"City Lights Vol. 1.5" is officially celebrating it's 10th birthday this Sunday (Sept 13). Unofficially, the majority of it is actually a tad bit older as the original "City Lights Vol. 1" first came out in 2004, as a free gift with a purchase of "Connected" (those of you that own a copy of the black-n-white cardboard version know what I am talking about). In fact, it's even older than that, as I first released the first volume as a free download on Okayplayer in June of 2003.
At this point, the City Lights series has been firmly established in my catalog but at the time of its inception, adding the "Volume 1" part thing was merely wishful thinking.
Between 2002 and 2003, while working on "Connected", I was coming up with a vast amount of material and it was clear that some of it would not be used. That sparked me to want to put together a beat tape, essentially, collecting some of my favorites out of the unused material and adding some instrumental versions of tracks that had already been released in one form of another. At some point I came up with the very loose concept involving a walk through a big city (specifically but not explicitly inspired by New York), and I added layers and layers of sound design and effects to create the big city feel. Because I looked at it more as a beat or mix tape rather than an album, I asked Lunchbox Tha Narcoleptic to "host" it. He came up with the idea of him "stalking" me with increasing intensity all through the album, and I ended up using some snippets of '50s big bang music to underscore the comedic element.
As my friend DJ Brainchild rightly points out in one of the interludes on the album, I "borrowed" the title City Lights from a classic series of Prince bootlegs.
And there it was.
Happy 10th.
