Take one musician more versed than a collection of sonnets. Add one MC who rips tougher than a phone book. Throw them in an industry think-tank devoid of artist development and full of MySpace rappers.

A dash of humor. A sprinkle of throwback. Stir.

Such is the recipe for Zo! And Tigallo Love the ’80s, a joint project with Detroit native musician Zo! and Little Brother emcee Phonte. The piping hot result is a set of yesteryear covers crafted to perfection without straying into the overly produced.

With no effective blueprint for the industry to subscribe to for signing and squandering talent, Zo! and Phonte were afforded the opportunity to (-gasp-) actually make music. There were no rules and they could develop and push their project however they saw fit — which lead to individually numbered, autographed, limited quantity CDs with a compact but muscular play list.

I recently caught up with Phonte online and asked him about the decisions he and Zo! made for putting out the record.

“It just came from me looking at the marketplace and seeing niggas complain about buying CD’s, but then turn around and spend $400 on a pair of exclusive limited edition dunks,” he said. “I just wanted to bring some sort of excitement back to music. You’re not just buying a CD… you’ve become one of the few…the proud….the Zo! and Tigallonians. *salutes* I’m trippin… we don’t salute…. lemme do this right… *sprays activator*”

The project more or less began as an often revisited discussion about music, including ’80s favorites. The conversations snowballed into equal parts creation, friendly one-up-man-ship and personal conditioning.

“With each song, I just took time to figure out how I would voice it to make it fit in a modern-day context,” he said. “Because these were ’80s songs, a lot of ‘em had vocal effects that sound dated now… real heavy reverbs and shit like that… so I just had to sit back and play with different vocal styles to see how I’d make it work.”

Phonte credits sound engineer Khrysis with being his “right ear in the studio.” Together they learned the unpleasantries of voice alteration for the computery stylings of Tay Pain on the track “Steppin’ Out 2008.”

A Cliff Noted lesson on alteration:

1) Vocoder – Allows an instrument to sing. Requires you to play an instrument well. Not an option.

2) Talkbox – Also requires instrumentation. Not an option.

3) Autotune – Championed by folks who can’t sing worth a damn live, i.e. T-Pain. An option… but…

4) Pitch Corrector – Championed by female vocalists operating under the guise they can sing live. Creates the Cher-effect, if used correctly. Ding!

Phonte sang all of his vocals straight, sent the tracks out for pitch correction, and got them sent directly back because he had sung too well (Phonte can saaang… in case you haven’t noticed.) He rerecorded the tracks a little left of kilter and sent them out again.

“Soooooooo… he sends the joint back to me and it has the effect on it. BUT… the computer only recognizes key… it doesn’t recognize individual notes. So that meant that me and Khrysis had to go through and match EVERY NOTE to the right pitch of Zo’s instrumental. THAT. SHIT. TOOK. HOURS.”

Thus deaded Tay Pain — activator to activator, dust to dust — after his one and only appearance.

“I ain’t never doin that shit again.”

The next day I spoke with Zo! on the phone about the laboriousness of getting his tracks right and what drove both he and Phonte through the process.

TSS: It sounds like [the album] wasn’t anything planned out.

Zo: Nah. Doing the whole album it wasn’t anything like “Tay man, I got this idea. We should revisit the ’80s.” It didn’t even come about like that. It was basically like one song at a time up until after “Take On Me.” First we did “Steppin’ Out.”

TSS: You just did those for fun?

Zo: Yeah, the “Steppin’ Out” joint, I was coving that for my Just Visiting album that was only on vinyl. And [Phonte] had already heard a couple joints from that and said that he liked them or whatever. So I was like what the hell, man. I had already heard Tay sing on Little Brother stuff before. So I was like, “Man, why don’t you sing the hook on it?” I may as well ask him, and if he says no, he says no. He hit me back and said, “Go ahead and send it to me.” So I sent it to him and he turned that around pretty quickly. So I’m sitting over here tripping out because I have a joint with just Phonte singing — like he’s not rhyming, he’s just singing. I was just bugging out about that by itself.

We had kept in contact and whenever we talked it would always turn into this huge musical conversation, whether it be on the phone or IM. We’d be talking about stuff that we either loved or hated. And one time we got in a deep conversation, I think it was on IM, and we were just going back and forth about songs from the ’80s like, “Yo, man have you heard this?” And he’s sending me tracks back like, “Nah, you heard this?” We’re sending this stuff back and forth and then we start talking about “Africa.” It just popped up, and I was like, “I’m down to do it if you’re down to do it,” and he was like “Maaan, can you imagine the harmonies on that?” and he started doing the harmonies. So we was just like, “Fuck it, man. Let’s do it.”

I had a drum track that was already laid out that was kind of remanicent of it. So I was like, “Well I’m going to play the keys over the drum track, and then you can lay the vocals over that.” I sent him that and then a couple of days later he sent me back vocals for it.

I mean you got to understand, everybody knows Phonte as Little Brother. He’s a very talented MC, real dope on the mic… and then I get this track that five, six minutes of Phonte singing. And we would joke about it like, “You got to do it, you got to do the accent. You got to do it all the way.” And so he sent me this joint back and he’s got the accent and I’m buggin’ like wow! I’m having a party in my apartment listening to this joint. I hit him back like, “Man, you was buggin’ with that, man.” So with that, I took it and added the change at the end, and sent it back to him… like, “Handle that.”

It was almost like a duel. Like we were trying to outdo each other… it turned out to be a friendly competition, hand-to-hand combat kind of thing.

TSS: And that’s the way the whole album evolved, essentially?

