A haze of velvet horns, broken hearts, and clever turns of phrase, Cigarettes & Figures of Speech is a smoky lounge of jazzy hip-hop ballads that speak in riddles and rhymes. Each track drifts like smoke through alleyways of memory and metaphor—crooning confessions wrapped in idioms, laid over upright basslines and dusty drums. It’s a late-night conversation between the soul and the subconscious, where every lyric is a double entendre and every beat feels like flickering candlelight. Smooth, soulful, and seductively smart—this album doesn’t just play, it speaks.

Bite the Bullet

🌻 "She takes care of everybody… but who checks on her?"
🎶 “It’s time to focus on you…”
New music for the soul 💛
#FocusOnYou #NeoSoulVibes #BlackLove #SelfCareIsSacred #RNBHealing #SoulMusic #IndieArtist #IndiaArieVibes

Focus on U (Special Version)

This is the 399th SoundCloud Exclusive Interbay track...the 399th consecutive daily posting of never before heard Interbay music.  

"It all seems like a dream..."  

I am prone to getting lost in nostalgia.  I have emptied the well of the comfort that nostalgia once offered me, long ago.  I have become suspicious of my own desire for legacy, for leaving something behind that could be valuable to someone.  

...but, then I think about photo albums.  Once precious and treasured family heirlooms, in a world where there seems to be an infinite amount of storage space for the uncountable number of photographs we each accumulate day after day, and how devalued and impermanent those images now seem...I'm not entirely sure what role photo albums hold in our modern society.  

I don't have many photo albums myself--I think I have two.  The rest of my physically photos are spread between two shoeboxes.  I used to look at them all the time, but less so as those are portals to a very specific and unchanging time.  

My more recent photos are stored in the cloud--ephermera defined.  I don't seem to look at them the way I used to repeatedly peer into the boxes of Kodak prints and Polaroids.  

When my wife died, she left behind a bunch of photo albums...none of them have any photos of me or our kid.  These are all photos from before I knew her...and I only know the stories of a sliver of the photos collected here.  As the last curator of my wife's life, I'm frustrated that I can only properly tell part of her story--and I fear that no one will bother to tell mine, when I'm gone.  

Stranger still, I know that I exist in numerous photo albums of people I no longer know.  Could they have thrown those photo albums out?  Are they ever looked at?  What sort of feelings do those photos dredge up for them...and would my own feelings be different than theirs?  

That's the state of mind that this latest Interbay track was born out of...a distrust of nostalgia blended with the echoes of the lure and comfort of nostalgia, and wanting to know how or even if one is remembered.  

I thought about taking a photograph of one of my own photo albums or one of my late wife's for the thumbnail image, but eventually settled for a generic photo of "a" photo album, rather than anything that too specifically ties this story to me...because I would be surprised if I'm the only one who thinks about this sort of thing.  

I went for an mellow, chillout, triphop vibe for this...with pizzicato violins, deep vibraphones, scoring strings, a flute that sounds more like a saxophone, a trombone that might be out of tune--but that adds a risable tension that I decided to embrace rather than erase.  

There are drums, but this track is not drum-centric.  (There's one partricular set of percussion that I think gives off a reggae vibe--well, reggae as played by The Police, perhaps.)    

I do like this track.  It feels different than what I normally do (but that also seems impossible because I often hop from style to style, genre to genre--often in the same song.)  I could hear this as bumper music for an NPR show (although, NPR show producers need to hurry up and use it for that purpose, as Orange Man Bad seems intent on eliminating most good things about America, NPR being one of them.)  

Give this a listen and let me know what you think.  
Like, repost, share, comment, playlist...all wonderful things you could do to help this ongoing Interbay music project.  

...but following this page might be the best thing you could possibly do, as that would make it easier for you to follow along as these daily track posts continue...

"Yellowed Pages" *SoundCloud Exclusive*

AGOO ( ft. McRay & Boorle Minick ) (unmastered)

Feelings - Single

Feelings (Prod. by Kwame Universe)

Wolves [Pr. Kenshxn]

Supposed 2

A Decade Later is four-track EP by US-Based Ghanaian Producer Billy Dray with guest appearances from budding young artistes Pzeefire, Chief Kellz, KojoTrip & A-Clipse. (Make We Jam !)

Love Is The Enemy (Interlude) feat. Questo

BULLY