Late Night Session At School House

There are moments in time where someone calls, you tend to hit the ignore button on your screen, and there are others that you have to take the call. Specifically good friends or people you make music with. When my phone shows that Mike Royal is calling, I answer. We go through the catching up on our time apart just to break ice, but we both know what the conversations about….. Music, and when we are going to have a session.

On a late June evening, we got things moving. I tend to enjoy my drives from the DC area back to central Maryland, where Mike and myself were raised at. I pick up a bottle of tequila and mixers to loosen up the nerves then head to School House aka “The Bottom”. I enter the community and park on the side across from the spot, and enter this sanctuary where we've made music for years. Embraced by my second family, we chat and catch up on what's been happening through these weird times. Then Mike comes down in a brotherly embrace. I think it’s time we get to work. We get a bucket of ice, two glasses and head up to the lab on the second floor.

The room is dimly lit from the LED’s setting the mood and the computer screens displaying his current project he’s working on. He likes an audience to see what he’s been working on especially creating tons of great content in Instagram (@young_royal24). I can’t blame him for wanting to flex his musical capabilities. He has a soulful old school approach to his music that derives from Motown, Disco breaks and foundational hip-hop. The humid air mixes with the cologne and tequila vapors within the room. I swear, this room has thousands of stories, and we’re about to make another one tonight.

Mike starts off with some instrumentals he’s working on, and they were all melodically beautiful, but I was in a dark mood. The songs he had constructed were slightly on the groovier side to which in any other time, I would be all over them. I was on a different spectrum that night. My mindset was on 140 BPM, deep frequencies of bass, skin chilling samples and bone cracking drums.

We began our session with exploring the palate of sounds in his library until we found some I really enjoyed I respect the mans patience because my palate can differ from one thing to another depending on my mood. Thats why Mike and I vibe so well, after all 15-16 years of friendship and creating music tend to go hand in hand at this point. It's like magic and mad science how he organically puts life in to his compositions. At this point, I began to write. Sometimes it’s a sixteen bar verse, sometimes it’s the hook to begin with. Maybe at times my mind drifts off and forgets the construct of verses, and I truly put visions to paper.

The song “Church” is about going to an underground warehouse rave, and in explicit detail I go through what I see, feel and experience. The dark feel of the song made for a great closing of the evening. Once the song was roughly mixed down, Mike sent me an email of the file for my listening pleasure. Makes life simpler than burning a CD and loading it that way. But sometimes, I feel like a CD has such a tangible meaning. As if you were a teenager making your first few tracks, and testing the music on a sound system in your car while driving home. Those were some good times.

Around 2am, I decide to call it an evening since I had an hour drive home. I take the back way through Columbia, MD to get onto I95 Southbound, and the track matched the spooky ambiance of darkness and fog that I was driving through. I must had listened to

The song 20 times before I got home. And what a great evening it was. As tired as we both were, it was still another solid session at School House with Mike Royal. Never a dull moment when Mike Royal and D-Spock come to play.