TheDarceKnight
Veteran
I don't disagree, but I'm just relaying the album making process from the guy that made it. The You Will See single is re-sang from an OG sample
The Story Behind the Long Journey to Release Prodigy’s Posthumous Albums
Complex visited the home of Prodigy’s longtime engineer, Joe the Engine Ear, for a conversation about the long journey to release Prodigy’s posthumous music.
www.complex.com
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In order to get Prodigy’s music back on DSPs, his friends and family culled through the paperwork and made sure the publishing splits, credits, and sample clearances were correct on every song in Prodigy’s solo catalog, as well as on the next two Hegelian Dialectic projects. “It’s hard to explain the amount of work that it took to get The Book of Heroine near the finish line,” Joe says. “I’ve never had to work this hard on anything ever, and it wasn’t just me. There was an army of people.
On top of grieving his friend, Joe lost his mother just three days after Prodigy’s funeral, and he says that Prodigy’s family told him to take all the time he needed to clear his head. “I personally had to take almost a year and a half to two years until I was even mentally capable of functioning in the studio to do what we’re supposed to do,” he says. “It had to be executed properly, so a lot of the delay was on my personal timeframe. I had to take time, so then once we began working, it became, ‘Alright, let’s start the clearance sample circus.’”
The circus entailed an all-consuming process of spending every day parsing through Prodigy’s entire catalog, sometimes using an app that finds samples, then trying to run down the source. “What I ran into is that some random people own some of these samples,” Joe recalls. ‘I’ll be like, ‘Ooh, who is this? This is not even like a publishing house or anything.’ Some samples might be 74 years old from Ukraine or something, and not only is the artist long gone, but then whoever owned the rights to that legally, that organization doesn’t even exist anymore. So I’m sitting there trying to find, like, ‘How do you avoid litigation on this one when you don’t know who in the fukk owns this shyt at all?’”
The relentless dive into legal minutia ended up engulfing Joe. “When I say I’ve lost friends, yes it is rhetorical and metaphorical, but it’s also my own doing,” he says. “I don’t talk to nobody. I haven’t seen my family in over two years. This is it. This is all I’m doing.” It’s a task that he admits he didn’t always know if he could complete, but he powered through on a simple mantra: “whatever it takes” for Prodigy."
