Hood Famous Music

For the first time in a long time, I took a couple of weeks off and went to Spain with my girlfriend Jackie. It was an awe-inspiring trip. We took in the romantic Spanish architecture, ate ridiculously delicious food, and enjoyed the perfect weather. We started in Barcelona, a truly diverse city. We split our artistic attentions between the talented graffiti artists that hold their own against contemporary masters like Salvador Dali and his wacky museum of prints and sculpture. We worked off all the phenomenal tapas running along Barceloneta, the ocean-front promenade, and swimming in the outdoor pool at Estadio Olympico, built for the 1996 Olympics (we’re nuts, we were training for a triathlon, but that’s another story). You can’t go to Barcelona without tripping over something Antonio Gaudi built, so we capped off our architecture tour with Sagrada Familia (still under construction after 120 years) and a hike around Parc Guell. Our last night was one we’re still trying to piece together, but it started off with a football match between Espanyol and Olympiakos (viva Espanyol) and kept going at the Festa Major de Gracia, a massive outdoor party covering a ten block radius in the Gracia neighborhood. Each street was transformed into a different a theme: from larger-than-life under water scenes, vegetable patches with monster pumpkins, tomatoes, and carrots to fantastical worlds straight out of the future. And everything was built using recycled materials. With different bands on each street and the good food and beer , it was impossible not to have a crazy night. Which is exactly what we did.

Up next was Valencia, another great city with 1940’s style architecture, lots of palm trees and a surprisingly vibrant nightlife. Unique to Valencia is the Jardines de Turia, the former path of the Turia River which the city developed into a long park, complete with running paths (which we tested out a couple of times with great results), football fields, a skate park, bike paths and European-style gardens. The most phenomenal attraction in Valencia also sits in the river bed: The City of Arts and Sciences. Not only do the buildings look like aliens landed and left their beetle-like shells behind, but CAS is home to Europe’s largest aquarium. That’s a lot of fish. Speaking of seafood, Valencia had some amazing selections on offer. Our first night in the city, we wandered into a tiny tapas place just before the kitchen closed and ended up with a whole grilled squid, by far the best I have ever had. And since Valencia is the birthplace of the traditional Spanish dish paella, we felt compelled to give the dish a try at a small restaurant looking out over the Mediterranean (don’t feel too bad for us). The paella was, of course, tremendous.
On to Malaga, a small town way down south. The birth place of Picasso, Malaga is home to the Picasso museum, which houses an exceptionally well-edited collection of lesser-known Picasso pieces. Malaga was relatively quiet, off on holiday with the rest of Europe, but it gave us a nice break to enjoy the beach. Of course I have to mention that Malaga holds its own in the Spanish seafood competition. Beachside dining offers up whole fish and tasty sardines grilled on a spit over an open fire, while smack in the center of the city is a great little alley with several tiny places serving huge plates of clams, grilled baby squid and anything else that was swimming earlier that morning. The promenade along the Mediterranean coast was a great place for a run, particularly in the evening, when everyone comes out for a stroll or sits around for a leisurely chat.

By the way, if you’ve never gone for a run around a new city, its an amazing experience. You get a fast forward view of all that the city has to offer, and if you can remember what you saw, you can retrace your steps and check it out later at a normal browsing pace. We use mapmyrun.com to figure out our runs.

We ended our Spanish tour in Madrid, another phenomenal city on par with Barcelona for culture, dining, and sights . Madrid is home to three of the greatest art museums in the world, but the best by far is the Reina Sofia. It has the most comprehensive collection of Spanish modernist painters anywhere and affords the visitor a unique retrospective on the development of influential Spanish artists such as Dali, Miro, and Picasso. The museum is a breathtaking experience; it left us both speechless and truly more appreciative of the depth and breadth of this period of art. After we got the culture out of ur systems, our urge to exercise overcame our common sense and we trekked out to the edge of Madrid proper, finding another olympic-sized swimming pool. Our training runs led us to Retiro Park, a sort of Central Park on ten. The park is full of manicured gardens, fountains, cool paths that lead to sculptures of nameless important people, and little secret meeting places. The food was, once again, thoroughly enjoyable.

With my head spinning with so much inspiration we headed to London where we were in just in time for Carnival. London’s million person block party, Spread out through Knotting Hill, it’s hosted by tons of DJ sound systems, food and people dancing all through streets. I enjoyed my last day or two of vacation checking out a bunch of graffiti spots in London and then met up with some incredible music writers.

I first met up with Jez Ashurst. He’s writer/producer and plays in his own band (of course I can’t remember their name). We vibed in his studio and wrote two songs over the next two days. Sam from Kobalt Music came by the studio and we all trade ridiculous music stories. (Amy Wienhouse is being completely trashed in the UK press so I got some inside stories on all that noise).

On Thursday I got together with Hanif Williams We wrote a cool female pop song and talked about he and his wife visiting NYC. I love making new friends through music. There’s almost nothing better than writing a great song and bonding with the other writer. Hanif and I were fighting really bad colds at the time so it was nice to be commiserating on our psychical poor being while creating something new.

In London I stayed with Tom Rutherford who is Ben Montague’s manager and a good friend. I’ve written a couple of songs together and we’re discussing me coming back to London in November to produce a number of songs for Ben. Ben is going to be huge! He is truly a gift artist.

I finished my trip up with the guys from TMS aka the Breakfastaz. Ben, Fro, Merv and Gav all really great dudes. We wrote a couple of songs and had an all around good time. They DJ in the breaks scene as I did for ten years so we had a lot in common. Like me they use they combine their underground production sounds with pop music.

Thanks to everyone who made my trip amazing especially Jackie!!! I look forward to return to London to work with everyone again. Cheers.

Recent Posts

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.