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and sawn out by a small group of chamber strings. It’s among the album’s more telling lines. For Nitai, recording Something You Feel was an exercise in rawness as he defines it. Most of his verses were freestyle takes, and the same might be said of the beats he programmed. "On some of these tracks, they’re stereo out of my MPC," says the producer, meaning without a multitrack production, "I couldn’t go back in afterwards and manipulate each layer individually." That on-the-fly methodology went for guests of the record as well. When it came to horn arrangements, Nitai kept the session players in the dark until they were in the studio—not unlike Miles Davis used to, he adds. "You know they're talented enough that you can put them on the spot like that. Usually they give you something great. "That nervous, unsure energy," Nitai continues, "I like that in music. It creates new dimension." Like with the record's more emotionally wracked sketches, he explains, which were born from a similar approach. Sarah Linhares, a Montreal-based vocalist who figures prominently on the album, also handled most of the conceptual groundwork with "80's Heart": sharpening his sparse but bruising beat into a pointed articulation of jealousy. "Love Won't Be," another love-gone-sour tale was similarly executed.
"I didn't write a thing down," he says, allowing that an old relationship with someone suffering drug-addiction accounts for the lyrics, and how they are voiced. "It has a half-suppressed anger in it, where I'm singing it, but biting down on my teeth."
“NERVOUS, UNSURE ENERGY...
I LIKE THAT IN MUSIC. IT CREATES NEW DIMENSION.” That's palpable, which is the ultimate intention Nitai had for this album. (And what he named it for, if it must be said.) But the sensations in this song cycle that truly stick have the howitzer-throated rapper reveling, in less combative mode—as in the slow-crackling "Moon & Star," or over the J Dillarecalling limp of "The Barrel," which features a memorable turn by the rapper Ceasrock. Even in these songs there remains a somewhat sinewy surface, and that separates them from the record's centerpiece. "Hard Times And Bless" is a soft
JAI NITAI LOTUS
spill of gratitude featuring Georgia Anne Muldrow chiming the hook. It's the sole track in the set that doesn't really bristle: a testament to Muldrow's assured vocal lines, which come layered amongst Nitai's gentle, snaremarshaled production. "Hard Times and Bless" is also an outlier in that, unlike so much of Something You Feel, it wasn't recorded in the flesh. "The music is always a mood for me," Nitai reflects, and the spectrum here was one he was mostly able to extract in person, within the studio, by virtue of Montreal's buzzing musical hive. Local talent may provide the bulk of its guest list, but Nitai roundly dismisses any priority on exclusivity. "I don’t look at things in a small way like that," he says, adding, "Montreal plays a role in my music," but not in the kneejerk sense that others might lay claim, which he puts with mock bravado: “Like, 'This is the sound of our city.' "No, it’s not," he reckons. "There’s so much going on here, and so many branches." Nitai's conversational momentum slows for a moment, but only that. "I’m not only looking at things within the city; I'm looking past and outside of it, reaching as far as I can."
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