NAS & DAMIAN MARLEY

Giants of rap and reggae find common roots in the musical family tree

Scarcely a hip-hop or reggae album is released these days without a roster of guest performances by stars or hot up-and-comers, but full-length album collaborations are rare. That fact only made the prospect of teaming up for Distant Relatives, their new genre-blending album, more of an enticement for reggae singer Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley and veteran rapper Nas.

It’s a collection of songs that seeks to view the challenges of the world through the lens of the troubled continent of Africa, an endeavor that both men say involved a powerful creative experience—and a pretty good time. “It was a very fun thing to do,” says Marley, the youngest son of reggae icon Bob Marley. Nas (born Nasir Jones) had worked with Marley once before, rhyming on the song “Road to Zion” from Marley’s 2005 breakthrough, Welcome to Jamrock. “I said on ‘Road to Zion,’ ‘I’ve been waiting to do this song with you,’” says Nas, the son of jazz musician Olu Dara. “I had heard some of his music before, and when we worked on ‘Road,’ we locked in and talked about working some more.” Recalls Marley, “I said, ‘Great, I can’t see anything wrong with doing that.’”

The pair holed up with Marley’s band in studios in Los Angeles and Miami to try recording together, and a project initially envisioned as an EP blossomed into a full-length album. Marley served as producer for Distant Relatives, and proceeds from sales will go to charity. We spoke recently with Marley and Nas, who will be touring together through at least August, about this very special meeting of minds.

How did you decide that now was the time to make this record?

Nas: It’s like it always was supposed to happen. You listen to what D talks about in a lot of his music and what I talk about in a lot of my music, and the only thing that’s surprising about it to me is that it’s two different artists from two different genres doing an album together. Other than that, we talk similar shit.

How did you break the ice?

Marley: We would sit and play music. We listened to some tracks, some stuff we’d been working on, some stuff I grew up listening to, some stuff he grew up listening to, smoke a few joints.

How did you go about figuring out how the album should sound?

Nas: I wanted our sound, whatever that was going to be. We had the opportunity to start from scratch, with Damian as the producer. We wanted to go our own direction and put the reggae in there, put a little hip-hop in there. But we wanted to add different things, too, so that it’s not all reggae, not all hip-hop.

Marley: We didn’t want it to sound typical, like what you’d expect from one of my albums or one of Nas’ albums. We wanted to create an album where you could see there was common ground, but that still had a new sound to it. That was the only thing I was concerned about in approaching the music. Other than that, it was all about feel and whatever felt good.

Africa is a recurring theme. Why?

Marley: I had one or two tracks I had been working on before we started working on this project, and they were songs based around Africa. So when the idea for the EP came up, those were the first songs we were thinking of using. It’s one of the things I love about Nas’ music: He always mentions Africa. And of course we do it in reggae music all the time, too, so that’s one of the things I really have in common with Nas. Africa is the cradle of civilization, the cradle of humanity. And on the whole, it’s the biggest example of a place that needs help. Even though we’re speaking specifically about Africa, we’re really talking about humanity in general.

So is this a socially conscious record?

Nas: I don’t know, man. When you get in the studio with someone like D, we don’t think about that: Is it socially conscious, is it political, is it pro-Africa, is it pro-people? It’s probably all those things, but the point was that we go in there and say what we had in our heads, what we were concerned with and what we were feeling.

How did your collaborative process work in the studio?

Nas: D put the tracks together and put the music together. He had a lot of ideas, so I would jump in and we’d talk about songs. We just started writing. We did all the songs together. We didn’t fly stuff around, we just got down with each other.

Marley: We did a lot of jamming. The musicians and I would jam together and we came up with a few ideas that way. Some of the tracks are programmed, so not every track is live. But it was a very creative, very experimental approach in the studio—very free. We tried a lot of new things, a lot of sounds and feels. We had many more ideas that we didn’t develop any further than the jam sessions, so they’re not on the album.

“As We Answer” was written and recorded on the spot. How did that track come together the way it did?

Marley: The experience of working on that song was great. Nas and I were going back and forth very intricately, like every two lines it changed between us. We got in the booth together and we were feeding off each other’s energy to write the song that way, which I’ve never done with another person. I’ve done collaborations, of course, and I’ve written songs in terms of it coming off the top of my head and tweaking it after, but not at the same time like that.

Nas: We got in the vocal booth and just went in on it.

What did you learn from working with each other?

Marley: You learn all different things about the person as a friend. For example, Nas has a crazy vocabulary. So I learned all these different words just being around him, because his vocabulary is bananas.

Nas: This man is serious, he’s dedicated to what he’s talking about. He has a mission—a few missions—he has goals, and he’s disciplined. That’s hard to come by. I find myself needing discipline.

You’re planning to give some proceeds of the album to charity. How did you decide to do that?

Nas: We’re going to send some to the motherland, we’re going to send some to our hometowns. We’re going to do what we can. We definitely want to do something, because life is about each one, teach one. Everybody needs to look out for each other, especially in this time and age. The world has definitely been made smaller through technology, so now we’ve got to get tighter.

–Eric R. Danton

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