profile.
The first thing Karefa-Johnson and Matthews did upon arriving was attend open mics around the city, looking for a community. After encountering Sam Brakebill (aka Brakebill) and Devin Wolf (aka WOLFTONE) one night, the trio started hosting shows at Wolf’s house, a place dubbed The Fortress. A flood of creativity soon followed, fostered by an open-door policy for collaboration. “At that time, collectives were a big thing,” DoNormaal said to KEXP’s Dusty Henry in 2023. Plenty of artists and producers looking for strength in numbers, from industrial dance powerhouse Michete to R&B goddess Taylar Elizza Beth to the multifaceted, absurdly talented Aeon Fux (later Guayaba, then Ex-Florist), found a home in that collective, which was eventually dubbed 69/50. (The name has no innate significance; it is pure coincidence that 69.50 is code defining the laws around controlled substances in Washington state.)
“It’s about experimentation and vulnerability and reaching your full potential every time,” Matthews described to Queerspace about 69/50 at the time. And the name that Karefa-Johnson chose to perform under, DoNormaal, reflects that mentality. “It’s a Dutch phrase,” she said in her interview with Henry. “Dutch people will say it when somebody is acting weird or different or out of line. They’ll be like ‘donormaal: be cool, chill out.’ So there’s that irony there of the music I was making being a little bit different.”
From left to right: Devin Wolf (WOLFTONE), Christy Karefa-Johnson (DoNormaal), Raven Matthews (RVN/Raven Hollywood/Rave Holly).
The arrival of the 69/50 Collective officially started upon the release of DoNormaal’s debut album, Jump or Die, in 2015. The record succeeded in two distinct ways: it illuminated her gift for captivating, instinctual rap and leaned into her reputation as a fosterer of community via its spotlighting of unsung producers. It’s consistently heady, but that headiness is filtered through a litany of original voices and enlivened by their bizarre, compelling inclusions - samples of horns, tinny triplets, the itchy scratch of vinyl, an old recording of piano. Its brilliance was obvious to local critics, who quickly focused their attention on both her and the people in her orbit.
By the time she released a follow up, 2017’s Third Daughter, DoNormaal had gained another reputation: as a relentless performer. Over 100 shows over the course of 2016 had helped hone her skills on the mic, and Third Daughter makes it evident from the moment she enters on “Fraught,” rapping fleet fours over Brakebill’s slow, plinking triplets. “Stream-of-consciousness” is a notoriously hit-or-miss approach to music, but the fact that her adherence to that approach had forged yet another success was astounding. If Jump or Die struck flint, Third Daughter burned the building down; as a tighter collection of tracks than its predecessor, it put DoNormaal’s name in the thoughts of anyone who wondered if the greater Seattle area was due for another ascendant representative of local hip-hop.
From left to right: Taylar Elizza Beth, Ozzie Hatfield (Aeon Fux/Guayaba/Ex-Florist), Christy Karefa Johnson (DoNormaal).
And so Karefa-Johnson’s decision, in the late summer of 2019, to relocate to Southern California hit bittersweet. Even those who wanted her to stick around couldn’t blame her, assuming she was trying her luck in a place with higher ceilings than Seattle. She was obviously talented and hungry enough. But there was another motive; she was tired, depressed, and needed a break from her daily grind for just a minute. In the comfort of her mother’s presence and home in Palm Springs she found that respite, but having always felt a deep connection to her family, she simply missed her mother and wished to be with her in Palm Springs. She couldn’t have predicted that the arrival of the novel coronavirus would keep her stuck there. In the suffocating context of quarantine, anxieties surfaced about whether the momentum she’d built in Seattle had been squandered.
