HipHopFiend Interview: Chuuwee & Sundown – The Millennium Falcon0

Say what you want about this social media age, but without it we’d never have two completely unrelated emcees from opposite sides of the US teaming up to make collaborative albums about Star Wars… And given how great Chuuwee and Sundown’s new collaborative record The Millennium Falcon is, that would be a real shame!

Last September when Chuuwee was over in North Carolina visiting Sundown, for the first time, to wrap up (and it turns out, re-record most of) the project, I was able to Skype in to catch up with them about what they’d been working on, and to listen to the album in full, talking through the tracks one by one: gaining an insight into the making of an excellent new project, that people really aren’t anticipating enough in my opinion!

How did you guys get together and start working on The Millennium Falcon?

Sundown: I heard a song that Chuuwee did, that Cookin’ Soul produced, called ‘Bikini Bottom.’ I just thought it was cool that he rapped over a Spongebob sample and killed it, and made something that was cartoony in nature (into) a good rap song. I saw ‘Need That’ off of his project with Lee Bannon, called Hot N Ready, I saw that on 2DopeBoyz and I was like, “Man, who is this kid?” Then I heard ‘Bikini Bottom’ and I was like, “Man I’m just going to try and send him some beats.” So I hit him on Twitter, and he was like, “Yeah, sure send me beats.”

At the time I didn’t have anything going on, so I asked him, I said, “Man, do you want to do a project?” and luckily he said yes. And I thought he was bullshitting… He wasn’t!

And then after a while, I didn’t know what to call it, asked 9th (Wonder) and he said call it The Millenium Falcon, and I told (Chuuwee), he said, “Cool”, and we just ran with it…

How would you describe the sound of the overall project? Particularly production-wise?

Chuuwee: I want to say the production is like… It reminds me of a new school 9th; because you know 9th has that classic North Carolina sound, that classic South-East sound. So it sounds like new school 9th mixed with Sundown’s own touch on it, mixed with like new-school (meets) old-school West coast flavour. It’s like the perfect blend of South-East (and) West Coast hip-hop. It’s like a crazy combination that a lot of people haven’t ever heard before. It’s crazy!

And Sundown you produced the whole project?

S: I don’t want to say I produced it. I made the beats.

C: He produced it! He produced it! He’s one of my favourite up and coming producers now. Some of the beats that didn’t make it are like crazy! He didn’t like the beats. Like, he played me some when I got down here and I’m like, “Why didn’t you send me this too!” He’s just been sitting on gold and he doesn’t think it’s good. I don’t understand him!

S: If I was going to say ‘executive produced it’, it’s him, because he picked out all of the beats, he ordered everything on the project, so that’s him.

And were the beats all made specifically for this project, or were some of them ones you’d already made?

S: Hmm. I made ‘Weekend Girls’ for the project, I made ‘The Modulators’ for the project, and I made ‘Calm Down’ for the project.

C: We practically started all over when I came down here too. So we went back and did a lot of re-production of stuff too. So I had a little bit of input into what we could change. But he went back and did a lot of different stuff to the beats that we had, to make it fit the project. So it’s a little bit of both I guess.

So will you (Sundown) be producing for other projects after this?

C: I sure hope so!

S: I don’t know. It depends what people say about it. I’m not trying to call myself a producer; I just wanted to do something. And, you know, I didn’t want to ask the Soul Council to help me on another project (because they are very busy) and I had beats lying around, so why not? And again, this is not me trying to say that I’m a producer, I just wanted to have some fun.

C: I think it came out better that we expected too.

S: I haven’t listened to everything in its…

C: I’ve been listening to it all day, I think it’s dope! It came out really good.

Yeah, I’d agree with Chuuwee that the beats really stand out on this project…

S: Thank you.

C: It’s like a different style too. It’s not like any beats that anybody’s heard. And that’s another reason why I accepted to do the project with him, because I had never ever heard beats like that, they were really different sounding. And I’m very adamant about the North Carolina hip-hop, since I’m a fan of Little Brother, I’ve been a fan of Justus League for a while, so I really just wanted to blend West Coast with that North Carolina soul and make like a new school Justus League record kind of…

S: (Looks shocked)

C: Kind of…

S: Yikes! We’ll see. I’m not expecting anything. I’m more excited for him, I’m a fan of his, so just the fact that he is number one, rapping on beats that I’ve made, but just the opportunity to hear him rap, and rap with him. That’s enough for me!

