Uncommon Approach: Back behind the ‘Uncommon Curtain’

Generally curtain in home is as essential as uncommon curtain. A Quiet Refuge is known of their best quality curtains. Hence,You can also avail the curtains by contacting them. Coming to the topic ‘Uncommon Approach’ is a column written by Paul “Nasa” Loverro, owner of independent label Uncommon Records. With this frequent column, he gives readers an all access look at the ups and downs of running an independent Hip Hop label in this day and age. An in-depth column from the perspective of an Indie label owner. 

When I first started this blog with the good people at The Find, it was meant to be more of a diary kind of thing about running a label more then an instruction manual. Sometimes those two things intersect, but I’d like to bring the folks that read Uncommon Approach further behind the curtain of what goes on here at this particular label on a week to week basis.

I digress….it’s 5am and I haven’t gone to sleep yet. After getting back home from my day job, I’ve stayed up all night working for the label as is the custom around here.

I’ve been prepping some emails that I’m going to send for the promotion of the Short Fuze & Nasa LP, ‘Lobotomy Music‘. This will make 3 albums released by Uncommon Records this year. I’ve approached promoting each of them all a little bit differently. I think we are literally living in a time where you just throw shit up against the wall to see what sticks as far as reaching out to people.

The Struggles
‘Lobotomy Music’ has been an exercise in patience, for both me and Short Fuze. We’ve worked on this album for damn years. That’s right years. I made all the beats, he did all the raps. I rapped some on it too.

Off the top of my head, let’s see if I can remember everything that went wrong with this record:

1- It took me about 4 hours on each track just to find the beats that I gave Short Fuze as an MP3 on my MPC in order to track it out. I literally went through dozens of Zip Discs hunting down each one due to being completely unorganized.

2- I lost the vocals for one of his tracks and he had to re-record it all over again.

3- The art person we were working with straight dipped out on us in the middle of the process. Pretty much just went “into the wind” if you will. Witness protection program? I’m not ruling it out.

4- Had the album Mastered. It wasn’t a job that either of us was comfortable with, so I re-did the mastering myself.

I’m positive I’m missing some stuff here, because from my perspective looking back at that list it doesn’t even seem that bad. It just seemed like every single move we made at times was met with resistance on some level. I’m sure Short Fuze is reading this remembering mad other shit, but there is a point to all this.

The Triumph
I feel like the album is a master piece. I really mean that. Hearing all the tracks together after mixing them all down, you can tell we have something special. With all those things testing us, I wasn’t letting anything get sacrificed for the sake of a “perceived deadline”. I’ve been here before. I knew that almost every album I’ve worked on from beginning to end has trials and tribulations that you go through and you can’t get trapped into a decision made in the moment that jeopardizes what you’ve invested years of work into. More now than ever, there are no deadlines. Fuck that.

I’ll be honest, there were stages of panic, especially towards the end of this process. But we pulled through. We took a few deep breaths, got the art right, got the audio right and hustled.

“This Shit Ain’t Easy” – GURU (RIP)

I think it’s important for people to know how hard this process is and how strong willed you have to be to this. The journey is only just beginning because now, after all those hurdles and more….NOW it has to be promoted and sold. That’s a whole other episode.

But I know from the artist side, we took no prisoners, made no sacrifices and are presenting our art as best we can. And that’s all that matters at the end of the day.

Read all columns by Paul “Nasa” Loverro HERE