“That moment was such a transitional period in my life,” she tells me. “I’d built something for myself in Seattle and just completely left, which seems kind of crazy now that I think about it. I went to a place where I didn't know anybody, and I’d separated from my partner of seven years. I’d been really blessed in my young adulthood, in that there were all these amazing things happening to me: just falling into this music scene and being able to develop a community, and suddenly I was being faced with...the ‘valley’ of all of that. It was a lot of questioning, a lot of self-doubt, a lot of wondering if there was something wrong with me or if I was crazy. I had to accept the fact that, okay, life throws curveballs, and it’s probably going to keep throwing curve balls at you. It was hard. So I guess [the record] really isn't just about transformation; it’s also about…having to look at yourself and not always being super stoked about what you find.”
“I don't know, I should put my lyrics up on there,” she tells me, chuckling a bit. “I’m sure that if you read the lyrics, you'll probably have a better way of talking about it than I can.”
“I can see myself floating to the other side
a dream I don't wake up from
Or I can free myself
just a little moment where I’d be the kind that wants some
Help
Welp”
-“DAOT”PALMSPRINGA starts, technically, with an email.
Born in Maine and having moved to the PNW from Rochester in the mid 2010s, Tony LaMothe had spent their younger years only tangentially connected to music. “My musical history is really not that exciting,” they say. “It wasn't a super prevalent thing in my household.” Though none of his family members were musicians, they dabbled in beat making in their teen years, first through the ersatz DAW of MTV Music Generator on the Playstation 2 and then through a cracked copy of Fruity Loops given to them by a friend. Later, in his senior year of high school, they convinced their parents to allow a borrowed drum set into the house for a school project and spent the rest of the year learning the instrument.
But it was all a hobby, just life fulfillment. Most of LaMothe’s work in their twenties amounted to loose projects with friends in college before self-producing under a handful of shrouded monikers - including, but not limited to, Novelty, Roland The Third, Postman, Not Sure, and Hep Alien (a reference, yes, to Gilmore Girls). “A lot of the names are just me daring myself to commit to a stupid name,” they say. “And I also like that it’s a ‘humility’ thing, so I don't take myself too seriously.” That penchant for nonchalance spawned their current nom de plume, Welp Disney, a name that says everything it needs to without further explanation.
Regardless of which project you decide to explore, you might notice a sonic throughline: industrial-slanted clamor in various shades of accessibility and abrasiveness, and beats that hit with a visceral impact. LaMothe guesses it comes from a handful of CD’s they inherited from their best friend’s sister. “It was like Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine,” they recall. “There were a few albums in there that I still like a lot to this day, and that I still heavily draw influence from. The pattern I noticed is that I've always been attracted to artists that treat the production component as another instrument. Whether we acknowledge it or not, or whether the intentions are there or not, the production component is such a big contributor to the final product.”
By the time LaMothe hit Seattle, they were more serious about music. “At the time, I remember I literally just googled ‘Seattle musicians,’ just combing through blogs and stuff,” they say. “I didn't know anyone here, I didn't know where to start.” After stumbling on a random online article about 69/50, they started going to shows and came face-to-face with DoNormaal’s talent. “I thought it would be a dream to work with this person,” they say. So they sent her an email - the first of what would be many, to many - hoping that, at some point, they would get the chance.
That chance wouldn’t come until just before DoNormaal moved away, when the pair forged a few sketches together. But after the pandemic hit, “I really put my nose to the grindstone and started working on music a lot and sending her a lot of stuff,” they say. “We started talking more, became friends more. That's how it started.”
Unlike Jump or Die or Third Daughter (and even unlike Yippie, which, though it’s yet to be released, would have likely followed the same formula if its advance singles are any indication), PALMSPRINGA is sonically unified in a way that’s only possible through the input of a single beat maker and a minimized production team. It also happens to apply that unification to a sound that strikes a fascinating balance between accessible and experimental. “I feel like we did a good job of making it one cohesive thing in itself,” LaMothe says. “As we’re listening to it in its final more, more and more it feels like it’s one thing that can’t be separated.”
Work on the record technically started with “DISNEYLAND,” which was based on a beat Welp Disney had made for DoNormaal shortly after her move to Palm Springs. “The way I felt when I wrote that song is so different from the way I felt for the rest of the project,” she says. “I sent Tony this sample of a documentary that I had watched. I was like, ‘Can you make a beat out of this?’ and he made this awesome beat. I love that beat so much.”