And there are a few features joining you on the project too. Do you want to talk about them?

C: Oh yeah! We got a lot of Jamla cats on there. We got Enigma of course. We got Remo, I got a bunch of people from my side on there. I got Mean Doe Green on there, I got my boy Carbin on there, we got Drique London on there, Intalekt, Tom Hardy is going to be on there, hopefully we can get Heather V to sing a couple of choruses, that’d be lovely. Who else is on there?

S: GQ

C: Oh! GQ. ‘The Weekend Girls’, that right there’s probably going to be the crazy single, that’s going to be the craziest single.

Has most of the recording process been done while you’ve been together, or has it mostly been handled back and forth via email?

C: Well it’s been finished for a long time. He sent me the beats and I did most of it and sent it back by email. And I was fortunate enough to gain the opportunity to be able fly down here, so we were just like, “We’ll just go in.” I came down for two weeks, we just re-did it, re-recorded everything, wrote some new verses. We can write with each other and get a better feel for the project, because a lot of times doing stuff through email, you really don’t get to feel the other artist and where they’re coming from. So if you write it together it’s like better chemistry and it’ll sound better as a whole project.

Sundown, I know you’re phone broke a few weeks ago and you had a lot of new material saved on it. Did this affect the project at all?

S: It did. I had a lot of verses for this project, a lot. Because I’d finished Still Hotter Than July, but even while I was working on it, I was writing for this. I was actually excited about some of the stuff I wrote, which doesn’t happen often. And I broke my phone about three weeks before he came out, and I was crushed. Crushed, literally.

C: I change phones all the time!

S: Oh God. I forgot about that, but yeah, that hurt. I’ve been able to write. I’m not necessarily as satisfied as I was with the other stuff, but we’ll see what happens.

C: I think it’s dope. I think this dude’s tripping. He’s a (great) rapper, dope producer.

Track-by-track:

‘Back To Tatooine’

C: Well ‘Back To Tatooine’ it was like, last minute and we were trying to find different Star Wars references to put in because we didn’t want it to be too off. Like basically from the content of the song, it was just like talking about wack rappers or whatever. So we went with, “Oh, well we go back to Tatooine after our reputation’s have been tarnished, after sucker MC’s have said what they had to say about us being successful or whatever, so we just go back to Tatooine, to lay down some law!”

S: Because I think in Revenge Of The Sith… Anakin goes back to Tatooine…

C: After his mother dies.

S: And kills the sand people. The original title was ‘Back At It’ but we had to tie it into Star Wars…

C: And it fit perfectly.

S: And Intalek killed it, he actually sent two verses that were both stupid, but the second one fit better so…

I’m not familiar with Intalek, but he does have a great verse here…

S: He’s an emcee from Virginia who is very very very very nice.

C: Yeah it was my first time hearing him as well; he’s dope!

‘I Remember’

C: Well when I was putting it together and I was listening I was trying to fit it together as like, a story, so ‘I Remember’ is like; we go back to Tatooine, and then we remember what it used to be like. And in (the) song, he’s rapping about Raleigh and I’m rapping about Sacramento. So we were really just talking about how are cities were and how our lives were before we started doing music, because it really changed a lot of stuff, especially being successful in both of our given situations. So it flowed with the story of going back to Tatooine, and it also gave us the chance to hit a hard-hitting topic about the changes in our cities and how our cities are similar, yet different.

S: I went off to a school in a different city, and I did not expect to come back to Raleigh. And I damn sure didn’t expect to be doing music, so that was me just telling the abridged story of how I got here.

‘Attacking The Clones’ (feat. Thee Tom Hardy)

C: I got the idea of that one from Tom Hardy’s verse. Because one thing he said in his verse was, “Do you think on your own, or are you Gang Taylored.” And in my city, everybody wants to be from Taylor Gang or they want to be like Taylor Gang. So his verse just made me think of everyone who raps, wants to rap, or wants to be like rappers, and we’re just attacking clones. Because everybody’s a clone these days, nobody stands out.

