Brooklyn’s Bodega Dream chatted with us about “The Murder” and their creative background.
Hey guys! Give our readers a little background on you all and your sound.
Darion and I (Sergio) started making music together in Miami. I was just starting to scratch the surface of looping multiple instruments to create beats and Darion would come by and start rapping and singing over them. Eventually we started writing songs based around short stories that we would create. That’s where Chronic City, our first EP, came from. We created characters that would reflect our surroundings. We played shows with me constructing the beats live playing guitar, loopers, a computer, and some keys, and Darion would layer soulful tones on top and deliver these aggressive rap verses that showed his rock influences. We decided that we had to expand on that idea and explore those elements. We started working with Fernando and Craig to help bring out a more intense, complex, and funkier rhythm section. It’s the sweat and blood that goes into writing and recording that makes a song. It’s something you can’t get from an 808.
What themes are you usually drawn to when writing lyrics? How does that influence the rest of your sound?
We love the idea of telling stories. Whether that’s in certain melodies that interact with one another or verses that reflect different characters in the same neighborhood. That’s one thing that’s always been a prevalent theme in our music, lyrically and musically. Our neighborhoods and backgrounds have always been our main inspirations. We have a track titled “Don’t Shoot”, in which Darion is rapping about our racially biased justice system. On another, he’s asking us to let go of the past by throwing away our Polaroid pictures. “The Murder” tells a story of a guy wrongfully accused of burning down a village (neighborhood), due to the past that he has, and how the majority blindly follows. We’re both from areas that are predominately hip-hop influenced. I’m from the South Bronx and Darion’s from Overtown, Florida. A lot of the lyrical themes that attract us are the things influenced from our upbringings. So we have this hip-hop culture coming from both sides, but then there are all those other aspects have changed us throughout the years. The weird high school goth stage to our current punk trap craze. And although Fernando loves A Tribe Called Quest, he’ll most definitely have a bareknuckle fight for a rare meshuggah CD. Craig lives in the lush sounds influenced by Radiohead and The National. We don’t want to hyper focus on whether we want to make straight hip-hop or straight rock and deny what makes our ears really tingle.
If you got the chance to re-score any movie with your own music, which one would you pick and why?
Life and Times in Cracktown, but only because we love Victor Vargas.
Follow Bodega Dream on Soundcloud, and grab their EP November 11th.
Saint Audio 