And obviously, I had the files on my phone. I brought a pair of headphones with me for exactly this reason, and so I loaded up the demos, and I gave Chris the headphones, and I just watched as he listened to them, like, sipping his daiquiri. He didn’t move his head at all—it was just like, very serious, very stoic—and after I played him the first song, he was just like: Is there another one? And so I played him another one. And after that one, he was like: Is there another one? And I played him another one. And he kept doing that until I played him all the songs, and after the last song, he took the headphones out of his ears, and he handed them to me, and he took a long, sort of contemplative sip of his daiquiri, and he was just like: These are great. LOL. This is some of the best shit I’ve heard in years. And I was just like: Boom. I mean, I’ve honestly never felt so good showing anything to anybody. It was like the whole sky opened up, and I could see the ocean over the hedges of the Seaside Club, and the sun was glinting just perfectly onto the pool, and for a moment, it was like the Seaside Club was the best place on Earth. I completely understood why Chris loved it so much.

And it turned out that Chris was actually a big fan of the songs I had recorded with Deez for HERE we Go. He didn’t even know it was me at the time, but apparently when they first came out, he was like, obsessed with them for a couple of weeks—he kept listening to them on repeat and singing them in the car with his kids—and at first he was kind of embarrassed about it, but after a while, he was just like: No, this is some of the best shit in recent memory. This is the real deal. And so it was pretty clear that we had at least been vibing on the same frequency for a while.

And, you know, I left the meeting without a definite commitment from Chris, but I was feeling pretty confident. At a certain point, I guess we had been hanging out for a while and we lost track of the time, and he was like: Shit, I gotta pick my kids up from school. And so we called it a day. But he said he’d be in touch with me, and I gave him my info, and then, like, a week later, I got a call from him, and he was like: Yo, you want to come over today? And I was just, like: Yeah, Chris, I think I can clear my schedule. LOL.