‘The Death Star’ (feat. Sean Boog)

S: I named that just because it sounded a little harder than everything else. And, shout out to the Away Team, Khrysis and Boog; Boog just doesn’t…

C: He’s relentlessly ill!

S: Boog is just going to hit you in the mouth every time. There’s nothing subtle about Boog, you know, he’s just straight to the point, he’s a blue-collar rapper. And the Death Star was the most ominous thing in all of the movies, and that beat was kind of ominous so we just named it ‘The Death Star’…

‘The Cantina Interlude’

C: That one… I originally wanted to get a 9thmatic verse on that, but we didn’t want to like, force the issue, and we kind of wanted to do something different. Because of what I was talking about in that verse, we picked that clip, and so we decide to change the name, because it was originally called ‘Uprise’ but we just decided to change the name so it would fit that movie clip; the clip in the beginning is when they’re at the Cantina and Luke got into it with the other guy (Greedo), so we just put our own little twist on it. We just wanted something fun in the project. Because as you can see, we’re having fun the whole time.

‘Carbonite’ (feat. Carbin & Drique London)

S: The first verse on that song was from his homie Carbin…

C: My homie Carbin, he’s from Sac, he’s a part of my crew TUS…

S: And so as soon as I saw his name, it just made sense, because Han Solo was frozen in Carbonite, so we just ran with that. And Drique London is also on there, emcee from Raleigh, he was featured on Still Hotter Than July on ‘Take It Back’. I wanted to work with him again, so I asked him to feature on it, and he came through and put a verse on. And then we were trying to figure out something different so we were like let’s just trade bars on the third verse…

C: Yes, yes, that was crazy. The whole format of the project, we just wanted to (do) something different, like some of them don’t have hooks, ‘Carbonite’ has one chorus, it has one hook in the middle. Some of them we just go verse after verse after verse. We just wanted to have a different structure; everything’s structured the same these days, we just wanted to do something wild.

‘They Better Run’

C: That one was just fun! He sent me that a while ago, and I got like a Little Brother vibe from it (Sundown shakes head- looking shocked again.) and so I just had fun with the chorus and it just ended up being extremely good!

S: Yeah, he sang the chorus. I told him he should keep it. I like the way it sounds; again it’s something that’s not conventional. I mean, we didn’t go get a singer to do it, and I didn’t tell him, “Oh, that’s off key.” Or “Try and sing it at this pitch.” It was just fuck it! Go in there, do it, he doubled it, and we were like, “Ok, that’s done!”

C: Came out really well!

‘Night On The Town’ (feat. Keno)

C: I was going somewhere with my girlfriend and I wrote that song. I can’t remember where I was going though, and so that one was written for a while, and he finally heard it and put his verse on there. And I had my homie Keno, he’s from my crew, I had him get down on that too, because just that beat and that style fits Keno, he’s a storyteller, and he’s like real laid back hip-hop, so I thought he would fit perfectly on there.

S: I’m glad that we put that on there, because I guess it’s kind of girl friendly, but at the same time it’s not like soft… I don’t think!

C: It’s like a chill joint. People can just ride to it.

‘The Modulators’

S: That beat I changed. Originally me and (Enigma) recorded verses and sent it to (Chuuwee). And then when he came I was like, “You know what, I don’t like the beat the way it is so I’m going to re-make it.” And I re-made it and we went and recorded it, we were waiting for E to put a verse on it but he was busy, “So I was like, ahh fuck it. Instead of waiting, because (Chuuwee) leaves soon,” I was like, “I’ll just put another verse on it.”

And as to why we named it that? Couldn’t fucking tell you…

C: Just to fit the theme! Like in a lot of the beats, I couldn’t really explain to you how I get (this), but they sound Star Wars-ish to me. Like when I hear them, I think of Star Wars automatically. So we just wanted to make sure we fit into the theme, because a lot of the beats sound like they would be in a Star Wars movie to me. Or they sound like they were Star Wars samples…

S: You know what. This is why we will say it’s called ‘The Modulators’, because in the Millennium Falcon I’m sure they have modulators on the control panels and shit, so that’s why!

C: Panels and things!

S: Yeah, panels and things.

‘Calm Down’ (feat. Big Remo)

C: I was actually letting off a little bit of steam. Every now and then I do get a little angry at my fellow hip-hoppers in my city, and there’s a lot of tension between us and sometimes I just have to voice my opinion. And then Remo just came and laid down law; Remo’s like one of my favourite rappers. We just wanted to make a hard track, and he took it there so we just built off of it.

