Outside the Lines With Rap Genius
Sene Excerpt #4 -- Doo-Wop
SameOldShawn: I didn’t hear anything I could identify as doo-wop on the first record
Sene: Yeah, I know. That’s the big thing. That’s what I was getting at before. I mentioned the words “doo-wop” because I grew up on doo-wop. And once I did that, everyone was like, “Wait, what’s he doing, a doo-wop record?”
SameOldShawn: I’m not hearing guys on the corner singing harmonies on the thing, you know?
Sene: A lot of it was written. I hadn’t been really comfortable and tried to do things the way I knew I could. So on “Day Late,” you head a lot of like, funny singing, where it’s like, there are songs that were cut and didn’t make it. I was saying, “I’m lifted way above the clouds.” You know what I’m saying? The cloud climbing joint. Like that, I’m picturing like, Frankie Valli, you know what I mean? Like, Four Seasons type shit. And, picturing, like, a barbershop quartet or something like that. And I sang in a certain way that I felt was more funny, out of the thought of like, “Oh, maybe if I rock it this way, you know, people would be like, ‘Oh, he takes himself too seriously.’”
SameOldShawn: It’s self protection, right?
Sene: You know what I’m saying? And that’s just me being real with people. Part of the reason why I just don’t listen to that record much. I know that people relate to it, and again, I appreciate that to death, that they do it - but I feel like that’s where I was. And so, some things that were really written completely in the doo-wop vein didn’t come out on the recording that way, because even though they were written for that, a lot of those songs, I was a little timid about delivering them