Melt Exclusives: Quadry

This week I sat down for an exclusive interview with QUADRY, the Baton Rouge native and luminary rap artist, whose recent project, Ask a Magnolia, represents a culmination of years of developing and perfecting his craft. 

From “The Ghost of BrandyWine” to the bonus track, “Grease Poppin’”, QUADRY spits silky rhymes across the project’s densely-packed, 30-minute runtime. 

The conversation below dives deeper into both QUADRY’s roots in Louisiana and the process behind his recent album.

The following transcript has been edited for both brevity and clarity.

To get us started, I’d like to hear a little bit about your journey into rap. What was that process like?

My mom is a big hip-hop fan, so, for as long as I can remember, I've been hearing rap music. I guess the earliest memory I can think of is Hot Boys, like ‘98/‘99; that's the earliest I can remember listening to music and knowing who that is and knowing the significance of what I'm listening to.

But to be honest, man, because I’ve been thinking about this a lot as far as what hip-hop is: the art form, the culture. For me, and people like me, it's more like a family heirloom. So it's like “When did you get into the vase that's in your grandma's house?” It's always been there.

Obviously it's a genre, but [it has always been] omnipresent in my life. From very early on I understood that this is a genre for people like me to express themselves.

And how has being from Baton Rouge, with its strong hip-hop culture, influenced your creative mindset?

I was talking to a friend from New York, and he would tell me that, when he grew up, all of his local rappers were the main rappers, like Jay-Z.

And [my experience] was the same because, 10 years later, the South was dominating the hip-hop scene. My local rappers were the rappers on BET, like Boosie and Webbie, so I’ve never seen hip-hop as something I’m outside of.

The hip-hop artists of the generation before me coming from the South, they were essentially outsiders. If you weren't in New York and L.A., and you didn't travel there often, you were basically left to your own devices. Like DJ Screw, he never signed to a major label, but he's an icon in the region just from his musical innovations and whatnot. You know Pimp C, UGK, they ate off of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi. They didn't need anywhere else.

But fast forward to my generation with the internet and seeing Boosie and Webbie on BET every f*cking 30 minutes. It was like “Yeah, I can be a rapper. Of course that's a viable career choice.”

Do you listen to genres outside of rap often? Are there any that are in your rotation right now?

Yeah, my moms always played all types of stuff. To me it was all just music, and rap was a thing that I knew I could do. I knew I couldn't sing like Frankie Beverly. I knew I couldn't play the saxophone like Coltrane. But I knew, if I practiced enough, I could maybe rap like Nas if I applied myself, you know what I'm saying? I can do that. 

But now as an adult I listen to all types, stuff my friends put me on. I’m really into indie rock from before it was even called indie rock: early Beatles, early Stones, Sex Pistols. I'm into artists that are unique. I love early FKA twigs; I love early Tyler the Creator.

[I like artists] that are kicking at the confines of the genre they're in. Those are the types of artists I gravitate to.

Where does your creative process usually start? And, when you’re looking for beats, what are you usually looking for?

[It starts with] the beat. I never know what the song is going to be about until like the 8th bar; the first 8 bars are just what I feel, what the beat made me feel.

But, when I’m looking for beats, it's just stuff that makes me feel like an outlaw. It could be something grimy or something sweet-sounding, but it needs to be something that makes me feel like I could be a version of myself that's invincible. Even when I'm speaking from a different perspective and I'm telling a story from a point of view that's not my own, I always gravitate to beats where it allows me to dig a little deeper into who this person is beyond the surface level. Maybe this person can be a villain? Maybe this person can just be a f*cked up hero?  Beats that have character, not just a loop, even if I wasn't rapping on them.

When making Ask a Magnolia, did you have a certain sound or concept in mind while you were choosing your beats?

It's never the sound in mind; it's just always a beat that I hear that fits what I have already sonically. For example, Ask a Magnolia started with “The Ghost of BrandyWine”, so if you look at it from that perspective doesn't everything on the album sound like a compliment to [that song]? The intro, “Davonte 2003”, radiated out of it. If you look at “The Ghost of BrandyWine”, it has a very fluid song structure.

It’s just about painting that wider picture… All of those songs share some similarities with each other, and I think that's why people are gravitating to it and appreciating it as a full body of work. I imagined it as my attempt to make an HBO show about my mid-to-late teens.

What if HBO made a show about my life from that period of time? How gritty would it be? How unraveled would it be? How abrasive would it be? 

Is this idea of centering your project around one song unique to Ask a Magnolia? What about your other projects?

This one was kind of unique in that perspective, but on every album I was trying to do this. Even Malik Ruff is a crude attempt at this, and each album I had different [environments]. For Malik Ruff, I was in somebody's studio all day. I had to come all the way from across Los Angeles essentially to record. For They Think We Ghetto, I did most of that in a house on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I was always trying to do the same thing, but the methods of creation were always different. So it always came out [as a reflection of] where I made it, how I made it, or what I was going through when I was making it.

With They Think We Ghetto, I was going through a lot of transitions with labels, team and stuff, so that's why it's kind of short and simple in a sense. But with Ask a Magnolia and Malik Ruff, they’re way more fleshed out and expansive because I had the time to sit down, make stuff, and try sh*t.

In both a concrete sense and an abstract sense, what would you like to do? Where do you want to take your sound next?

I want to perform live more and get my world of the music I'm making into a live setting. That's one of my goals, and I also want to just get better and just see how good I can actually get. That's my passion or purpose now. I know I'm good. I know I'm borderline great, but how good can I actually be? I want to see if I can actually be one of the greatest rappers ever.

Final question: If you could go back to the beginning of your career and give yourself only one piece of advice, what would it be?

Yeah (laughing): save your money. That's it.