The Long Road to Little Brother's Unexpected, Triumphant Return
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But at that cookout at Phonte’s house the day after Art of Cool, he and Big Pooh decided it was time to go for it (9th Wonder was invited to the cookout but couldn’t make it because he was out of town). The duo subsequently reached out to him, and the trio agreed to start working on a new album together. But when it came time for 9th Wonder to submit beats for
May the Lord Watch, which was originally to be titled
Homecoming, it seemed to Phonte and Big Pooh that the Grammy-winning producer wasn’t recognizing how much they had grown musically over the years.
Between Phonte fronting the sophisticated soul outfit The Foreign Exchange with Dutch producer Nicolay and Big Pooh recording entire solo projects over beefy production by Nottz and Apollo Brown, the two felt they had outgrown their affinity for the dirty boom-bap that 9th Wonder provided on
The Listening and
The Minstrel Show.
“I said, ‘Look man, I think you’re sending us what in your mind is your best Little Brother beats, but we need your best 9th Wonder beats, period. Send us the same shyt you send Rick Ross or Nas,’” Phonte says. “To me, it was all a part of the process. We just had to shake the rust off. If you’re willing to work with me, I will stay through the mud with you until it’s over. We have to figure this shyt out together.”
While they were waiting for more from 9th Wonder, Phonte and Pooh started combing through a hard drive of beats from other producers that Phonte hadn’t used on his second solo album, 2018’s
No News Is Good News. It didn’t take long before they came across beats that they were mutually geeked about recording to.
But according to Phonte, 9th Wonder felt he should handle all the production duties on a Little Brother album called
Homecoming. (The
INDY reached out to 9th Wonder through his representation at Jamla Records for comment but received no replies.) Phonte says he was angry, and that he called 9th Wonder to offer an analogy about a father who leaves a family for years and then returns.
“And it’s cool. It’s great,” Phonte says. “He’s welcomed back into the family. But mom has remarried. You have a whole new family dynamic now. So you can’t come back into the family and tell the stepdaddy how many seats he can get at graduation. … Who are you to say that brothers like Pete Rock, Nottz, and Illmind, who all helped keep the LB name alive, don’t even deserve a shot or a seat at the table?”
When the three next talked, Phonte and Big Pooh say that they had already decided to use just one of the songs that they had recorded over 9th Wonder’s beats. They claim that he agreed to stand behind the album and rejoin the group, but with the stipulation that he only appear with and deejay for the group during festival shows, leaving the deejaying duties for all other tour dates to Little Brother’s longtime tour deejay, DJ Flash. Phonte and Big Pooh rejected that offer. To them, it was all or nothing. No 9th Wonder-produced song appears on
May the Lord Watch."