S: Remo’s like Boog, the drug dealing version of Boog. Like, Remo doesn’t play, there’s no jokes, I mean there are, but he takes what he does very seriously, and he put his verse on first and I was like, “Ahh shit!” If there’s anybody to calm a situation down, it’s Remo.

‘Weekend Girls’ (feat. GQ)

C: I told him to sample that, the S.O.S Band ‘Weekend Girls’. It fit the theme somewhat because of the Star Wars clip, and it was just something that people can relate to. Because there’s a lot of up-and-coming artists and people who get busy and have women constantly bothering them about them being busy or them having something to do. So we wanted to make sure that we had somewhat of like, depth to what we were saying, because a lot of it is just hard hip-hop, so we did want to have some depth and we did want to have substance; we wanted to talk about some things.

S: But at the same time we wanted to make something fun, and that’s how that came about. We did that last Sunday, and we were just listening to old music, and he was like, “Oh! Do you remember ‘Weekend Girls’ by S.O.S Band?” And I was like, “Hell yes!” and then it just clicked. We were like, “We’ve got to do something like that!” So I made the beat, and we went to the studio and did it, and GQ was just there, so I walked into the back room and pointed at him, and I was like, “Please come here and lay a verse on this.” And he was like, “Oh, ok. I can fuck with that!”

C: And he just came and just did it! GQ is hard man! Jamla is a dope label, they’re fucking amazing!

S: I’m glad that Q got on it too, because Chuuwee’s from California…

C: Yeah, he’s from the West Coast, I’m from the West Coast. So it was nice. It was nice to meet him first of all, because I have his tape and I listen to his tape a lot. And it was cool just to get that, like both of us being from the West Coast but never meeting, it was more chemistry with the Jamla family really. We were just vibing out and he just fit the track perfectly, he just added that cool factor.

‘You Are’ (feat. HaLo)

S: That was, I don’t know. For me, my verse was about just… In the hook it mentions something about a star. But to me, like I say I’m riding somewhere with (Enigma) and he’s smoking a cigarette, I have the window down and I’m ducking second hand smoke and we’re just trying to get to wherever we’re going. And that was it for me.

C: My verse was, honestly, I was rapping about myself like I was looking at myself in the mirror, and it was just a reflection of how far I’ve come. Because just to be down here around Act Proof, like I’ve been listening to Act Proof for two years, and just to be around 9th, just to be around all the Jamla people, people that I listen to and people that I’m a fan of, it was a constant reminder that I’ve come a long way. So this song was just a perfect way to voice how far I’ve came and how much I’ve done with my music.

S: And same thing with HaLo…

C: HaLo went in! Yeah, HaLo was there and we just told him we wanted him on the project, so we just played him two joints and let him pick which one he wanted to do, and he just came in and handled it!

S: As usual.

To round off the interview, how was the overall process of making this record?

C: My main focus was just making sure that 9th liked it, because I’ve been a fan of 9th Wonder all my life, so I was just trying to make sure he liked it. So I was just trying to go hard, he came up with the name, and I was like “Let’s go!”

S: We started this a few months ago, and we restarted it ten days ago, so now we’re done. And it was cool. I’d never met him before he came down. We talked on the phone about three weeks ago and he was like, “Yep, I got my plane ticket.” I was like, “OK, cool.”

C: I didn’t have nothing to do. So I was like, “Whatever, lets go.” I’ve never been to Carolina, my mom is from Greenville, so I was just like, “I want to see where my mom’s from. Sundown’s cool. I like his music. Let’s go!”

And like I was saying before it’s better to get that chemistry of two people in the studio, rather than just, “Oh, I’ll send you my verse, and then you do yours, I’ll send you the files, then send them back.” It’s better to get chemistry on a project that you’re doing together, especially when you’re doing a joint project, songs is a different thing, but when you’re doing a project with somebody it’s always best to get that experience and the vibe off of each other.

The Millenium Falcon is out now.
Chuuwee’s Watching The Throne is available now.
Actual Proof’s Still Hotter Than July is available now.
Follow @ChuuweeTUS and @SundownActProof.