Money Changes Errthang

"It's pretty sweet, man,” he says of his enviable digs. “I've been in this spot for almost a year now, with quite a few trips back Down Under to NZ and Australia over the summertime. It's not bad, bro, not bad and it's something that I've wanted to do for a long time now. It all kind of lined up last year, and getting into the new album it all sort of lined up with that. I jumped at the chance to make music over here.”

Wadams took the interesting tactic of releasing four lead tracks on SoundCloud before the album was released, and he is confident that it was the right decision to approach the release in this way.

“All that stuff has been going down really well which is nice to know,” he says. “As a recording artist you put stuff out and you want people to enjoy it so it's looking good so far.”

“My theory is that it takes quite a while for music to spread outside of the core fans – the purist music heads. So having a point of contact with the fans every few weeks with a new tune, I feel that there's a snowball effect. So hopefully if we've done this right we're in a position that the most amount of people possible are aware that the album is coming out and have heard something from it. Hopefully the people on the fringes have heard one or two things and it's piqued their interest.”

Gratitude features some heavy hitting international guests, like M.O.P. and Talib Kweli. These well-known crew have already garnered some interest from the US blogosphere.

“The major rap blogs like Nah Right, 2dopeboyz and The Smoking Section have been really, really supportive,” he says. “Those are the sites that I check as a fan and a DJ so to see my stuff sitting there alongside other artists I would normally listen to is pretty cool, and I've been able to measure the reaction and reach of that. I'm getting people on Facebook and Twitter that would have had no other way of hearing me saying that they're digging my tunes, which is broadening the exposure and is part of the reason of me being here, in New York.”

As well as expanding his audience with the help of the American guest stars in tow, P-Money is also proud to be using his expanding profile to promote some of his New Zealand colleagues such as @Peace and Aaradhna to a much wider audience. He says the previously very inward looking culture of hip hop in the US is changing as well.

“There's definitely an increasing awareness (amongst the US hip hop community) of what's happening in other countries, NZ and Australia included,” he asserts. “They're aware that we have our own local music scenes and there are stars within those scenes and they're starting to go, 'Hey, what's going on over there'. Even some of the really commercial artists like Drake coming from Toronto – the borders used to be really closed even to Canada but now he's come through and he's dominating, so fans and labels and media people are starting to look externally. I think down in the bottom corner of the world we have a very outward looking perspective on the world, and that's starting to happen in the US with people looking to Europe and Australia, and that's really dope. It's great to be a part of it – we've been chipping away at that for close to ten years now!”