Even in a sea of highlights, the song stands out. It spins like a Tilt-a-Whirl, shifting from a menacing chain of chimes and slackened buzzes with the addition of a whimsical organ pattern that hits like arriving at a traveling carnival right as the acid kicks in. DoNormaal switches times deftly, speeding up as the song picks up speed, all of her words fresh off the dome about her reign in Seattle. Far from the present-tense grievances of Third Daughter (“Still a little girl because I cry sometimes/North Seattle summer make me cry sometimes/...Some of these boys don’t really like me much”) “DISNEYLAND” is sanguine in a non-nostalgic way, and even the hard times were part of the greater plan. “Riding the bus down on Phinney man/Seattle that city like Disneyland!” goes the chorus - where some use the term “Disneyfication” to describe the colorlessness of the modern metropolitan area, her use of the word is distinctly earnest.
“I felt like, ‘This is the shit,” recalls Karefa-Johnson about the spirit of the song. “‘I’m about to take off running. We found it, we got it, I feel so good. I love Seattle, I love that place, love you guys, but I'm on my journey, and I'm good. That's totally what that song is about.
It’s also the most optimistic track on the album - after all, it’s the only one written before the tribulations that were to come. In that vein, both Karefa-Johnson and LaMothe were dead set on having the opening tone be the trial-by-fire of “ADAPTATIONS.” “Tony would always say that people are just gonna hear this and be like, ‘What the fuck am I listening to?’” she says.
That was definitely this writer’s first reaction. As a tone setter, “ADAPTATIONS” hits like a panic attack. There’s no fade in, no intro skit, no benevolent readjustment or fluffing of the pillows. LaMothe leaves you for 32 full measures in that discordant loop, each downbeat like a set of guitar strings breaking over and over again, before DoNormaal comes in with a verse bearing just enough melody to provide context for the noise. A crunchy guitar lick lays parallel over her chorus as her mother addresses the transformation that comes from accepting “the third way” between two seemingly-opposite sides. “Neither one is going to win,” she muses over the din. “Neither one is going to be the way that we go.”
“We thought that if you can make it through this song, you can make it through the album,” says Karefa-Johnson.
Her words ring true: save for a pair of gentle interludes, the album is one sharp dive in brambles after another. In fact, the divide between the lo-fi ukulele of “THEO’S INTERLUDE” (recorded by DoNormaal on her iPhone while at her nannying job) and the shrill alarm introducing “D PLUS” is representative of the record as a whole. But once you’re accustomed to the noise, it takes on a warped beauty, especially when LaMothe’s more orchestral proclivities flare up. The end stretch between “MEDICAL LEAVE” and “PALETZ,” in particular, earns Welp Disney the unironic majesty of their namesake.
It’s not just that LaMothe’s discomfiting sounds translate the impossibility of growth without discomfort. Its name is a portmanteau of Palm Springs - the place DoNormaal spent the pandemic - and Rumspringa, a time when Amish teenagers explore the modern world before returning to the uncomplicated dictums of the Amish lifestyle. Ironically, it’s not that DoNormaal could do all that much adventuring at the time. Her Rumspringa would instead be internal: an introspection on her breakup with Matthews, her move to California, the excitement of starting a new chapter of her life, and the subsequent frustration of wasting that opportunity in government-mandated dormancy. There are a few tracks dedicated to post-breakup libidinousness - “FEED ME” and “COMPLACE” in particular are an explicit one-two punch - but primarily she’s in a contemplative mode, treading water as the sharks swim.
To Karefa-Johnson, LaMothe’s beats were a relief valve from all that stagnancy. The process wasn’t just creative expression; it was therapy. “It gave me some sense of control over my life," she says, “to have this thing that I was really excited about and this partner that I was working 50/50 with, because I had never done that before. I had never made a project that was so closely collaborative.
“At least for me, it was my home. It's been my home for the past four years.”
