SOTLY Shawn explores music and life in his art, and consequently produces music that is to be explored for its own sake as well as the message.
His latest EP, Day by Day, is a hip-hop meditation of day-to-day life featuring a marvelous variety in theme, beat, instrumentation and flow in its five tracks.
“Standin’,” the featured single that closes the EP, is an ode to perseverance in the face of all the hardship and drudge of work and life.
“I just want you to feel the passion and understand how you can get through anything,” he said. “No matter how many times you get knocked down or how many times you fail, you’re going to get back up — that feeling of perseverance, that feeling of consistency, consistently getting up when being knocked down.”
The chiming melody behind Shawn’s fast, rhythmic rap creates an upbeat “landscape” for a closing message of the hope and pride to be gained from simply hanging in there.
Watch it how I stand tall
Verse after verse, beat after beat
“I feel like the beats, or production in general, is another way of communicating that’s just as important as your lyrics, if not more important, because that’s how you communicate the feeling, and that can dictate, even highlight, what you’re saying.”
“Still” opens the EP with a slow, ponderous beat and ominous instrumentation that is like getting up for Monday work.
Still fighting where the sun don’t shine
Still serving dreams while I go get mine
In between “Still” and “Standing” are “No Doubt,” “The Soul” and “Tonight.” The instrumentation of the tracks varies widely in the featured sounds and in the quantity of sound produced, from bare and minimal to lush.
“I want to push the boundaries and create more landscapes, whether it be stripped back, like on ‘The Soul,’ for example, or if it’s more like ‘Still’ and ‘Standin,’’ where there’s more elemental factors. Like, in ‘Standin’,’ I have the ocean playing, and that’s a lot.”
Shawn’s exploration delves into the listener’s perception and relation to the track. The example he uses from Day by Day is “No Doubt,” about his mother and how hard she worked and her attitude about her work, which was, “Listen, if I’m gonna die, I want to make sure that I’m getting my bills paid and my kids taken care of.”
“Now some people might see that as extreme,” he said. “Other people might say, ‘I totally get it.’ So, a consistent theme in all of my music is that I try to make sure that I don’t try to put blame on anybody. I just explain the situation.”
He pulls from his own experiences and those of the people he grew up with and who live in his community, including his own struggles working to pay the bills at the same time he needs to earn the money necessary to put out his music.
He draws his inspiration from a wide range of artists and genres — jazz, R&B, Nat King Cole, Al Green, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, NWA.
Now 25, he began writing at age 10, when his parents split up. He wrote and rapped to instrumentals he found on YouTube. He says his first productions were “Wayne inspired.” Lil Wayne.
“And they weren’t good,” he said, laughing at the memory, “but at the time I thought it was the coolest stuff. I just wanted to have something to perform in the mirror. That’s what kept me going.”
His overarching message, and the example he wants to set in his music, is “Things might be falling apart, you might be feeling like you’re hitting a brick wall, but, you know, we still get up.”
Or, as in his artist name, SOTLY Shawn. SOTLY is “Somebody Out There Loves You.”
He is a performing artist, a writer and a producer and, as a producer, he seeks to create a landscape in sound.
“The goal has always been not only to keep things fresh and introduce sounds but to see a kind of a landscape that I’d never heard before. I really push those boundaries. Especially with hip-hop or rap and R&B and in different genres, I push it forward. I don’t want one project to sound like another project, of course, but I also want to make sure that I’m challenging myself production-wise to create not just beats but full-out productions.”
His goal is to be one of the greats. His definition of that has changed over time but remains the same in one aspect — the number of people affected.
“I saw J. Cole on YouTube, and he looked like me. It made me believe that not only could I rap, but there’s somebody out there chasing the dream like me. I’ll know I’m one of them when there’s people saying, ‘You helped me through this time.’”
He is working on another collection of songs, perhaps another EP before the summer is gone. He wants to do more open mic appearances to get “performance-ready.”
“I want to develop that as an art form and a skill, to get more into the performing aspects of the songs and see how people react to the songs.”
Meaning, he is asked, developing a show?
“Exactly,” he said.
Stay connected to SOTLY Shawn on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
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