Zo: That’s basically how it evolved. I mean, after that we were joking like we need to do another one, but it need to be a little bit more left field. And we picked the most Charlton Banks, sweater-wrapped-around-your-waste joint we could think of – we was like, “Man, let’s do ‘Take On Me.’”…

At the time I was thinking what was I going to do with “Take On Me?” What can I do that’s going to make it sound presentable with Phonte singing on it? So same thing, I sent it to him without the change on there, and he ended up putting Carlitta Durand on there to sing the change, and I was just like, “Oh man!”

From there it was like we had three joints, why don’t we just keep going?

TSS: How did you pick the rest of the track list?

Zo: We did “Something About You” after that. “Something About You” and “Human” were definitely Tay’s idea. That was something like a personal quest like, “Ay man, we need to do these two joints.” And both of those were talent instrumentally anyway. You hear “Something About You” the original, it sounds like something from “Miami Vice,” but it’s dope! And I’m thinking what can I do with it that isn’t going to destroy its legacy, but is still going to keep it current.

And “Human,” although it’s Human League, it’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis so it used to get played on urban radio stations, so that was something that black folks was familiar with too. So I’m like if I mess this up, I’m going to be touching a nerve! You know what I mean? So you got to be creative, but you also got to be careful that you’re keeping the original effectiveness of the album. You’re just kind of putting your own spin on it in that aspect.

I think the last one, “Written All Over Your Face,” that’s like a classic, you know what I mean? So that was another one that we really had to be careful. I remember going in there, and even after it was finished, like, still tweaking stuff. I was like yo, this is not even leaving this apartment unless everything is perfect because I don’t want to hear it — I don’t want to hear it later like, “Oh man, your snare was off at the two minute, twenty-four second mark. And I hate you for that!”

So you got to make sure everything is on point, because the Internet will let you know about it.

TSS: For sure. I think we prove that every day. So you played all the instruments on the album, right?

Zo: Yes.

TSS: And did you know how you were going to attack it every time, or was it sometimes a struggle to figure out how you were going to do it without making it an exact replica of the original?

Zo: It was a struggle. It was a stuggle, I’ll be honest… Like “Something About You” kind of came. I was scratching my head in the beginning, but once it came, it kind of flowed. The “Human” one on the other hand, I was like “Maaan.” He hit me up like, “Yo, you get the “Human” done yet?” and I’m like “It’s coming, alright?” and I’m looking at my keyboard like, “Shit, I haven’t even started yet.”

So the “Human” one… I got married and moved, and that was actually the first joint I did after I moved, so it was kind of like the new environment helped twist that one out a little more. That got me my first neighbor complaining at the new spot, so you know, it’s got a little special place in my heart… That’s another one I sent to Tay and he was like, “Aw man, I’m about to do my thing on this one,” and we got on him a little bit, “Man, you was having you a little moment. It got a little good to you!” But I really like how the “Human” one ended up coming out.

TSS: This sounds like something you guys had been working on back and forth for awhile then.

Zo: Yeah, I would say for about a year I guess. Because the main reason we were doing it was to keep each other on point, number one. If I had a new joint I’d always send it to Phonte because Phonte won’t hold his tongue as far as giving an honest opinion. And you need that. So it was a way of kind of keeping each other on our toes and sharp in the studio, as we were both kind of in between albums. At the time Get Back was getting ready to come out and I had finished Freelance, so both of us were back in the creative mode.

And you know, we don’t want to look bad in front of each other. I don’t want Tay over there clownin’ on me, “Where is this coming from? What kind of shit is this you’re sending me?” We want to make sure we look good in front of each other, so it keeps our game tight.

TSS: That sounds like a consistent working relationship. Does that mean you’ll do something in the future with him?

Zo: I definitely don’t rule it out. I know for sure we’re doing stuff for my solo album – he’s actually writing to a couple things for that. I mean, me and Tay will definitely be working together in the future for sure…

TSS: I mean, I’m not a record executive or anything, but to me it seems like the way you put this album out is like a new blueprint that could be built off of. You numbered every copy so every copy feels special – I know every time I see my No. 290 I get excited like I’m an individual – you autographed them, you did all the Internet promotion, nothing crazy, just word of mouth so it feels really cult-classic, you know?

Zo: Oh yeah, for sure. You know, we were trying to do a combination of things with that. One, we were trying to bring the fun back into producing an album, you know what I mean? We have so much music that if you get an album on Tuesday… it’s out of rotation by Thursday. And if that’s the case, and that’s the case week after week, there’s no reason to get excited about a new release. So we wanted to make it so that people get hyped up for what we bring to the table.

Tay made a real good analogy as far as comparing it to limited edition shoes – where, if someone comes out with limited edition gym shoes and the joints comes out at midnight, folks is real hyped up. They get the gym shoes and they going around bragging about that for months to come…

And just to pair it with the ‘80s, no body knew when an album was coming out like that. There wasn’t no 2000 magazines or Internet promoting the things for months before it came out. You just walked up in a store and there’s Thriller. There’s Janet Jackon’s Control. Like, “Oh, I didn’t even know it came out! Let me go cop it real quick.” So we were real tightlipped about the track listing and the release date and all of that because we just wanted it to come out.

It was just having fun. We had fun creating the album, so we want people to have fun when they purchase it and actually get their hands on it.

For more info, visit www.myspace.com/zoandtigallo.

Zo! is currently working on projects with Asylum 7 and Tiffany Paige, as well as his next solo album.

Phonte is half of Little Brother and Foreign Exchange, continues to work with Khrysis and his brethren at The Hall of Justus, and is featured on S1′s forthcoming album.

You can purchase Zo! and Tigallo Love The ’80s from FatBeats.

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Previously Post – Zo! & Tigallo Love The ’80s | “Written All Over Your Face”