“I’m tryna be cool, I feel like I’m naked
But the only thing to do is to use what I got and make it into
One sad song, two sad songs, three sad songs for the daughter and run along”
-"PALLADIUM"The uneasiness embedded in PALMSPRINGA isn’t just a commentary on the trials its creators were experiencing. It also - in a way unintended by anyone involved - accurately reflects the trials that occurred while making it. The actual writing of the record moved swiftly: “Tony was sending me sometimes up to five beats a day,” says Karefa-Johnson, “so I was able to quickly but carefully pick and curate the sound for this project. If I felt like I wanted him to tweak some of the arrangements, or if I came across a sample I liked out in the wild I would send it to him and ask him to work off it and he’d get me something back like same day or next day. So the communication lines were very open and it was very collaborative in that way.”
Recording and mixing was a different story. It took almost a year to get everything down in a DAW, and almost two years to craft and balance its heady, dense sound. “It’s funny that the record sounds solidly like a documentation of the experience,” says LaMothe. “You wouldn't know it unless you’re me or Tony or the engineer,” confirms Karefa-Johnson. “Nobody out there knows it, but it was a Herculean effort to get this done.”
The bulk of the recording took place in the summer of 2021, when LaMothe Ubered their entire setup up to a tiny Airbnb in Woodinville and met up with Karefa-Johnson. Initially, she expressed unease at the peculiarities of LaMothe’s methods. "He pulls out this tiny little mic, not even a condenser mic,” she says. “I was like, “TONY?!” I was convinced we had to re-record the whole thing.” And yet that choice of microphone helped bestow that intimate, almost confrontational edge to DoNormaal’s layered vocals. “Months after, I was like, ‘It was ‘cause of the mic,’” she admits. “We needed to go through that process.”
LaMothe at the makeshift studio in Woodinville.
Outside of the initial friction, bad luck had only begun to rear its head. “I brought an air conditioner,” says LaMothe, “and the window didn’t lead it very well. It ended up flooding into the room and leaking water all over this one-of-a-kind magazine collection. But she was chill about it.”
Once recording was finished, the duo brought on William Edwards III, aka Rogue Black, who was a friend of Karefa-Johnson’s brother. “He was an L.A. producer with a really big character, huge character,” she says. Edwards worked out of a shared recording studio on Lexington Avenue, and in it he spent months attempting to wrestle with the material. But in the middle of his work, a devastating fire resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ruined equipment, as well as the death of 26-year-old musician Avery Drift. Without access to the burned building, it was unclear whether they had lost the recordings, but miraculously, the work was saved.
Ultimately, considering the type of project, Edwards’ approach to production wasn’t the right fit. The pair moved on to another producer: Andrew Vait, the man you hear strumming the acoustic guitar on the eponymous “ANDREW’S INTERLUDE.” Originally from Alaska and currently based in Everett, Vait was dealing with his own tragedies at the time he was contacted to work on PALMSPRINGA, and so Vait took to the work with the same kind of determination. “I was like, ‘Come to us when you're ready,’ Karefa-Johnson recalls, “and he was like, ‘No, I want to work on this right now. This is helping me.’”
But alongside Vait’s softer touch on the mix, Karefa-Johnson wanted one more source of input, which led to LaMothe reaching out to Max Schaffer. A musician and producer under the alias Saint Taint with a history of working with artists like lonelygirl15 and Oh Nothing, Schaffer made another, more logical fit for handling LaMothe’s style of beats.
“It’s worth noting that this was not an easy project for anyone to get their hands into,” says LaMothe. “I was bringing a lot in terms of sonics, and Christy does a lot of vocal layering, so there were a lot of things to balance. And mind you, we were rarely in the same place, so it was three people communicating through email and chat trying to tweak this very complex thing. That’s part of why it took a while.”
The other part of it was simply how ambitious the arrangements ended up being, and how much time it took to get to that point. “It was such a wild kind of beast of a project,” continues LaMothe. “We didn't even really know exactly what we wanted, or how to articulate it.” It made for a painstaking process: trying out a sound, getting it right, sending it to Vait and Schaffer, receiving their inputs and tweaks, and then spending days letting the ears clear out and deciding whether the sound even worked to begin with. Dedication threatened to curdle into obsession. “I still have piles of papers with notes,” they say. “Just piles of notes, everywhere, just notes, notes, notes, notes, notes.”
