Singled Out: Shinobi Ninja's Brooklyn To Babylon

Before Shinobi Ninja started, Mike and I were in this awkward middle period between projects and were producing some of our own beats. In the winter of 2008, I was in my Grandmother's house when I made the drum pattern to Brooklyn to Babylon on my MPC. I had taken sounds from James Brown's the funky drummer and built three different sequences; an intro, verse and chorus. Clyde Stubblefield's playing inspired me to swing all the tracks in the sequences at around 20%.

It wasn't until the middle of February when Mike and I were building on some of our ideas that Mike wrote the guitar parts. We were in our home studio in Manhattan when he laid down the funky distorted 311-toned guitars to the track. At first, I didn't like what he put down but it grew on me after he laid the bass tracks. The whole production just made you smile because of the way it bounced and all the positive energy oozing out of it.

By March, we had started writing music with D.A. and were having these awesome marathon sessions where we would get hammered off blunts, sushi and sake, and have fun in the studio. The first song we did was pretty out there and had some lyric in it like "I'm bleeding jesus when I'm driving in my car"�..woah dude!!!! The next song we did, D.A. asked Mike and me if we had any other beats he could freestyle to and we put on the track. In 45 minutes, we wrote two rap verses�.the only difference between the two was "ladies of the world, throw your panties on the stage tonight".

Over the next two and a half hours, D.A. freestyled the chorus Melody and we all took turns writing chorus phrases. After the chorus was finished, D.A. wrote a breakdown rap and mike put another bass track on it. It wasn't until the end of the month that we decided to re-track the song with live drums in my mom's house and BLAOW!!!! We had Brooklyn To Babylon.