Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you….drum roll please!!!!!  The brand new Stan Ipcus album.  The Young Professional.  This is my most personal work to date.  I’ve matured.

The Young Professional is the story of a 31 year old married man living in the suburbs of New York City (Westcheddar 914), with a baby on the way, reflecting on his past and looking to his future, cleaning up his act, handling responsibility, working full time, and still having fun and making rap music.

Here’s my track by track breakdown…

“Intro”

When I was on my honeymoon, I copped this CD at this little record store on our layover in Laguna Beach by Martha Velez that was produced by Bob Marley.  Once we finally got out to Kauai, I popped it in the rental car while we were driving around to check it out, and this one song on there hit me.  It was too slow to rap too, but I looped it up anyway when I got home and figured I’d use it for something.  So when it came time to put together an intro for the album, I reached for it.  As for my ramblings, well I just wanted to say “thank you” to my family and everyone who has supported me over the past ten years I’ve been been releasing music, and shout out all the places I’ve lived that made me who I am today.  This album is like the culmination of my life thus far.  I’m looking back as I look forward.  Like I said before, it’s personal.

“Auspicious”

That’s a dope word.  This song is almost two years old, but I kind of stashed it away, knowing that I would use it for something special.  I had one of the kids I work with read the definition of the word in the beginning of the song, which I recorded at my studio where I work.  It sums up the meaning of the song.  And yeah, that’s an Alchemist beat.  I usually always jack something of his for all of my releases because he’s my favorite producer.  At first, I had this in the middle of the album, but realized it was the perfect song to start everything off with.  It’s lyrical, but not too heavy or topical, and it’s straight hip hop, with the vocal scratches and all.  Plus, it was the first song on the album I recorded.

“A Pimp’s Proposal”

This is another one I had in the stash.  Don’t let the whisper flow throw you off, I went in on this song lyrically.  It’s funny, my wife, well we weren’t even engaged at the time but still she’s my wife now, she was sleeping in the other room and I was up and I was kinda twisted so I wanted to record this, but I didn’t want to wake her up.  So I was like whispering into the mic!  The beat is like your floating or something.  Shout out to my boy Tic for putting me on to the song I got the loop from.  Anyway, this is basically the story of how I dreamed of proposing to my wife.  How I would do it and all that.  But also, what the proposal really means.  What the significance of the ring is, and us being married, and all that good stuff.  The day I bought her engagement ring I was thumping this shit in my whip.  It had me amped to get down on one knee.

“The Working Man Is A Sucker”

I shaped the concept of the album around this song.  I looped the instrumental from The Menehan Street Band, who are the dudes that Jay-Z got the “Roc Boys” sample from.  I don’t really program drums and all that, but I’m nice at finding loops to rap to and creating an intrumental format from them, with a hook and all that.  I do that alot on this album.  Kinda like what I did on my first album Pu Click Poetry.  I guess I’ve come full circle.  Anyway, this song is about what it’s like to be a rapper who has to work full time.  I’ve always worked full time to make a living, which I’m proud of but in a way it held me back from really putting my all into my career as a rapper.  But hey, I had to do it to live.  This song explains the lifestyle of the young professional.  There’s lots of us out there, who have to work hard to make a living.  Sometimes our dreams suffer for it, but in the end of the day, it’s okay.

“Happy Hour”

This was fun to make.  I looped up this new funk song I like and wrote a story to it about getting out of work and going to happy hour in NYC.  I did the voice for my boss Fitz Winkleman, which is one of the old characters I used to do back in high school on my TV show Prime Time with Dan and Andrew.  I gotta shout out my boy C Bats who inspired this song.  He works in Manhattan and is always popping it off during the week like this.  I come get up with him when I can.  This is some real Westchester white boy shit though, in terms of the slang, behavior, and the overall story line of how a night after work can go down.

“Delegate of Hell”

I made this beat on Garage Band.  True story.  Fall back.  Nah Right posts alot of my stuff, but I was proud when they posted this because I made it from scratch.  The first verse is one of the best verses I ever wrote.  This is probably my favorite song on the album.  It’s dark, and lyrically vicious.

“College Park Homecoming”

This was the last song I recorded for the album.  I downloaded Oddisee’s Odd Autumn, and once I heard this beat this story came to my mind.  I know Oddisee from back in my University of Maryland days, which made the connection to telling the story of returning to my old stomping grounds in College Park perfect.  It’s been a decade since I started doing official shows in October 1999, which is crazy to me.  This beat gave me the canvas to paint that picture.  It’s a really nostalgic little song.  Those years were so important to my development as an artist and a person.  It’s about time I revisited them.  Shout out to the University of Maryland class of 2000.

“Picket Fence Dream”

I’ve never played this song for anyone.  I played the beat for my boys when I first made it though, and they loved it.  I made it like two years ago, and wrote the lyrics about a year ago.  It’s funny, because I wrote it looking into the future, and it’s what actually ended up happening.  I mean, we really do have a baby on the way, but back then, it was just a dream and something we always talked about.  And it describes our wedding, which was pretty similar to the way I rap about it in the first verse, at least the feel of it.  I was gonna flow more laidback on this, but the sample on the hook is sung with such emotion that I had to go harder, and I think it actually came out ill.  It’s soulful.  I put my all into this one.  Hopefully people can hear that.

“Killin’ Time”

There’s so many dope blogs out there that post old soul gems from the 70’s that I never heard before.  This is one of those songs.  I extended the intro so I could rap to it, and I felt like the concept of the song fit with the album.  My verse is about how I like to kill my time, back in the day and now, in terms of chilling and making music and stuff like that.  “This ain’t a hobby, it’s a lifestyle”.  I say “remix” in the beginning because it’s structured how a modern day R & B song remix would be, with a rapper adding a verse to the beginning.  I’ve been holding this one for a while too.  Peep the slow flow.

“The Good Old Days”

This is my remake of Biz Markie’s “What Comes Around Goes Around”.  Such a dope old hip hop track.  I’m telling the stories of a couple of my old girlfriends and I how I first got with them.  I’m spitting young G on this!  True stories though.  This is about as radio friendly as I get on this album, though the quality is kinda wack because I had trouble finding a good version of the instrumental.  But I did find it, and the final product sounds kinda like some old tape from back in those days anyway so I guess it’s kind of fitting.  I had this in the middle of the album before but then I decided I liked it at the end.  I don’t know, it just ends nice.  Like, those were the good old days, but now I’m looking to even better days in the future.

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Thanks to my dude David Roy for hooking up the album cover, and thanks to everyone else for their continued support.  Enjoy the music.  Peace and love.

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