By late January 2024, even after nearly four years of work and with the finish line in sight, the pair couldn’t escape tragedy. It happened the day Schaffer sent his final versions to LaMothe. “We found out that William had passed away,” he says. Edwards had been listening to his headphones in his car when he was shot, and he later died in the hospital. He was 46.
In retrospect, neither Karefa-Johnson nor LaMothe can extricate the circumstances of the process with the finished result. What started as a record about battling self-doubt and triumphing over heartbreak now included discord, devastation, and real death. It makes the grinding, uncharacteristically chaotic sound of the album feel that much more weighty, when there’s that much more discomfort to grow from.
“We went through so much through this album,” says LaMothe. “Outside of it, inside of it, in and out; it was a Mobius loop situation. Every song has such a deep personal resonance with me, even if I don't have an intellectual understanding of what that actually entails. There's just so many dense things like that interwoven into this whole project but it all fits. We didn't know it was going to be like that, but it all makes sense now.”
Halfway through our conversation, no longer able to drown out the raucous block party outside her window, Karefa-Johnson takes her laptop and moves to the staircase in the foyer. There, the chalk-like gleam of the steps behind her, incandescent from the rays of sun pouring in through a window on the higher floor, overtakes the background.
“I would love to get together with Tony and do some touring,” she says. This was back in August; the following month, LaMothe would hit the road drumming for Power Strip on a tour across the western United States. DoNormaal also had a few shows scheduled later in the year, sharing a bill with Divide and Dissolve across a few northeastern states and Canadian provinces. Hopefully, she says, they can beef up the mix a little more for playback through bigger sound systems.
“I’m not the best at doing the post release things,” she admits. “I really want to honor this project because I think it deserves it, so I'm having lots of conversations with myself about how to kind of step up for it in that way.”
But regardless of how she and LaMothe choose to play the project out, the pair still acknowledge how much the project meant in their individual capacities, not only in the moment but in their development as artists.
For DoNormaal, PALMSPRINGA is proof positive of her ability to grow even more: as a musician, a lyricist, and a producer. “This project was so fundamental as part of my journey and monumental to my growth,” she says. A lot of that, she says, was being able to so closely work with another person. “I'm not a huge collaborator, I don't really like to do that. That's why I kind of spread it out between different producers, and mostly because I'm a perfectionist and my process is hell.
“But a big part of the project was the break-up and the leaving of Seattle, the abandonment. It was like, ‘Who’s here with me now? Can I stick with me? Are the people who listen to DoNormaal gonna stick with me?’ It’s about showing up. I feel that way about this album: how much it taught me about showing up for myself. And I have to give thanks to the family members and friends who helped support this project, who helped us pay off the engineers. It was a huge community effort.”
Like combat veterans, the turbulence of making the record has tied their fates together. “Christy’s one of my best friends forever now,” LaMothe says. “No matter what happens, just having this experience with her is the most valuable thing to me. It was a journey of a thousand pep talks, a thousand existential conversations. During the pandemic it was such chaos, and it was this tiny thin thread that grounded us; believing in each other, believing in art. I grew a lot as an artist and as a person, and that’s directly connected to doing this project specifically with Christy.”
“It was kind of amazing how Tony was there the whole time, just as dedicated and down to keep going even if it wasn’t right yet,” says Karefa-Johnson. “I have endless thanks to Tony. He gave me music that stretched me and challenged me. I just want a nice cute easy beat, but his beats touched me. I had to push myself to write this project. That’s why it’s so special to me; he was there with me, his friendship was there with me.”
“I never coulda turned my back
My heart always facing Sea-Tac
If you said the worD
I’d get right on the tracK
I’d be on my way back
I’d be dressed in all black
Do you believe in me? I swear”
-”MEDICAL LEAVE”