Living The Dream

"People seem to forget you pretty quickly!” Mr Grevis (born Gary McPhee) states when asked why he wanted to keep rolling after his well received debut The Sampler. He also confirms he's very happy with how it turned out and is glad he decided to try this approach.

“Yeah 100 per cent,” he confirms. “There are so many little things I'd like to change but as soon as I listened to the master – I literally listened to my final master in my car on the way to press it – I knew it was the right decision. I didn't expect the first one to get the response that it did. I knew I had to get to work and strike quickly. Hopefully this one is strong enough that I can take two years off and work on my next one, my masterpiece.” He laughs after this but you can tell he really wants to spend some more time on the follow-up. While the desire to return to a much more slowly crafted process must be appealing, the spontaneity and more off-the-cuff nature of My Escape really shines through.

“I would have liked to have put some more breaks and bridges in there as well but then maybe people would have thought I was trying to be a bit too musical with it,” he explains. “I definitely focused on having something for everybody...I wanted the songs to sound really different and be different with subjects and topics. Drapht is a big influence of mine and a good friend, and I find that with his stuff it sounds so different, and he's so on point with his topics. A lot of rappers try to stay on topic but before long they start to stray and just do random bars.”

He also wanted to show some other sides of himself as a rapper that he didn't get into on the debut record.

“After my first record when I had that track The Youth, I seemed to get a lot of comments from people who were at least 40 years old on my Facebook and I felt like I sort of still needed to cater a bit more to them. The only complaints I got last time were that I wasn't doing any fast raps. I can rap fast but I just find most of the time when dudes are doing that double-time shit, generally 90 per cent of them aren't saying anything. So I did that on the intro, and I don't even really say anything,” he laughs. “It's just a bunch of bars, but I really wanted to show cats that I could do that sort of stuff.”