Ande Bishop – A New Southern Star On The Horizon

On the topic of the EP, Bishop began to break down what he intended to prove with the project, and themes contained within the seven tracks; “Ocean$ was my attempt to be as versatile as possible as a solo artist, I tried to make each track sound different but still sound cohesive. There’s no one particular theme outside of the “duology”, money and friends but it’s just me trying to promote good things and keep you entertained by myself. There’s no features so I really tried to have some variety so it wouldn’t sound monotonous since I’m the only voice on the project.”

“At first it was production based, just trying to get a lot of beats made but then I just decided to put a project together to challenge myself. I had a lot of inspiration and a lot of verses written so I just tried to put it all together. I did the whole album in three days, honestly, some of the stuff was written before then but as far as my performances and laying it all down, I laid it all down in two hours.”

“It was influenced by The Game. I was listening to The Game’s “The Documentary” – his first album. He’s popular for name dropping and including rappers names on the songs, so for both of the money or friends tracks I tried to say as many rappers names as possible as a tribute to The Game, I’d say thats the only recurring theme on the album – trying to do what Game did when he first came out.”

As an obvious student of the game, DT posed the question of how much experimentation went on in producing the album, to be told the ambition was to blend the contemporary with the classic.

“I would say it started out old school but then towards the end I was listening to it and thinking that I needed to change some stuff so the first half was traditional then towards the second half of it I really started experimenting and seeing what sounds I could come up with.”

Out of the seven tracks on the EP, Bishop says; “My personal favourite is ‘How it feels’ but if I had to choose one to give people an idea of my sound it would probably be ‘OG Jaylon’ the intro – that was a verse I wrote a while ago but one of my favourite songs that I’ve written so far.”

Moving away from the subject of the EP, Bishop began laying down his goals for the rest of 2015; “I’m always working on our brand, we have a couple artists, my goal this year is to put out 4 or 5 projects, it doesn’t matter if they’re EP’s or just 3-4 song projects. I just wanna put out and have a decent catalogue going into next year. I want to tour, that’s what I really do it for – to see the world with my music. So I think I have to make as much good quality music as possible.

My personal goal for the rest of this year is to do at least 30 dates, we’re lining something up for this summer like late June/early July and in August I’m gonna do as many dates as possible once the project has been out a while and then by January I wanna be out in the UK. My goal is just to be overseas. I hear the culture over there is so much more passionate, they really support the underground lyricists a lot so I definitely want to experience that.

The one festival I’d love to do is Bonnaroo in Tennessee – it’s a huge festival in July and that’s my goal. If I can’t get in this year then definitely next year. That would be a huge milestone for me personally.”

The interview coming to a close, our last questions for the lyrical up-comer were whether he believes it’s easy surviving as an aspiring artist in the current economy and whether he believes people need to start buying music again.

“Nah it hasn’t been easy at all but I think as a rapper these days or a musician period you have to be versatile and figure out different streams of income because it’s difficult to get people to buy your songs so you gotta figure out something else. To answer your question, it’s pretty hard man.

For myself I don’t mind people not buying my music, the old way of people buying music is pretty much over, I think you have to give your music away for free and then eventually people will support through shows and merchandise but with streaming and how easy it is to pirate albums I don’t ever expect people to really buy great amounts of music again.”

The ‘OCEAN$ EP’ is out now. Preview it below or buy you copy at iTunes here