And the real stroke of genius—I mean, the real sort of moment when the whole project opened up for me and I realized that this wasn’t just some crazy thing that popped into my head but it was actually a dope idea—was when I realized that Chris Jeffries and I had to do a collaboration.

Chris was always my dad’s favorite—if my dad ever wanted to be somebody else in the world, it was Chris Jeffries. Like, seriously, when I was growing up, Chris and the Thunderbums were like, practically gods in my house, and we’d just be listening to them all the time. My dad would buy all these collector’s edition recordings, and like, we’d go see them in concert whenever they came to town—they never rolled through St. James proper, but like, if they were playing anywhere near us, like, anywhere within a couple hours, we’d drive there—and I’m actually almost positive that like, the Thunderbums were my first concert—when I was four or five or whatever: as soon as my mom would let my dad take me.

And sitting here writing this now, I’m actually remembering this one time way early on, like, way toward the beginning of my career, when we were about to play a concert at the Staples Center in L.A., and my dad was like, looking at all the pictures of the people backstage who had performed there—you know, like, they just have all those pictures hanging up in the green room—and he stopped in front of a picture of Chris, and he was just like: Wow. Incredible. I mean, I think that’s when he first realized, you know, that we had made it.

So, anyway, I started asking around to see if I knew anybody who knew Chris, and it turned out that he and Trick Hatz were members of the same country club. LOL.

I mean, that’s something I find so funny about the whole industry, you know, is that like, everything is presented as if it’s these totally separate categories—like when I used to go to the record store, like, especially if it was a big one, like a Virgin Megastore or a Tower Records or whatever, the different genres of music would be in totally different corners of the room. You’d have to walk like, ten minutes to get from Country to Rap. And even now, like, even on the internet, the sites are still set up to make you feel like you’re entering a different world when you’re looking at a different style of music—but the truth is we all know each other. We all go eat at the same restaurants, and we all send our kids to the same schools, and like, yeah, fucking Trick Hatz and Chris Jeffries are both members of the Seaside Club in Malibu.

Their kids even played on the same volleyball team, so I asked Trick if he thought he could set up a meeting between the two of us, and Trick said he’d give it a shot. I didn’t want to go through the managers or whatever, because I knew Chris had been in retirement for a while, and I was pretty sure if he just got an email from some assistant or some secretary, he’d just be like: Nah, I don’t think so. And so Trick mentioned it to him at one of their kids’ volleyball games, and Chris was a little apprehensive at first, but I guess as a favor to Trick, he eventually agreed to meet with me.