A career in music is no easy feat, but Shade is ready to make his musical debut and take the scene by storm. His debut single “The Flame” will be available for purchase on September 20 on iTunes, Napstar, Emusic, and Amazon. Before “The Flame” drops, we caught up with Shade to talk more about his music!
DHH: Let’s focus on “The Flame,” what is the inspiration behind this song?
Shade: The inspiration for the song was completely internal and if you pay attention to the lyrics you can hear their candor. “The Flame” in the hook/chorus is a metaphor to describe my current state of mind after overcoming the in summary trials and tribulations of growing up in a religious family, as a born and raised American, and the balancing of personal life experiences in the streets to have become who I am today.
DHH: Is there an underlying ambition in “The Flame.”
Shade: The ambition of this song is to display that just because you may drift towards certain expressions of art and have made poor decisions in your past, this does not HAVE to define you as the person you seek to become in your future- without getting into too much personal detail.
DHH: Your music sounds to us like a form of therapy as to what you have experienced in your life.
Shade: In my youth I was engulfed in a partially unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyle being raised in the neighborhood of the “Bay Side Posse (Bloods)” and the “Native Son Bloods” in the north side of Seattle. However, just because my ignorance may have led me into poor decision making in the past, it did not hinder me from progressing past them in my future. Even as a student who was expelled from high school because of violence, I had eventually gotten my GED, gone to college, and finally graduated from a Big State University!
DHH: Congratulations on all the personal achievements! With your debut album The Time is Now on its way, what can you tell us about the EP?
Shade: In totality from my upcoming album “The Time is Now…” you can expect a variety of music from Pop, Hip-Hop, to even progressive Political Rap. The title is as such because there have been many personal, religious, and cultural battles I have had to wage both explicitly and implicitly with others and myself in the process of whether or not to embark on my music career. These battles have been what has kept me aloof for so long. In the end I decided to go forward full swing because tomorrow never comes, the time is now…
Shade: To an educated person no individual can be defined in one broad brush stroke, in terms of black or white, and this or that it is the same with my music. I like to express myself in numerous ways and listen to virtually every genre of music. So that hopefully will be apparent in my SOLO debut album EP with the genres I mentioned earlier.
With ambition and passion, Shade presses forward in his music career and the Desi Hip-Hop movement. As we follow Shade through his career we can expect to hear powerful lyrics as well as strong productions.